Emily Danvers

Across the faculty of social sciences, many of us share research interests, professional expertise and academic knowledge that shape the topics we teach. When we met to collaborate on this project, for example, we found most of us teach about issues related to education, social justice, and globalisation. Yet we rarely teach outside the confines of our disciplines and departments. And where we do, it is through favours and friendships, rather than anything structurally organised. Our compartmentalised teaching arrangements often produce a culture that can work against collaboration.

A couple of years ago, Jeanette and I met through a shared interest in education for those of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller heritages. This was an area I research, and Jeanette had just started a community legal education initiative, Street Law, in partnership with the community organisation Friends, Families and Travellers. She asked me whether I’d talk to her students about teaching. Of course, I’d love to. I liked her. I liked the project. It was my area of expertise. Why not?

I’ve since done this a couple of times and get a huge amount from teaching Law students who I normally would never get to meet. Thinking about their contexts, disciplines and experiences and translating my pedagogical knowledge to them is also a useful exercise in understanding what and why I prioritise as an educator.  But it isn’t in my workload. I don’t have to and am not, directly ‘rewarded’, in the very narrow sense of my own time.  Jeanette confesses in our collaboration project that she feels guilty about asking me. But we work in the same university and now in the same faculty. Why shouldn’t we teach across these artificial academic boundaries?

This raises questions about how much of academic life might be sustained by these sorts of favours. It reminds me of the complicated emotions of gift-giving, where the receiver bestows something with surrounding norms of exchange and appreciation. On the one hand, forging positive relationships and having reciprocal practices of care are important ways to navigate academic work and its pressures (Frossard and Jeursen, 2019). Doing this cross-faculty teaching was joyful and enriching – a ‘gift’ to me as well as Jeanette. Also, an academy where we only did what was in our job description would surely fall apart!

But, on the other hand, these practices lead to under-recognition of labour or overwork. Academia has long been organised into silos – whether departments or modules – producing a sort of bento-box style organisation rather than a rich, interdisciplinary tasty stew. It is only when trying to foster collaboration through teaching across departments that we notice how the structures and cultures produce or preclude the kinds of interdisciplinary work we may find personally enriching.

In reflecting on this experience, what becomes clear is the tension between the joy and enrichment of interdisciplinary collaboration and the structural barriers that make such collaboration exceptional rather than expected. While cross-faculty teaching can feel like a ‘gift’—personally fulfilling and intellectually stimulating—it also reveals the fragility of a system that relies on goodwill rather than institutional support. When collaboration is sustained through favours rather than formal recognition, it risks becoming invisible labour, disproportionately carried by those with the capacity or inclination to give more than is required. If we want to foster truly interdisciplinary, socially engaged teaching that reflects our shared academic interests and values, we need to rethink how work is recognised, rewarded, and organised. Moving beyond the bento-box model of academic life will mean embracing new structures that not only encourage, but also sustain, collaboration across boundaries.

Frossard, C., & Jeursen, T. (2019). Friends and Favours: Friendship as Care at the ‘More-Than-Neoliberal’ University. Etnofoor, 31(1), 113–126. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26727103