In the fall of 2023, as the incoming Impact editor-in-chief, I held listening sessions with the members of Impact’s editorial board, several of whom had been serving since the journal’s launch in 2012. I heard pride and belief: pride in the many outstanding articles, interviews, and book reviews that have found a home at Impact; belief in Impact’s mission to investigate the role of interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and scholarship to address complex challenges such as climate change, the rise of AI, global threats to democracy, pandemics, and more. In the context of an increasing number of online journals, we made the decision to update our publishing platform and to recommit to our mission.
Since 1952, Boston University’s College of General Studies (CGS) has been dedicated to interdisciplinary education. Our faculty from Social Science, Natural Science, Humanities, and Rhetoric teach on interdisciplinary teams, integrating their syllabi and creating assignments that ask students to combine disciplinary methodologies to propose solutions to real world problems. Today, undergraduates lead the way regarding interdisciplinarity. Nationally and internationally, they are pursuing double majors in record numbers and pushing for the creation of combined majors in disparate fields, for example, Computer Science and Economics, Physics and Psychology, Linguistics and Philosophy. In pursuing work across disciplinary boundaries, students, faculty, and researchers have contributed to the emergence of new fields such as Environmental Humanities, Computational Biology, Media Studies and Engineering, and more.
As Impact moved from its online home within the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at Boston University’s College of General Studies to Scholastica’s Open Access platform, we embarked on a study of our past. By reading and rereading our 22 issues and 80+ articles, we worked to understand the ground the journal has covered since its inception and to spotlight the articles that continue to speak to us today. We agreed that the first issue on our new platform would be a Retrospective. In looking back, we chart our path forward.
As our editorial board revisited Impact articles, we found ourselves engaged in conversations about terminology. What distinguishes “multidisciplinary” from “interdisciplinary” from “transdisciplinary” and how important are these distinctions? Even as we debated terminology, another word presented itself: “convergence.” In her inaugural address this September, Boston University’s 11th president Dr. Melissa Gilliam promised that BU would seek to “embrace the power of collaboration and the power of crossing disciplines,” calling specifically for “the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities to converge, in laboratories, spaces, and in classrooms across our campuses.”
Rather than aligning ourselves with a particular definition or approach to interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and scholarship, we selected articles that intentionally take up these questions. We focused on work that specifically considered the implications of collaborating across disciplines, working closely with people whose training leads them to define problems differently from their colleagues and even to disagree on what qualifies as evidence. Thus, while we plan to invite an array of approaches to discussing interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and scholarship in future issues, for our Retrospective issue, we looked for explicit discussions of what is at stake when it comes to blending disciplinary boundaries.
Our Retrospective Issue leads with Ngina Chiteji’s “Reimagining the Way Economics is Taught: The Value of Engaging with Other Disciplines,” in which Chiteji argues that bringing a study of the Swahili Coast into undergraduate economics courses not only addresses common misconceptions about Africa, but also integrates history, archeology, and cultural anthropology to encourage students to engage more deeply with key economic principles.
Jeanine Williamson Fletcher’s “Using Biglan and Holland’s Classifications to Understand Similarities and Differences Between Disciplines in Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary Education” offers a framework to help explain conflicts that can arise among collaborators from different fields. As Williamson Fletcher notes: “members of collaborating disciplines may complement or conflict with one another.” Understanding the differences and areas of overlap, Williamson Fletcher argues, can lead to more fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations.
Ruth Kassel, Krysta Dennis, Robin Flatland, and Scott Nelson Foster similarly explore the challenge of ensuring productive working relationships on interdisciplinary teams. Their article, “The Journey to Community-Engaged Transdisciplinary Research,” advocates for the creation of “spaces through community engagement where power differentials can be neutralized,” which allow students to develop “leadership and interpersonal skills.” The authors report on a public-facing event that brought together experts from computer science, visual arts, and theatre arts, noting that their mutual dependence was responsible for the project’s success.
Cathy Marie Ouellette’s “Reflections on Global Learning” attests to the relationship between Area Studies programs and student learning. At Muhlenberg College, the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program immerses students in language acquisition, cultural literacy, history, and sustainability studies, with 80% of its students attesting to their significant improvement in global awareness, cultural competence, and understanding of diversity. Ouellette argues that programs in Area Studies equip students to solve global problems and should play a central role in undergraduate education.
Stacey Stanfield Anderson, Heather Castillo, and Kiki Patsch offer readers the chance not only to read about but also to experience through video recordings the interdisciplinary projects they worked on together at California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI). “Collaborating for the Coast in Performing Arts, Environmental Science and Resource Management, and English” immerses readers in two wide-ranging and multifaceted projects that bring together dancers and choreographers, environmental scientists, and writers to confront audiences with the urgency of preserving sandy beaches threatened by climate change.
Like Chiteji’s article on interdisciplinary approaches to Economics, Theresa A. Dougal’s “Sustainable Communities: Teaching the Environment in the English Classroom” considers ways to bring interdisciplinary perspectives into the English classroom. Unlike “Collaborating on the Coast,” which documented a project involving three courses and three disciplines, Dougal’s article explains how even one course, in one discipline, can incorporate multiple disciplinary perspectives and ultimately move towards a dynamic and “action-oriented curriculum.”
Robert S. Ross’s “An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Environmental Ethics: Changing Human Behavior though a Partnership between the Humanities and the Sciences” reports on a two-semester faculty lunch series featuring speakers from oceanography, economics, law, psychology, history, philosophy, religion, and art, all responding to climate change. Originally published in 2016, the paper’s call for an interdisciplinary approach to “the earth’s most pressing problems” reads with even more urgency in 2025.
Finally, reflecting our commitment to bringing new interdisciplinary work to light, we conclude our Retrospective with a book review. Ann Scheunemann’s discussion of The Cambridge Handbook of Community Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Contextual Perspectives underscores the broad range of fields that intersect with community psychology, namely, public policy, anthropology, history, public health, environmental science, and sociology. The work underscores the complexities of collaboration, not only across disciplines, but also across different populations.
The articles in our Retrospective Issue contain recurring keywords: integration, partnership, collaboration, community. We return here to the point made at the end of Anderson, Castillo, and Patsch’s “Collaborating for the Coast”: classes, projects, and events that bring scholars, researchers, teachers, artists, and community members together require us to consider the other—the other courses, the other disciplines, the other methods of seeing.
We are proud to share work from our past, to recommit ourselves to Impact’s present and future, and to collaborate with you, our readers and contributors, across the disciplines.