We were thrilled to continue our third season talking to Prof Angela Woods, Professor of Medical Humanities at Durham University. We talked with Angela about the development of her own research and her take on how the field of Medical and Health Humanities has grown and changed over the last 10 years. We also discussed some of the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration and about what we can do to identify and address barriers to the further evolution of the medical and health humanities, especially for early career researchers.

A recipe for interdisciplinarity

Angela told us about her work as Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, a decade-long interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing funded by the Wellcome Trust. The project has embodied a commitment to interdisciplinary working, and Angela identified two key ingredients for its enduring success. The first is the singularity of a shared focus, as a recipe for interdisciplinary chaos is no doubt working on things in a parallel fashion without a unified project that everyone contributes to in true collaborative fashion. The second key ingredient is the importance of a creative facilitator, as someone with an external overview and the ability to facilitate meaningful connection between researchers across disciplinary and professional boundaries. We took this as key advice for all of us who are thinking about developing complex interdisciplinary boundaries.

Challenges and barriers

While we talked with Angela about the joys of interdisciplinary research, we also reflected on challenges and barriers. People who work in an interdisciplinary way are often faced with the label “jack of all trades, master of none.” Therefore, the encounter with strongly disciplinary spaces – which remain dominant in academia – remains something which many interdisciplinary researchers anticipate with some levels of anxiety. This situation can be particularly challenging for early career researchers, who’s chances of employment often hinge on the attractiveness of their profile as individual researchers in a specific (sub)discipline. To overcome such challenges and barriers, we need an openness to listen and engage with what people are really doing, rather than imposing pre-fixed structures of meaning onto academic research.

A call for kindness

At the end of our conversation, Angela received a great prompt from the audience to leave us with a “provocation for the field”. Perhaps surprisingly, Angela dared us to be kinder. Academia is highly competitive and being successful as a researcher is often framed as outdoing your competitors. In this framework, which is really more fitting to the Olympics than it is to scholarship, ruthlessness can be celebrated as a virtue. Meaningful interdisciplinary research serves as an attitude against such misplaced rivalry. We couldn’t agree more when Angela says that what need most of all is to think through how we can celebrate kindness and respectfully collaborate with each other.

Do tune in to the podcast to hear the rest of our conversation!

Dieter and Ian