This is an article featuring my participation and insights from the interdisciplinary Circle U Summer Workshop 2025. The piece highlights my active engagement with international academic communities and cross-disciplinary research dialogues.
Here, you can read my writing, while the link at the end of the page leads to the article in which my work was featured.
The image above is a small part of our collaboration during the workshop.
my take on fear and trust in interdisciplinary research
I would like to begin this article with an illustration that hopefully captures what this seminar did to me. The phenomenon I am referring to is the continuous movement between fear and trust. Although it is not unique to this seminar, the few days we spent together seemed to intensify it in a way I really appreciated. To make it easier, I would like to use the first day as an example.
After we had received the opening task, I asked myself: well, what is it even that makes me “special”? What is it that makes my studies special? What do I even do? I began comparing myself to all the other people in their disciplines and meanwhile tried to stay authentic. I had to keep in mind that I was worth it even though other people were about to become doctors in some hard sciences. Fear.
Secondly, we opened the space in our group of four and let our notes flow into one another. Here, I quickly realized that I was among peers who struggled with the exact same (il)logic and insecurities as I did. It was important, however, to slowly move on from individual perspectives and find common ground to work on while still implementing everyone’s input. Trust.
We then switched back into individual mode and began crafting on the Miro board. Personally, this task was completely fine and fun for me, but I could clearly sense how careful everyone was, especially in the first couple of minutes. Fear.
Following this, we engaged with each other’s work. Our task was to rework the existing material through copying, rearranging, recoloring, summarizing, and adding to turn it into a shared piece. Trust.
The next thing I remember was thinking, oh no! It’s me who drew that little flower over there on the board and now it’s ruined because the others are making something new out of it. I felt territorial. Fear.
Quickly after, however, I thought, “Oh, but actually this looks so cool now, wow! My flower is not lost, it is in there, but it is also given a new touch, and it is growing and changing. Besides that, working together is so much fun!” Trust.
Moving on from this task, we now needed to take one step back and reflect on what tied this group together. We had to (re-)discover a golden thread in the Miro-mess we had made. One shan’t just craft too randomly! So, we wondered more specifically what our board was about. I mean, most of the info was there already, in front of our eyes, because we went step by step and the instructors giving us this task knew what they were doing. But after getting comfortable in the crafting process, we had to reconsider and slowly start explaining ourselves. Fear.
A moment after, though, I noticed how nicely our minds worked together. Ideas were quickly dropping in and swoosh, the strings started coming together. I thought that now, we really had given birth to a little project and, my team, they get me! Trust.
Going one step further, we had to present our results in the plenum and to the other groups. I thought, what if we misunderstood everything completely and all the other groups are so much better than us? Fear.
After the first group presented their results, I caught myself thinking (not the healthiest instinct, I know) that our outcome was looking surprisingly well, maybe because most of our team had a background in the Humanities and enjoyed art. Many of the SEMP participants, by contrast, often seemed more unsettled by the lack of structure. Trust, I guess.
Nobody really knew what the expectations in the seminar were. Fear. I felt exactly what I’ve been experiencing throughout my studies all these years: students are scared to make moves. We have been graded our whole lives according to fixed schemes and predefined expectations. And now we are suddenly told to take risks in an unfamiliar setting with students from all kinds of disciplines and levels, many of them “above” my own? That’s crazy.
In a similar vein, going to extremes often feels impossible in academia. The game is usually played safely in the middle, where everyone can see and understand the ball. But I was genuinely happy when I finally realized that breaking free from those structures and growing into something new was the whole point. We crafted the board together and often communicated with few words, and every day I left feeling lighter.
Thinking back to the first day, I realized that trust appeared whenever we were reminded of our shared goal, the thing we were creating together. Fear, on the other hand, showed up whenever I was focused on myself, on my own ego. Perhaps that is why I felt lighter in the end. It was the experience of the “inter” in interdisciplinarity, the space between, among, and across, where individual boundaries softened and something collective could emerge. It’s not about merging disciplines into one or replacing them, but about what happens in the space between them and that space is unstable, transitional, relational and ultimately, productive in its own way. But: Ego must go.
Yet, the sense of investedness was intense. Out of more than 25 participants with strong and diverse academic backgrounds, many of us wanted to express specific ideas through the artistic choices we made on the Miro board. Importantly, though, there simply wasn’t enough (literal and metaphorical) space for everything and that’s exactly what makes working interdisciplinarily so meaningful. We had to clear space for the common thing, whatever that was going to be. We had to accept, move on and only jump in when something truly felt necessary or important to us individually.
I don’t want to sound sentimental, but it really is about accepting that the whole is stronger than its parts, and that knowledge should not, and ultimately cannot, be owned. In that context I remember that by the end of the seminar, someone said “once knowledge is produced and shared with the world, it belongs to everyone.” One more time, that forced me to question my own sense of territoriality and competitiveness, my assumption that certain elements were still somehow mine and should be acknowledged as such.
Ultimately, I think the seminar often managed to perfectly illustrate the kind of fear that keeps lingering in academic settings. The fear of making a wrong move, of misunderstanding, of being judged. And the instructors handled this so well. They took us by the hand, then let us do our thing, then tapped our shoulders again to remind us of what the point was or to give new insight, then let us loose again. And I absolutely loved it. I’ve approached Miro boards in similar ways since the seminar ended. Maybe it inspired the artist in me, maybe I just needed a di\erent view on academia, perhaps both.
Jovana Rapaic 
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