Critical reflections of postgraduate researchers on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project

The contemporary British university system represents a landscape of asymmetries. From the disparity in pay and security between senior managers and hourly paid staff, the system reproduces existing inequalities and the politics of exclusion along dimensions of gender, race, and class. Further asymmetries are seen within a funding landscape that favours large grants over small, and the established academic over the early career academic (ECA), as well as the systematic undermining of departments, disciplines, and programmes deemed not sufficiently profitable or failing to generate 'impact'.

As postgraduate researchers (PGRs), the authors pursued their Ph.Ds as members of a large interdisciplinary collaborative research project composed of scholars from physical, computational, economic, and social sciences (2015–2020). This experience represented their induction into the academic system and offered unique perspectives across and within disciplinary traditions. The central research question asks how and to what extent the interdisciplinary nature of this environment shaped them as researchers in their formative years. Offering a lens from below, they link individual and collective experiences as PGRs on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project to wider tensions within British academia. A secondary aim is to reframe 'success' in such projects around the narratives of the researchers situated within them. The work primarily contributes to literature on interdisciplinarity, with secondary relevance to critical university studies and science & technology studies, with novelty in its retrospective collective autoethnographic approach.

The paper first surveys the context of the British university system and PGRs’ place within it, reviews interdisciplinarity and its measures of success, and assesses the PGR experience. It then outlines a retrospective collaborative autoethnographic methodology, presents critical reflections structured as three asymmetries (risk, disciplinary hierarchy, knowledge), and discusses how these themes relate to broader tensions in British academia. It concludes with considerations of findings and directions for future research.

The literature review situates the study across three dimensions: the neoliberal academy, the rise of interdisciplinarity, and the PGR experience within these contexts.

Precarity and risk in the neoliberal academy: The diffusion of neoliberal logics into higher education emphasising entrepreneurialism, market metrics, and financialisation has reshaped UK universities (Harvey, 2005; Engelen et al., 2014), manifested via rising tuition fees, outsourcing, impact/REF-driven evaluation, and student-experience league tables. COVID-19 further exposed fragility in fee/rent-dependent funding models, exacerbating hiring freezes, redundancies, and austerity. Mental health crises among students, PGRs, and staff are widely documented. PGRs occupy an especially precarious position: PhDs are not employment; stipends lack employment rights; and access to financial products is limited, contrasting with many European systems that employ doctoral candidates.

Rise of interdisciplinary research: A shift from Mode-1 (discipline-oriented) to Mode-2 (problem-oriented) knowledge production (Gibbons, 1994) and the impact agenda has increased funding and prestige for cross-disciplinary projects. Interdisciplinary work promises holistic approaches to ‘wicked problems’ and higher impact, yet faces challenges: communication barriers, definitional opacity, time constraints, power asymmetries, structural barriers to integration, and lack of success indicators. Definitions span multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity (Klein, 2010), and what counts as ‘successful’ varies by discipline. Interdisciplinary projects can be slower to produce outputs, paradoxically judged as ‘unproductive’ even while expected to deliver high impact.

Disciplines, boundaries, and cultures: Disciplines are dynamic rather than static; boundaries are historically contingent, negotiated, and policed via tacit norms and performative practices (Gieryn, 1983; Becher, 1989). Specialisation and differentiation make interdisciplinarity a moving target, complicating assessment of ‘success’ and demarcation between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work.

Navigating this space as a PGR: PhD models, expectations, and regulations vary within and across institutions and disciplines. Interdisciplinary doctoral programmes can foster creativity and reflexivity but also produce insecurities around depth of knowledge, identity, and employability. PGRs must navigate ‘dual loyalties’ to home disciplines and interdisciplinary teams, risking feelings of being outsiders or curtailing creativity when retreating to disciplinary safety. While anxieties about career prospects are common, empirical evidence does not consistently show worse outcomes for interdisciplinary graduates; barriers often reflect broader sectoral precarities (short-term contracts, relocations, care responsibilities) rather than interdisciplinarity per se. Collaborative challenges include underestimated time to learn to work together, mismatched expectations, minority-discipline marginalisation, and tension between project goals and timely PhD completion. These literatures frame the authors’ later reflections on asymmetries of risk, disciplines, and knowledge.

Design and approach: The study employs a retrospective collaborative autoethnographic (RCA) approach (Tripathi et al., 2022), combining the authors’ autobiographical accounts with collective interrogation and synthesis. Brookfield’s (2009) framework of critical reflection guides analysis to surface power relations and hegemonic assumptions, asking whose interests are served by prevailing practices.

Case context (“The Project”): The case is a large interdisciplinary grant (2015–2020) at a Russell Group, ‘Mode-2’ institution. The team included 24 researchers (8 senior academics, 6 postdocs, 10 PGRs) spanning sociology, economics, geography, physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science. Work began in six cross-cutting themes (Environmental; Social & Cultural; Economic; Measurement & Data; Modelling & Optimisation; Policy & Governance), which blurred over time. The authors’ PhD registrations: Phil (geography), Ben (physics), Ashley (sociology; project ethnographer), Hannah (sociology). Although institutionally domiciled in disciplinary departments, PGRs/postdocs co-located in a shared project space near departmental homes. Regular “update and integration” meetings, workshops, seminars, and informal collaborations aimed to stimulate interdisciplinary ‘micro’ projects. Departmental regulations (annual reviews, progress reports, disciplinary thesis norms) exerted strong influence on PhD trajectories, often in tension with interdisciplinary aspirations.

Data and analysis: Primary ‘data’ comprised informal, unsystematic experiential materials (research notes, memory) accrued during everyday project participation. Over ~3 years (during and after PhD completion), the authors evolved from informal peer support into semi-structured, iterative meetings that generated shared documents. Individual written reflections and vignettes were cyclically discussed, edited, and juxtaposed to identify convergences/divergences. Using Brookfield’s critical reflection, themes were extracted around asymmetries of risk, disciplinary hierarchy, and knowledge. The retrospective stance aimed to reduce immediate-context bias, and the collaborative design to enhance reflexivity, transparency, and trustworthiness.

Ethics and positionality: The paper focuses on the authors’ experiences only; reflections about other project participants (collected by the ethnographer) were excluded to maintain ethical integrity. The authors acknowledge positionalities and privileges (funded PhDs at a Russell Group university) and note potential influence of interpersonal friendships on analysis. Formal institutional ethical approvals and informed consents related to the broader ethnography were obtained; additional written consent was gathered from co-authors for use of their autoethnographic reflections.

• The interdisciplinary project context acted as a lens revealing pre-existing asymmetries within the neoliberal British academy; the authors’ uncertainty and precarity stemmed more from sectoral structures than from interdisciplinarity itself.
• Three interrelated asymmetries structure PGR experiences:
  1. Asymmetry of risk: Time-bound PhD milestones, stipend limits, and publish-or-perish pressures concentrate risk on PGRs. Boundary-work time in interdisciplinarity (to align concepts/methods) disproportionately jeopardises PGR timelines and publication prospects; senior academics hedge risk via multiple projects and institutional security.
  2. Asymmetry of disciplines: STEM-led leadership framed social sciences in ‘support-service’ modes (e.g., providing model inputs, stakeholder communication), clashing with social scientists’ critical aims and departmental expectations. Divergent disciplinary cultures (ethics, authorship norms, thesis structures) surfaced conflicts that required extra emotional labour, often resolved by retreating to disciplinary requirements to secure PhD completion.
  3. Asymmetry of knowledge: PGRs’ breadth-oriented learning generated anxieties about depth relative to disciplinary peers and examiners. Tacit, sometimes rigid, disciplinary boundaries and norms (e.g., ethics standards, authorship practices) were hard to know ex ante and were unevenly enforced, intensifying vulnerabilities for junior researchers.
• Despite challenges, interdisciplinary immersion cultivated reflexivity, pluralistic understanding, and transferable skills; all authors leveraged interdisciplinary experience positively in subsequent opportunities.
• Reframing success: The trained doctoral candidate should be recognised as a core output of interdisciplinary projects, shifting valuation toward care and development of researchers rather than solely counting publications/impact.

The authors integrate their reflections with the literature to argue that interdisciplinarity, while demanding, primarily magnifies rather than creates structural inequities of the neoliberal academy. They elaborate the three asymmetries:

• Risk: Funding concentration, metricisation, and casualisation allow those with power to take risks while PGRs bear hard deadlines and income insecurity. Interdisciplinary boundary-work consumes time that PGRs cannot easily afford, conflicting with demands for timely thesis submission and disciplinary publications needed for early career progression.
• Disciplines: Hegemonic privileging of STEM, coupled with REF/journal structures, marginalises social sciences and privileges disciplinary outputs, pressuring PGRs to conform to home-department norms. Within the project, leadership expectations centred modelling outputs and positioned social scientists as support, revealing micro-level enactments of broader disciplinary hierarchies.
• Knowledge: Authority accrues with experience; PGRs must ‘defend’ knowledge within contested disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinary breadth-versus-depth trade-offs heighten anxieties about meeting tacit disciplinary criteria, particularly at examination.

They situate these asymmetries within transformations of UK academia (Mode-2, impact agenda, austerity, COVID-19), noting continuing disciplinary organisation of evaluation (REF, journals) and undervaluation of interdisciplinarity by institutions and funders. To support PGRs and genuine interdisciplinarity, structural changes are needed: aligning administrative, measurement, and reward systems with interdisciplinary aims; recognising boundary-work time; and valuing developmental outcomes.

Reframing the PhD: The discussion advocates centring care and fairer conditions in doctoral education, recognising PGRs as key outputs of projects. This implies treating PGRs as staff, ensuring funding until completion, training supervisors for interdisciplinary boundary-work, and supporting work–life boundaries. Interdisciplinary contexts can foster valuable skills (teamwork, flexibility, pluralism) applicable inside and outside academia. The authors caution that counting PGRs as outputs risks metricisation pitfalls but can shift focus toward nurturing individual researchers.

The paper contributes a retrospective collaborative autoethnography of four PGRs embedded in an interdisciplinary project, revealing how the project context illuminated systemic asymmetries of risk, disciplinary hierarchy, and knowledge within the neoliberal British academy. The key argument is that PGR precarity and uncertainty are rooted primarily in sectoral structures rather than interdisciplinarity per se. The authors propose reframing success metrics to recognise trained doctoral researchers as core outputs, thereby valuing care and development in doctoral education.

Future research directions include: broadening beyond a single Russell Group case to diverse institutions and disciplines; employing mixed and comparative methods to test the generality of observed asymmetries; mapping how interdisciplinary centres fit in departmentally organised universities; and comparing PGR roles to early-career training in other sectors to clarify the function and promises of the PhD. Clarifying expectations and purposes at the outset could help prospective candidates make informed choices and align responsibilities across projects and departments.

As an autoethnographic, single-case study, generalisability is limited. The authors acknowledge challenges typical of autoethnography (individual bias, selective analysis, evolving attitudes, interpersonal influences). The retrospective and collaborative design aims to mitigate some risks through multiple voices and temporal distance, but the findings remain context-dependent (Russell Group setting, Global North employment, COVID-19 period). Ethical constraints exclude reflections about other project participants; only authors’ experiences are analysed. Friendship among co-authors may have shaped discussions, underscoring the need for reflexivity.