Tvärfacklighet

Tvärfacklighet is a term used in Swedish academic contexts to describe collaboration across different faculties within a university or research organization. The aim is to combine expertise from multiple disciplines to study problems that are difficult to address from a single disciplinary perspective, such as urban sustainability, public health, or digital society.

Within universities, tvärfacklighet often materializes as cross-faculty research centers, joint degree programs, cross-disciplinary research calls, and shared infrastructure. Projects may involve researchers from, for example, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering, collaborating from early planning stages to dissemination. It is a form of interdisciplinarity focused on institutional boundaries (fakulteter) rather than, for example, purely disciplinary integration.

In relation to other terms, tvärfacklighet is one manifestation of interdisciplinarity and is distinguished from tvärvetenskaplighet, which can be used more broadly to describe cross-disciplinary work; and from transdisciplinarity, which explicitly includes non-academic stakeholders in the research process.

Benefits include access to complementary methods, richer analyses, and increased relevance to policy and society. Challenges include aligning differing epistemologies, publication and funding norms, timeframes, and power dynamics across faculties. Success often depends on deliberate governance, protected time for collaboration, shared goals, and a common language for translating concepts across fields.

See also: tvärvetenskap, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity.