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Paper short abstract

More than sand, less than ignorance: conducting interdisciplinary doctoral research comes with tensions. This paper explores the contingent, non-trivial tensions that arise when actors in interdisciplinary doctoral programmes get 'Lost in Agreement'.

Paper long abstract

In trying to understand how interdisciplinary research can change the world, we also need to consider what hurdles we are facing. In this paper, I argue that in 'weaving' interdisciplinarity in disciplinary institutional structures (Lindvig, 2024) certain tensions arise that deserve our attention.

Institutional aspects (e.g., organizational structure of laboratories or departmental requirements for PhD students) can have a significant influence on the research conducted within these settings and the tensions that can arise from them. Yet discussions of interdisciplinarity often focus on epistemic differences between disciplines, while paying less attention to the socio-material and institutional conditions that shape how such collaborations unfold in practice.

This paper examines how actors in interdisciplinary doctoral programmes can get 'Lost in Agreement'. Despite (formal) agreement on how to design and implement a doctoral programme, tensions arise that should not be ignored. This paper typifies these tensions as more disruptive than tensions that are 'sand in the gears' of the interdisciplinary machine (Chen and De Jong, 2026), and less inevitable than tensions arising from ignorance about how to design and implement interdisciplinary research.

This study is associated to the newly established SPINE project (UCPH). The SPINE project addresses the critical gap between the acknowledged importance of interdisciplinary research and the practical realities of collaboration within existing academic structures.