Interdisciplinarity: 2H + O Is Not the Same as H₂O

A glass of water looks innocent: transparent, neutral, boring, even. However, it is also one of the best arguments against intellectual laziness. If you take hydrogen and oxygen and put them “together,” you do not automatically get water, you get gases — one of them famously explosive — and a chemistry lesson you won’t forget. H + O does not automatically make H₂O; you must understand bonds, conditions, reactions, and the invisible rules that make compounds emerge. And yet, every few years, academia (and industry, and policy, and the LinkedIn ecosystem) puts together a “new” topic: energy and society, AI and ethics, climate and security, health and cities; and an entire crowd shows up with the same assumption: “I know a bit of A and a bit of B. So, I can do A + B.”

This is how serious disciplines get crowded with confident amateurs, how missions get diluted, and, worst of all, how fields become fads. Let me be blunt: There is a version of “interdisciplinary” work that is a primary school collage. You take a few concepts from social science, sprinkle them on a technical model, add a shallow survey with a couple of questions, and then you have an “energy and society” project; you take a sociological concept, attach it to a technology you barely understand, and call it “socio-technical” innovation. The result might fool most, something that passes off as a molecule; yet it behaves like a mixture: superficial, unstable, and often dangerous. Impostors thrive in these gaps because the field is young enough to be permissive, and fashionable enough to be rewarded.

It has tells. A few are almost universal:

• Jargon without lineage. Big words that don’t recognize and cite the debates that gave them meaning.
• Methods without mastery. Regressions are treated as a “truth machine.”
• Communities as data sources, not co-authors. Engaging with communities to talk about —knowledge extraction— or speak for —savior complex—, not to co-construct with.
• Aesthetic interdisciplinarity. The paper “mentions” social concepts such as equity or justice, but they are not conceptually embedded in the research or project. 

In the field of energy and society, the dangers are not abstract. When the impostors treat energy as the main variable and “society” as a decoration, they produce policy advice that might sound elegant but fails real homes. When “energy” and its technologies are treated as a neutral commodity and aspects such as practice, culture, gender, class, and power dynamics are ignored, they design programs that, at best, sustain and at worst, deepen inequalities. Later, everyone acts surprised when adoption is low, mistrust is high, and people refuse to engage further.

It is not about moral policing or making an exclusive club; it is about quality control. Complex systems don’t forgive superficiality; they suffer it, often quietly, through unintended consequences. Groups that do energy-and-society justice cannot simply copy-paste bits of disciplines. They build new systems: new shared questionings, shared standards of evidence, shared accountability. It becomes twice, thrice, as rich and rigorous, having to stand to the ‘laws’ of both social sciences and energy science.

That is why places like the Glasgow Centre for Sustainable Energy frame energy as a service to sustainable and inclusive development, bringing people across the university together to find genuinely interdisciplinary ways to deliver the reforms required for net-zero. It’s also why the UK’s Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC) matters: their work is explicitly about integrated technological and social change, with themes that include Futures, Place, Governance, and Equity; meaning “society” isn’t an annex; it’s a structural beam. Notice that both cases don’t treat interdisciplinarity as decoration. They don’t just visit interdisciplinarity, they live it. Both treat it as integral architecture: designed and staffed methodologically plural, and built for impact.

Latin America does not have the luxury of “interdisciplinary tourism.” Our energy problems are not just one-off case studies or seminar topics. They are lived, breathed, and endured every day. That’s why I listen when an institution says, explicitly, that energy studies must be interdisciplinary, collaborative, inclusive, and aimed at building a just society. The Centro de Energía at Universidad de Chile does exactly that. Their mission and vision explicitly state that they are an interdisciplinary center working toward a “sociedad justa y sostenible.” They highlight their active links with industry and the public sector as part of their ways of working. That’s not branding. That’s a design pre-requisite.

In Mexico, I see the same principles behind the Laboratorio de Innovación y Futuros at IER-UNAM: you cannot do futures work well if you only speak “techno-economic.” Futures are made of institutions, narratives, cultures, incentives, fears, and hopes, plus physics.

There lies the deeper lesson: Interdisciplinarity demands, commands, and shapes your methods and actions. If your work is truly about society, you must accept society as a co-producer of knowledge, not a passive recipient of your “solutions.” When new fields emerge, the balance is delicate. You have your ingredients, and everything is possible, and everything is vulnerable. If we let the space be colonized by people who are only passing through, we get fast, plentiful publications with little substance and slow progress. We get conferences full of applause and policies full of holes. We get a field that becomes a label rather than a craft.

So yes: I will criticize the fad. Not because interdisciplinarity is wrong, on the contrary, because interdisciplinarity without depth is just a performance. Performances are not what households need when the bill arrives, when the air is unbreathable, when the “transition” feels like a promise made to someone else.

So, 2 H + O is not H₂O. And a new field is not the sum of two disciplines. It is a cared-for chain reaction: demanding conditions, disciplined humility, and the courage to be corrected by realities outside our comfort zones. If we want energy-and-society to be more than a trend, we must protect its standards, reward real collaboration, and call imposture what it is: pollution and noise.

Because other energy futures are possible. But only if we stop confusing mixtures with molecules.