Originally published at Ideas on Fire, May 12, 2025
In the evolving landscape of academia, interdisciplinary research is a cornerstone of innovation and creativity. By bridging gaps between fields and between academia and broader communities, scholars can address complex problems with holistic and multidimensional approaches.
However, a major challenge is making such research accessible and understandable to various audiences. At times this shows up in small-stakes ways such as a reader misunderstanding a key argument in an article—and thus missing out on using the publication in their own research—or a programming committee rejecting a conference submission. At other times it shows up in bigger-stakes ways, such as a tenure committee, search committee, or acquisitions editor questioning whether particular research truly “fits” within their purview.
Balancing interdisciplinarity with legibility is crucial for the impact and dissemination of this vital scholarship. Here I offer some strategies to navigate this balance, ensuring that interdisciplinary research remains accessible and influential in a wide range of locations.
The importance of interdisciplinary research
Interdisciplinary research transcends scholarly and other boundaries, integrating theories, methodologies, and insights from multiple disciplines and communities. This approach fosters creativity and can lead to breakthroughs that just aren’t possible within a single field.
For instance, Ideas on Fire author Kit Myers’s new book The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States (University of California Press, 2025) brings together legal studies, archival research, and discursive analysis methodologies through ethnic studies, adoption studies, and kinship studies to demonstrate the race- and class-based power dynamics at work in adoption practices. A single disciplinary focus or a single methodology would only have been able to analyze one part of this puzzle. Instead, Myers’s interdisciplinary approach provides a holistic picture and elucidates creative remedies.
The inherent complexity of such interdisciplinary research can pose significant challenges, though. Each discipline has its own jargon, methodologies, theoretical frameworks, pedagogy, and norms. When these elements intersect, the resulting research can become difficult for readers from any one discipline to fully grasp. This is where the need for legibility comes in.
The challenge of legibility
Legibility in academic writing refers to the ease with which readers can understand the content and be hailed by it—making them recognize the work as relevant to them in some way.
For interdisciplinary research, achieving legibility means ensuring that the work is accessible to scholars from various fields and backgrounds. This requires clear communication, effective structuring, and thoughtful consideration of multiple audiences and backgrounds.
One common pitfall is the overuse of discipline-specific jargon. While such terminology is precise and often necessary within a particular field, it can alienate readers from other disciplines who may use different terms or frameworks to describe similar phenomena.
When an author focuses more on discipline-specific phrasing than the actual meaning of the content, they reduce the potential audiences and effectiveness of their ideas. Learning to humbly step out of one’s comfort zone and truly hear how something sounds to a range of readers is the first step to mitigating the jargon issue. The next step is experimenting with alternative phrasing and framing, which a professional editor can help with.
Another issue is the complexity of integrating multiple methodologies and theoretical frameworks, which can result in convoluted narratives and arguments that are difficult to follow.
Obviously, methodology and theoretical frameworks are important—especially in interdisciplinary scholarship—but if you can explain them in ways that are more accessible to a range of readers, you can dramatically increase the impact of your research. Interdisciplinary indexers know this trick well—a great interdisciplinary index creates multiple entry points to a text for varied readers. As an author, take a look at some of the interdisciplinary indexes you admire and see how their framing of methodology and theory can provide models for your own text.
Often these issues show up when an author forgets that their unique career path and research trajectory is not necessarily shared by all (or any) of their readers. Ditching this assumption can have a big impact on accessibility. Make sure to explain things you think are obvious and shared—these often need to be introduced and fleshed out for readers.
Define key terms and concepts
When writing interdisciplinary scholarship, it’s particularly important to take the time to define key terms and concepts clearly and early on. Avoid assuming that readers from other disciplines or interdisciplines will understand specialized jargon. Providing clear definitions and explanations can help bridge the gap between different fields and communities.
Definitions are your opportunity to focus readers’ attention on the meaning you want them to keep in mind, rather than the one that they may think of first given their own disciplinary background.
For instance, in How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games (NYU Press, 2025), Ideas on Fire author Bo Ruberg takes care to lay out for readers exactly what they mean by worldbuilding and that definition is clearly reflected in the interdisciplinary index. This is important both because it is an anchoring concept for the text (and thus if a reader does not understand what is meant by the term, they will misunderstand the entire book) and because Ruberg is defining the concept slightly differently than others have—and that difference is crucial to their argument about how worldbuilding is specifically queer.
By taking the time and care to define key terms and concepts, you make your text more accessible and legible to interdisciplinary audiences.
Use accessible examples
Concrete examples are a very effective way to elucidate complex ideas and are a key way you can open your text up to varied readers. By illustrating theoretical points with real-world examples, case studies, or analogies, you can make abstract concepts more tangible and relatable for audiences.
Depending on your methodology, this may mean integrating an array of interview quotes from different types of interviewees or tracing a sustained metaphor across your entire text. Take care to introduce and explain any background your readers need to follow your examples—even if you think that background is super obvious and surely everyone must know it already (they don’t!).
For instance, when writing Postconflict Utopias: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia, Ideas on Fire author Tania Lizarazo faced the daunting challenge of speaking to transnational readers from Latin American studies, women’s studies, critical race studies, and peace and conflict studies, as well as local activists and community members at the center of Afro-Colombian women’s peace movements. Rich and varied examples allowed her to illustrate incredibly complex, locally specific issues of law, policy, and violence and make those issues accessible to that wide array of audiences.
Examples are also where you can demonstrate scholarly relevance to your home fields, even as you stretch beyond them. This is particularly useful if you need to make sure your potential tenure committee will recognize your book as situated within and contributing something important to your tenure field.
Additionally, for crossover books—books seeking an audience beyond and within academia—examples in the form of storytelling are one of your best tools for translating academic research for audiences beyond the academy.
Take care with structure
A well-organized manuscript is easier to follow and goes a long way toward balancing interdisciplinarity with legibility. Your first step is to state your argument clearly and right up front. For books, this means stating your argument in the first few pages, for book proposals in the first few sentences, and for journal articles in the first paragraph.
Keep coming back to that argument across the text so it resonates with readers, and try to avoid switching up the argument’s technical language too much. Some linguistic variation can be helpful for avoiding repetition but if you use too many different words for the same thing (especially if they are different jargony-words), you risk confusing readers.
A strong introductory section that outlines the scope and structure of the manuscript can provide a roadmap for readers, helping them understand how different chapters or sections are interconnected. Keep in mind that some readers will only read your introduction, and you want them to still come away with a clear understanding of what your text covers. While of course we want every reader to read every precious word we write, that just isn’t practical or realistic. Grant committee members and tenure review committee members evaluating your career-long dossier, letters of rec writers gathering background information, and fellow professors seeking to assign your book in their class simply do not have the time to read every single word, particularly given the massive increase in service requirements and the peer review crisis. If you want your interdisciplinary text to be legible and accessible, a strong and complete introduction is vital.
Use clear headings to guide readers through your arguments. I recommend not getting too cutesy or esoteric with these—clear, direct language that describes the content is a much better choice than that evocative quote you love but means nothing to someone who hasn’t read the source text. Developmental editors can assist with this, offering ways to strengthen existing headings as well as identifying places where adding new headings would make your argument clearer and help varied readers move through the text.
Collaborate with colleagues from different disciplines
Interdisciplinary collaboration is vital for creating legible interdisciplinary texts. Depending on your institution and/or department(s), you may have more or fewer official opportunities to do this in the form of co-teaching or collaborating on a project through a campus research institute. If your institution doesn’t offer official options, I encourage you to create your own opportunities for this kind of collaboration, even if they are through informal means. Organizing events with folks outside your department or forming cross-discipline reading groups are easy ways to forge these kinds of connections.
Co-authoring scholarship with authors from other fields or from beyond the academy is another great way to enhance the clarity and applications of interdisciplinary research. Learning to merge authorial voices and disciplinary frameworks can let you see your research in a new light and find connections you might not otherwise make. It also means you have partners in bridging interdisciplinarity and legibility—you don’t have to tackle this alone.
I am a big fan of interdisciplinary writing groups as a way to bring multiple perspectives to a manuscript or research project. Colleagues can provide valuable feedback on whether your work is accessible to non-specialists as well as to the range of audiences you’re seeking to reach.
The goal in all of these collaborations is to get multiple sets of eyes on your project, particularly from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. This mimics your desired interdisciplinary readership, and learning from colleagues as you write and revise helps you create texts that are legible and compelling to them.
Work with interdisciplinary editors and indexers
Bringing in professional support for your project can help tremendously with ensuring your manuscript is legible to varied readers. But not every editor or indexer has this focus. Developmental editors, copyeditors, and indexers who specialize in cross-disciplinary projects and those that reach beyond the academy bring unique training, experience, and techniques to these types of projects.
To find folks who could be a good fit, talk to authors whose interdisciplinary scholarship you admire, and ask them for recommendations. Peruse the portfolios of those editors and indexers to see how your project would align, and read reviews from authors about their experiences working with them specifically on interdisciplinary projects. Finally, reach out directly to get price quotes and answers to any questions you might have about their process, interdisciplinary expertise, and schedule openings.
Conclusion
Balancing interdisciplinarity with legibility is a critical task for scholars engaged in cross-disciplinary research. By adopting clear communication strategies, collaborating with peers, getting specialized support, and emphasizing the value of an interdisciplinary approach, researchers can ensure that their work reaches and resonates with varied audiences. Ultimately, the goal is to make complex ideas understandable and actionable, fostering greater collaboration and innovation across fields.
In an academic world that increasingly values interconnectedness and a broader social world that desperately needs it, the ability to convey interdisciplinary research clearly and effectively is not just an asset—it is a necessity. As scholars, we must strive to make our work as inclusive and accessible as possible, bridging the gaps between fields to create socially just scholarship that can help shape new worlds.
Ideas on Fire specializes in helping interdisciplinary scholars navigate the publishing process with confidence. Contact us to learn more about how our experienced academic editors can help strengthen your next manuscript.
