Governing Interdisciplinarity: Stakes and Translations of Interdisciplinarity in Danish High School education

This thesis explores the governing of interdisciplinarity in Danish high school education. In particular, it is concerned with the configuration of interdisciplinarity in the aftermaths of a widely contested reform in 2005 that introduced interdisciplinarity as a key organizing principle. Arguing that interdisciplinarity is largely misapprehended if perceived as a definite concept or method, the thesis points towards the need to approach interdisciplinarity as a contingent configuration, and the way it is governed as an outcome of specific historico-practical stakes and translations. Uncovering the history of interdisciplinarity in Danish in high school education and offering ethnographic analyses of the sticky practical arrangements of interdisciplinarity after 2005, the thesis demonstrates that the present governing of interdisciplinarity in Danish high school education entangles ideas and techniques, which historically have been at odds. More specifically, it shows that ideas of industrial innovation and techniques of performance measurement that are associated with interdisciplinarity today have, in fact, been the very objects of critique in earlier preoccupations with interdisciplinarity.