This year’s keynote speaker is Iris van der Tuin from Utrecht University.
Iris: “During Utrecht University’s previous Strategic Plan period (2020-2025), I served as Dean for Interdisciplinary Education. My university-wide task was threefold: I was to ensure that UU’s interdisciplinary education was of the highest possible quality; that as many teachers as possible participated in its (re)design, delivery, and evaluation; and that as many students as possible were able to take part in faculty- and department-transcending courses, minors, tracks.
My role came with responsibility: among other things, I was to engage all of the university’s disciplines, both epistemically and socially. The strategy chosen by the so-called IDE team was conceptual: disciplined interdisciplinarity (Van Lambalgen and Van der Tuin 2024; Repko and Szostak 2025; Van der Tuin ed. 2025), as a versatile concept, was to guide the university’s interdisciplinary educational endeavours.
This keynote evaluates this strategy not only by considering alternatives to concept-driven interdisciplinarity through a reading of Apostel’s rich 1972 volume Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities, thereby reflecting on the many approaches to interdisciplinarity the book contains, but also by response-ably (Haraway 2008) engaging with colleagues’ epistemic and institutional reactions to disciplined interdisciplinarity, and to concept-driven interdisciplinarity per se.
For the latter reflection, I will use the case study ‘Strategieën voor institutionalisering van inter- en transdisciplinair onderwijs aan de UU’ [Strategies for Institutionalizing Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Education at UU], written by a team of colleagues from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Amsterdam on the basis of a focus group of 21 Utrecht-based participants (De Greef, Wenting, Schuitmaker-Warnaar, and Zijlstra 2026).”