1.3. Difficulties and challenges encountered in interdisciplinarity

a) Trust. Trust concerns to the need to be able to trust in the continuation of a project in which you invest, but it also concerns to trust in the other participants of the project. What sacrifices am I/is my discipline ready to make? What moral setting can we agree upon? Furthermore trust has to do with the fairness of the distribution of resources and the benefits.

b) Mutual recognition. It takes time and effort for people from different disciplines to understand each other's ways of seeing. People from different disciplines make assumptions about what the other disciplines are about, think they understand their languages. A possibility is accepting ignorance and being humble about knowledge on other arenas.

c) Legitimacy of all participants and balanced participation. Interdisciplinary projects imply finding strategies to include a diverse number of people from different disciplines. This however, demands on the one hand side communication and negotiation processes that are reconised and seen as legitimate by all participants, a balanced and open participation of actors from various sectors, and possibilities for renegotiating at least some of the established rules, norms and demands according to new participants and shifting needs. It is evident that the needs and demands to settle in concrete demands, aims and goals are different from actor to actor.

d) Problems of communicating across disciplinary boundaries. Virtues for participants in interdisciplinary projects include humility, reflexivity, diplomatic skills and general goodwill. Participants who are committed to the world-view of their own discipline will struggle and will create impediments for the group.

e) Problems of commitment and continuity. How can continuous engagement be guaranteed? This depends on the type of interdisciplinarity and on the organization within such a project – hierarchical, symmetrical, collaborative.

f) Problems of funding and support. Dependent on the project type there are different funding issues.

g) Milestones, benchmarks and evaluation criteria. Criteria for evaluation and even completion which hold in disciplinary contexts may not hold in the interdisciplinary realm. Continuous negotiation of goals and criteria is a necessary aspect of an interdisciplinary project.

h) IP and appropriate credit. Participants in interdisciplinary projects should accrue the kinds of rewards which are of value in their worlds, personal and professional.

i) Institutional support. Funding bodies and institutions actively (though not intentionally) impede interdisciplinary projects by ascribing value to only certain kinds of outcomes – a grant, a peer reviewed paper. Allowing credit for an exhibition, a film, or a protocol they contributed to would encourage interdisciplinary work.