Academic Hospitality in Interdisciplinary Education (AHIE)

Over the last fifty years, there have been more calls for interdisciplinary education, research, and work. Our project will develop pedagogies designed to improve collaboration in study programmes intended to prepare students for interdisciplinary research and work, to meet complex societal problems.

About the project

As a society, we are constantly faced with complex and intricate problems. This means that there is a growing need for interdisciplinary solutions and approaches to meet challenges that are difficult, ambiguous and unpredictable.

In recent decades, more and more politicians, both nationally and internationally, advocate interdisciplinarity as a means of solving complex issues and societal challenges, such as climate change, pandemics and social inequality.

Organizations such as the UN emphasizes precisely the importance of interdisciplinarity in solving such societal problems. At the same time, constructive, continuous interdisciplinary collaboration is easier said than done. This means that universities must prepare their students for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Our project, Academic Hospitality in Interdisciplinary Education (AHIE), studies collaboration in interdisciplinary education using the concept of academic hospitality, as developed by Phipps and Barnett in 2007. Academic hospitality describes different ways of being hospitable in a university context, including epistemological, material, linguistic or touristic hospitality.