The Communicative Construction of Interdisciplinarity: Group Discussions with Climate Scientists

In academic practice, we find a variety of definitions of interdisciplinarity. How do climate scientists define the term? Their understanding, as interdisciplinary and disciplinary group discussions show, is influenced by the group-specific communicative construction of interdisciplinarity as well as by their disciplinary identity.Interdisciplinarity in research and teaching has been intensively discussed. How scientists define interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaboration can be influenced by their disciplinary backgrounds. Using Bohnsack’s documentary method, we conducted group discussions to answer the following research questions: 1. What do communicative constructions of the term interdisciplinarity within different groups of professors look like? 2. How are group-specific (inter)disciplinary contexts involved in the communicative construction of interdisciplinarity? The discussions took place in one interdisciplinary and three disciplinary groups. While all groups understood interdisciplinarity as a collaboration of scientists, they each put a different focus on where interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaboration begin. The groups with a disciplinary self-understanding referred to discipline-specific logics and habitus to define interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaborations. The openness to different conceptualizations of the terms depended on the internal interdisciplinarity of the groups.