The Mission promotes mutualisation between actors and plays four targeted roles on the key dimensions of institutional change that enable the development of interdisciplinarity:
#1 : a strategic support role. This involves clarifying the political discourse, explaining the reasons for and objectives of the interdisciplinary strategy, and implementing the latter in a concrete and coherent manner in the institution's major projects. This role includes the shared use of terms and concepts, as they do not have the same meaning in all disciplines. It is also a question of explaining what interdisciplinarity requires and what it brings, with concrete illustrations, the complementarity between disciplinary identity and interdisciplinary approach... The idea is to get away from the implicit, to give meaning to terms that are now overused or that seem obvious in order to explain the added value of the approach undertaken, so that the community can find its way around and adhere to it.
#2 : A role in supporting organizational change. The implementation of interdisciplinarity is slowed down and made more complex by an organization structured in a disciplinary manner, whether it is a question of departments, training courses, or the affiliations of teacher-researchers... The identity remains globally disciplinary. It is not a question of overturning this, but of facilitating and enhancing interdisciplinary projects (training, research, career) which are not only more complex by nature, but also hindered by this compartmentalized structure and this culture of disciplinarity. A diagnosis carried out with the different services, departments, laboratories and institutes of the University will allow to characterize the reference situation, the obstacles and the priorities, in order to experiment new practices aiming at recruiting interdisciplinary profiles, facilitating career reorientations, valuing individual initiatives... with the objective of perpetuating the practices which will have shown their effectiveness.
#3 : a role of accompanying the implementation through project support and evaluation. The Mission offers different types of support to interdisciplinary project leaders who need help with these issues, depending on their needs: facilitation of interdisciplinary workshops to facilitate project design, critical review and proposal of language elements related to AMU's interdisciplinary strategy, support in responding to national and international calls for projects for which interdisciplinarity is a selection criterion, proposing criteria for measuring interdisciplinary integration and co-constructing targeted evaluation and impact tools and indicators, supporting the framing of interdisciplinary actions and their administrative implementation in order to overcome institutional difficulties, intermediation and putting people in contact with internal and external skills... As interdisciplinarity is a complex process, it requires specific indicators, and the evaluation of its results and impact is crucial to support the effectiveness and usefulness of the approach. In this spirit, an Observatory of interdisciplinary practices is set up.
#4 : a communication and dissemination role. One of the issues that the Mission is committed to addressing is the fragmentation of interdisciplinary knowledge and the lack of mutual understanding between actors. This is why, in addition to setting up a web space dedicated to interdisciplinarity, which will centralise useful information for players involved in this field, the Mission will integrate networks of players involved in this field in order to relay opportunities (calls for projects or applications, etc.) and disseminate best practices, both internally (community of practice) and externally. It will strengthen its partnerships on its strong axes and will constitute a place of cooperation and valorisation for the interdisciplinary community of the site, to which it will provide support as a resource centre.