This book explores interdisciplinary university teaching in both theory and practice, drawing on the experience and expertise of educators from across the social sciences and humanities. Based around pedagogical theory and concrete practical examples and experiences from the classroom, the book contributes with a multiplicity of knowledge to the growing appetite for interdisciplinary initiatives at universities.
The book is unique in offering depth and breadth of analysis of one of the most prominent experiments of interdisciplinary social science and humanities education in Britain, namely LSE100: The LSE Course, an interdisciplinary course taken by all undergraduates across disciplines at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The course has three streams, each addressing a major challenge of our time: The climate crisis, fairness, and artificial intelligence (AI).
The book is of interest to academics, educators, and university leaders curious about developing and implementing interdisciplinary education in their own contexts, as well as to anyone interested in understanding the dynamics and challenges at stake in interdisciplinary educational settings. Finally, it appeals to students seeking to broaden their understanding of the social sciences beyond their own discipline.
Lukas Slothuus is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Sussex and Visiting Fellow in Government at the LSE. His interdisciplinary research brings together environmental politics, political theory, and international political economy to understand processes of social change with a current emphasis on the politics of the transition away from fossil fuel production. His research has been published in journals including Political Studies, Energy Research & Social Science, Contemporary Political Theory, and Global Intellectual History.
Dave Ashby is Lecturer in Education at King's College London having developed and taught LSE100 as a Fellow at the LSE in 2021-2024. With a background in human geography, their interdisciplinary research draws on political ecology, anthropology, and psychology to explore emerging climate politics across the axis of age. Maintaining a focus on inclusivity, material conditions, and the politics of transformation, they apply methods and theories from their research to education scholarship. Their research has been published by the Leicester Institute of Advanced Studies.
Catherine Duxbury is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her research is on the histories of animal experiments, green crime, and social harm. Catherine is by no means an academic, but she does enjoy the occasional dabble in the arts of academia (even though it can be painful sometimes). Surprisingly, she has written a book, Science, Gender and the Exploitation of Animals in Britain Since 1945 and was nominated for the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best first sole-authored book in the discipline of sociology.
