Two ACRC PhD students present a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration.

We have been part of an interdisciplinary collaboration between early-career researchers (known as ECRs) at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Copenhagen throughout 2024. 

The initial connection between the nine of us – five from Edinburgh and four from Copenhagen – was made by senior academics, as part of their efforts to build partnerships across the two universities, with a focus on ageing and care. On the ACRC side, our team included two Academy students (us), one affiliated PhD student (Kieran Sweeney), and two postdocs (Imane Guellil and Stella Arakelyan) – so a lovely cross-section of the different ECR roles that exist within the Centre. The Copenhagen team – Andrea Nedergaard Jensen, Catharina Thiel Sandholdt, Jonas Thorborg Stage and Amalie Russel – was a similar mix of postgraduate, PhD and postdoctoral researchers.

We all share a common focus on ageing and care, and found through our initial discussion that we had a shared interest in inequalities and disadvantage in primary care. We came at this topic from a wide range of different disciplinary backgrounds, with very different knowledge and skills. As our collaboration progressed, we realised that one of the most important things we were learning was about how to understand and build common ground with a brand new group of people, in time-limited circumstances, and almost entirely online. 

This led us to reflect on the ‘how’ of our process – how we had got to know each other, found a shared interest, agreed on a focus, and developed a shared understanding. We identified various activities we’d used at different stages in the process, and distilled these into a series of steps, which we believe could offer a useful roadmap for others who are considering interdisciplinary and cross-institutional or cross-country collaboration.

As a team, we wrote these up for a journal, and we are now going through the slow process of academic publication. But, in the meanwhile, we wanted to share this roadmap with others who may be interested in hearing about our methods and reflections. Anna presented our work to the Work Package 4 team in March, which then led to a request for the project to be shared with the Team Science Edinburgh-Newcastle collaboration, which Kieran led on a couple of weeks later. We then had the big presentation ahead of us: the Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference at the London School of Economics.

The conference draws teachers and researchers from higher education institutions around the world – we heard speakers from Hong Kong, Brazil, the Netherlands, Sweden and more, as well as from many UK universities, as part of a very packed one-day programme. 

With the serendipity so typical of conferences, we also learned more about interdisciplinarity close to home, as Dr Jenny Scoles from the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Academic Development shared her work on developing an Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Manifesto [link]. So much of the Manifesto resonates with the work we do within the ACRC, that perhaps its second principle could even be our motto: 

“The world’s inherent complexity ought to be honoured in learning environments.”

Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of everything we do at the ACRC. As PhD students, an interdisciplinary approach shaped our taught year, and has gone on to frame and inform our research. To that extent, interdisciplinarity has been a means to an end for us. But reflecting on our learning from this conference, as well as the ACRC Student Conference earlier this week, it’s fascinating to see how interdisciplinarity itself has become something that interests us and informs our thinking; something more like an ethos than a method, perhaps.

We were among a very small number of PhD students presenting at this conference. While most of the other presentations focused on module or programme design, it felt like we were able to offer something a bit different, as our framework is intended for project-based collaboration. We were grateful to receive positive and constructive feedback, with one participant even saying they hoped to use the framework to help facilitate a collaboration that they are now planning.

From our perspective, the Edinburgh-Copenhagen ECR collaboration was a lovely way to get to know new colleagues with shared interests. We’re hoping to keep up our connections with each other, and perhaps in future to do some substantive work on ageing and care together. But we couldn’t have imagined that the collaborative process itself would become such a useful output from our work. It is lovely to see how others might adopt it or learn from it, in order to shape their own projects. This conference has been part of that, and we hope it might also resonate with others at the ACRC Symposium next month.