Looking for a place to anchor: Confusing thoughts along an interdisciplinary dissertation journey

Writing a doctoral dissertation is always a challenge. There is probably no PhD candidate who has not struggled with formulating a good research question, writing a convincing research proposal, managing time and research design, coming up with a neat literature review, collecting suitable data, developing analysis and writing up results. Here, we will not go into detail about the challenge of making sense of the bits and pieces of data acquired over the years, which eventually leads to handing in a dissertation that brings a bit of something new into science. There is a multitude of books in which authors have made it their business to lend a hand to the confused minds of PhD students. This text here is about another kind of struggle, one that is growing increasingly common, as more and more PhD candidates are working on interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research projects, particularly in the context of doing science for sustainable development (Kates et al. 2001; Farrell et al. 2005; Meadowcroft et al. 2005). The first part is written in the present tense, in the form of a sort of ‘field report’, and is then followed by reflections, analysis and lessons learned.