How to achieve interdisciplinary research? Focus on the people

During the 2017-18 academic year, we took a long, hard look at ourselves. The distinctive lines of the university had become rather hazy. Instead of focusing on the things we were really good at, we were trying to do too much. We needed to be louder and prouder about our academic strengths and tell a clearer story.

Realising this, we regrouped around three colleges and 12 schools in place of five faculties and 26 departments. Admittedly, there were other, less cerebral drivers for our restructure, but agreeing and then inhabiting the best and truest version of our academic selves was a genuinely inspiring process.

Knowing our strengths

One of the University of Westminster’s strengths is research quality, attested by subsequent iterations of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), but we’re not equally fantastic at everything, and nor do we expect to be. As we redrew some of our fuzzy lines, we looked at our research performance indicators and then consulted widely.

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What was really striking was the unanimity in the domains of research excellence at Westminster, and they were straightforward to describe: arts, communication and culture; health innovation and well-being; sustainable cities and the urban environment. We take great pride in our diversity as a community and in our commitment to inclusivity, and we agreed that diversity and inclusion should be more than just a Westminster characteristic; it must be core business. And then there were four.

How to bring these four areas of research strength to life? Other universities describe research themes or interdisciplinary areas or grand challenges or centres of excellence. For us the key thing is the people – people coming together from across the university and beyond to share their passion, work out solutions together and develop new projects. So, we established our four research communities.

The communities do not have a fixed membership but rather bring people together around particular problems or opportunities. Each one has an academic lead, and they receive focused support from our Research and KE Office, as well as internal funding. They exist in a landscape that includes research centres and groups and various other constellations of research activity, but they have a distinctive role to play.

Find your community

If our research centres are hubs, the communities are the spokes, making links between groups of researchers and creating a sort of town square where they can meet. The communities actively pursue multidisciplinary project development, and they are driven by actual current funding opportunities as well as by possible future fundable partnerships. They are an explicit commitment in our 2022-29 research and KE strategy (Making a Difference), so, unlike research themes, we’re not going to keep reinventing them. Indeed, the first bullet point on the first page of the strategy states: “By 2029 we will be at the forefront of research and KE globally”, in the four community spaces.

While the distinctive role of the communities may be crystal clear to those of us leading our research endeavour, to others their purpose may be harder to understand. How are they different from research centres or academic schools? Why are they not offering more grants? It is true that they are not equally valuable to everyone, and that is totally fine, but there are those for whom the communities do provide what other bits of the research and KE architecture don’t. The communities are matchmakers.

For those, particularly mid-career researchers, whose research endeavour needs a lift, new inspiration, the chance to work with new collaborators or to develop connections beyond the immediate disciplinary home, the communities offer those connections.

For those wanting a space for more speculative discussion or who are looking for potential impact partners, or who are looking to raise the profile of their work beyond their home school, the communities offer something special. We have colleagues, including PGRs, who, because of the distinctiveness of their research feel like they don’t naturally belong to any one research centre, but who have found a home in one of the more fluid and diverse communities. And they have brought people together to support research in other ways, via grant-writing workshops, writing retreats, external visits and the like.

Our communities have been operating for six years, and there are six years until the end of our current strategy period. All four communities have new leads as of now (either permanent or covering a colleague’s leave), so we are taking the opportunity of a soft relaunch, re-inking some fuzzy edges, but what is clear is that our research communities have served us well, and I’m sure they will continue to do so.

Andrew Linn is deputy vice-chancellor for research and knowledge exchange at the University of Westminster.

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