Abstract
This commentary reflects on the role and uses of metaphor in Key Texts on Interdisciplinary Higher Education, edited by Iris van der Tuin. It examines how, within the volume's selected extracts and its introductions and analyses, metaphors shape both student and educator understandings of disciplinary structures, integration and epistemic positioning. It emphasises the importance of critical reflection on the historical and ideological freight that can be carried within established figurative frameworks and reflects on the value of more fluid, malleable and reflexive metaphors that embrace complexity, openness and decolonial potential in interdisciplinary pedagogies.
Keywords
How do educators and students conceptualise and articulate the process of integration in interdisciplinary education? Scholars of interdisciplinarity have long turned to metaphor in their efforts to define and redefine relationships between disciplinary structures and epistemologies (as geographies, ecologies, architectures, economies, mechanics, pathologies…); so too have teachers in their efforts to facilitate their students in navigating and reflecting on their interdisciplinary learning and research practices. As Lakoff and Johnson show us, metaphor is not just a ‘device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish’; rather, our ‘ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 3). In interdisciplinary education, where epistemological boundaries are continually contested and remodelled, metaphors become key pedagogical devices. Many are brought into play throughout both the extracts and analytical apparatus in Iris van der Tuin's Key Texts on Interdisciplinary Higher Education, especially in serving the volume's aim of foregrounding and unpacking integration as a core practice.
Offering the first sustained attempt to bring together a research base for interdisciplinary higher education, the volume's selection of extracts and insightful summaries offers a coherent and accessible ‘red thread’, in the editor's own metaphor, through this terrain. We encounter students progressing from ‘surprise parties’ to ‘mapmaking’ (Haynes and Leonard, 2010 in van der Tuin, 2025, 22); the ‘weaving’ of different knowledge systems (Tengo et al, 2014 in van der Tuin, 2025, 134); the ‘trading zone’ where ‘participants meet and interact for integration’ (Galison, 1997 in van der Tuin, 2025, 136). Discussing metaphorical frameworks for interdisciplinary teamwork, Van Lambalgen and Hacopian note, ‘metaphors help students to concretise interdisciplinary relationships and team processes and to increase epistemic acumen’ (van der Tuin, 2025, 259). By using metaphor to structure their understanding, they observe, ‘students develop multi-level cognition of the interdisciplinary process’ and, presented with self-reflection questions, gain insight into ‘disciplinary privilege and blind spots’ (p. 260). Metaphor is thus embedded in the volume as both a conceptual tool and a pedagogic practice. Many of us who teach interdisciplinary courses and programmes similarly use metaphor explicitly and reflexively in our pedagogy as an integrative strategy. For example, for a postgraduate Global Cultures module on knowledge integration at King's College London, I designed learning activities in which students choose a metaphor to describe their experience of integrating knowledge across domains; they then undertake a mapping exercise spatialising both existing knowledge structures and idealised ones of their own invention.
The figurative scene is initially set by van der Tuin's citation of the richly metaphorical The Troubadour of Knowledge by philosopher Michel Serres. As she cites, Some, doubtless specialists in their field, had even understood, on their own, that each portion of their knowledge also looks like Harlequin's coat, because each works at the intersection or the interference of many other disciplines and, sometimes, of almost all of them (p. 9, Serres [1991] 1997, xvii). In knowledge and instruction, a third place also exists, a worthless position today between the two others: On the one hand, the hard sciences, formal, objective, powerful; on the other, what one calls culture, dying. Whence the begetting of a third man; the third-instructed, who was nothing, emerges today, becomes something and grows (p. 9, Serres [1991] 1997, 45).
Attention to metaphor therefore reveals much about the ways that interdisciplinary education imagines, figures, and structures the ‘third place’ between disciplines, and the pedagogic potential of reflection on this process. Some of the collection's metaphors for interdisciplinarity are apparently static: bridges, webs, bubbles, snowflakes, gates (and their keepers). However – as paralleled in Mieke Bal's ‘Travelling Concepts’ – the emphasis in Key Texts is on mobility, the journeying across, through, and between these structures, and indeed many of the most-used analogies draw on the semantic fields of landscapes, territories, and borders. In Julie Thompson Klein's words, in interdisciplinary metaphor, the ‘dominant image … is that of geopolitics…the major activity is dispute over territory’, invoking ‘floundering expeditions’ into other disciplines and excursions to the ‘frontiers’ of knowledge (Thompson Klein 1990, 77–78; see also van der Tuin 2025, 259–60). It is worth putting pressure on the implications of using such topographical, anthropological, and geopolitical metaphor to structure our understanding of interdisciplinarity. As van Lambalgen and Hacopian note, ‘comparison to cultures based on ethnicity, national identity or racialised communities raises problematic questions if demographic diversity in scientific communities is not valued or acknowledged’ (p. 260). Elsewhere, outside this volume, Catherine Manathunga and Angela Brew have scrutinised Becher and Trowler's well-worn notion of academic ‘tribes and territories’, suggesting these terms can ‘bleach out the complexity and variety of different ways of thinking about knowledge’, and urging reflection on the colonial origins and ongoing entanglements and mentalities of the disciplines themselves (Manathunga and Brew 2014, 48). There is, therefore, a radical potential in creating new interdisciplinary formations to overturn these harmful inheritances, but only with a critical reflexiveness on what new meanings are being constituted.
Key Texts foregrounds its recognition of the situatedness of knowledge, a concept emerging from feminist history of science, as van der Tuin reminds us in her introduction: she warns (citing Paul Ziche) that this ‘insight comes with a responsibility for teachers, especially in interdisciplinary classrooms’, to ‘connect rigorous epistemic standards with a fundamental openness’ (p. 12). The extract from Barrineau et al. proposes a radically ‘open-ended experimental orientation’, following Lotz-Sisitka et al.'s call to transgress ‘taken-for-granted norms, existing ethical and epistemological imperialism in society and higher education, and provide possibilities for engaged, lived experience of transformative praxis for all of our students’ (p. 154–155). Other chapters also emphasise context sensitivity and decolonising perspectives (Lindvig and Ulriksen, p. 271; Lam et al., p. 139; Gusman and Ten Hagen, pp. 191–2, all in van der Tuin, 2025). The implications of recent work on decolonisation for interdisciplinary education are only beginning to be explored, and these references signal the potential for and importance of future work in this direction.
So which semantic field might offer metaphors that best support intellectual openness and awareness of epistemic positionality? What new opportunities might thinking through Serres’ ‘third place’ offer to interdisciplinary practice? Following Angela Brew, Lindvig and Ulriksen note that ‘more fluid’ and ‘less fixed metaphors would better capture the actual practices, developments and sense of affiliation found in academic practice’ (p. 269). 1 Such metaphors have been developed productively elsewhere by Manathunga and Brew, who seek to abandon colonial land-based metaphors for an ‘ocean of possibilities’ (Manathunga and Brew 2014, 51), while Maggi Savin-Baden describes an emancipatory and reflexive ‘liquid learning’ (Savin-Baden 2007, 26). Elsewhere in The Troubadour of Knowledge, Serres expands on his guiding metaphor of a ‘river between two thresholds’. As he describes, when entering a river, we may hold onto the security of returning to the bank: ‘you have not really left … you do not swim, you wait to walk’; the ‘swimmer on the contrary, knows that a second river runs in the one that everyone sees, a river between the two thresholds, after or before which all security has vanished: there he abandons all reference points’ (Serres 1997, 5). In this watery third place, the swimmer forsakes his previous landmarks of ‘hard sciences’ and ‘culture’, for ‘there is no learning without exposure, often dangerous, to the other. I will never again know what I am, where I am, from where I’m from, where I’m going, through where to pass (p. 8)’. Revealing an inherent epistemic dislocation and disorientation at the heart of meaningful interdisciplinary engagement, this image powerfully evokes the intellectual risk and openness required of interdisciplinary learners: A willingness to push off from familiar ground, let go of disciplinary certainties and methodological habits, and swim out into uncharted waters. ‘Never take the easy road’, he writes, ‘swim the river instead’ (p. 8).
Open water offers an escape from the rigid structures and restrictive boundaries of terrestrial metaphor, while still allowing teachers and students to think in terms of journeying, of meeting, and, particularly, of integrating. Many prevailing metaphors focus closely on the disciplinary structures that interdisciplinary practice seeks to work across and beyond, and there can be substantial value in these; in van Lambalgen and van der Tuin's term, this is ‘disciplined interdisciplinarity’, which retains a strong base in its disciplinary roots and underpinnings (p. 8). Van der Tuin does not see a contradiction between ‘disciplined’ and ‘integrationist’ modules – ‘the two approaches support each other’ – and these excursions into metaphor provide one way of perceiving and comparing further their shapes and dimensions (p. 8). The more organic forms of fluid metaphor are especially valuable for considering integration, as they invite a different quality of pedagogical action. Liquid metaphors encourage immersion in a blended medium that resists demarcation, inviting learning environments that are less hierarchical, more dialogic, and more responsive to differing knowledge practices and emerging student needs and contributions. Most importantly, fluid metaphors can offer the ideal surface for reflection, critical and contextual awareness, and metacognition, highlighted by many of the authors in Key Texts as crucial to the interdisciplinary learning process. 2
These reflections on metaphor remind us that how we figure interdisciplinarity and integration in language shapes our everyday practice of these processes. As many of these authors show us, in different contexts, a critical and reflexive perspective on what we do and how we describe it is crucial to both better understanding and undertaking of these processes and, as the discussion above has pointed towards, to avoiding the reproduction of some of the historic, perspectival, and ideological limitations of disciplinarity itself. There is potential value in further work – by scholars and students – that looks curiously at the metaphors for interdisciplinarity that we use every day, from our own teaching and learning to institutional and national policy, and considers how they shape interdisciplinary education in practice.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
