Crossdisciplinaire

Crossdisciplinaire (French for cross-disciplinary) refers to practices that involve collaboration across multiple academic disciplines to address questions or problems that exceed the scope of any single field. It emphasizes the integration of theories, methods, data, and perspectives from diverse domains to generate new approaches and insights. Crossdisciplinaire work can occur in research, higher education, industry, and cultural projects, and typically aims to move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries rather than operate within them.

In francophone and European contexts, crossdisciplinaire is related to, but not identical with, related terms such as multidisciplinarité, interdisciplinarité, and transdisciplinarité. Multidisciplinary work assembles parallel contributions; interdisciplinarity seeks to synthesize across; transdisciplinarity extends beyond academia to include non-academic knowledge. Crossdisciplinaire is often used as a flexible umbrella term for boundary-crossing and synthesis.

Methods include forming joint research teams, cross-training researchers, sharing data, developing common frameworks, and co-designing projects with stakeholders. Challenges include linguistic and methodological differences, differing epistemologies, conflicting aims, and institutional or funding structures that reward single-discipline outputs. Assessing cross-disciplinary work can require new metrics for collaboration and impact.

Applications span science, engineering, health, policy, and the arts. Examples include climate research that combines meteorology, economics, and political science; urban planning that integrates architecture, sociology, and ecology; and education studies that blend pedagogy, psychology, and cognitive science to explore learning.