Dancing Backwards, Inching Forwards? A Partial Perspective on the Interdisciplinary Present

Using the metaphor of interdisciplinarity as the junior dance partner, this article offers a personal perspective on why an interdisciplinary approach is not yet fully accepted and embedded in academic research processes. Over the past 25 years, policy and practice discussions around interdisciplinary research may have moved on from why we should do it, to how to do it, but we still do not have the absorptive capacity to do it consistently well . I argue that we already have the knowledge to do interdisciplinarity better , but without radical changes in funding policy and research cultures, we currently lack the will or the continuity of resources to do so.