Oweyegha Afunaduula
For decades, we have been told to stay in our lanes. Scholars, analysts, policymakers, and professionals have hidden behind a convenient shield: “That is beyond the scope of this discussion.” In a fragmented world, this phrase served a practical purpose. It allowed focus. It respected disciplinary boundaries. It prevented infinite regress.
But those days are over. And we are fed up.
We live in a world of profoundly interconnected knowledge. Climate change is not just atmospheric science—it is economics, migration, justice, and health. A pandemic is not just virology—it is supply chains, behavior, inequality, and trust in institutions. Artificial intelligence is not just computer science—it is labor rights, epistemology, psychological safety, and geopolitics. As researchers like L. W. Jerome, S. K. Paterson, B. von Stamm, and K. Richert argue in the journal Futures, “as society has become more complex, the intractable problems of our global community have also become complex, interconnected, dynamic and nonlinear. Potential solutions… will not be identifiable through efforts associated with any single discipline.” We are currently doing everything possible to reintegrate knowledge: interdisciplinary research funding, systems thinking curricula, digital hyperlinks between fields, and AI models trained across domains. In this environment, claiming something is “beyond scope” has become, more often than not, an escapist choice.
The Escapist Logic
When someone says “that’s beyond scope,” watch what happens next. Critical thinking stops. Relevant possibilities are not explored. Complex issues are flattened into safe, narrow channels. The speaker gains a rhetorical shield against inconvenient connections, uncomfortable evidence, or the sheer difficulty of holding multiple truths at once. As Allen F. Repko, Rick Szostak, and Michelle Phillips Buchberger document in their foundational Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, experts routinely “omit evidence that they consider outside the scope of their discipline or profession. ‘Facts,’ then, are not always what they appear to be. They reflect only what the discipline and its community of experts are interested in.” This is not rigor. It is willful blindness.
A Real-World Case Study: The Grenfell Tower Fire
On June 14, 2017, Grenfell Tower in London caught fire. Seventy-two people died. The official inquiry ran for years and produced thousands of pages. But one of the most damning findings—reported by The Mirror and confirmed in the official Phase 2 Report—was how many times “beyond scope” had been used to block action before the disaster. In 2015, a tenants’ group raised concerns about fire safety—specifically, the combination of flammable cladding, unsafe electrical wiring, and a building management system that had never been tested for high-rise fires. Different agencies responded as if they inhabited different worlds. The local council said fire safety enforcement was “beyond the scope” of their housing department. The fire brigade said reviewing electrical systems was “beyond the scope” of their annual inspections. The building regulator said the interaction between cladding and gas supply lines was “beyond the scope” of their testing regime. A central government official, when asked about the cumulative risk, wrote in an email: “That level of cross-departmental analysis is beyond our scope.”
Each agency stayed inside its silo. Each said “not my problem.” And because no one was responsible for the connections between these factors, the building burned with people inside. After the fire, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report concluded that the disaster was not caused by a single failure but by a “systematic inability to see the whole picture.” Writing for LocalGov, public sector analyst Mo Baines captured the essence of the tragedy: “For decades anyone challenging the narrative of fragmented models of public service delivery… were denigrated.” The tragedy of Grenfell, she argues, exposes how such “fragmented, marketised and de-regulated systems really work. Most often, they simply do not work.” Counsel to the inquiry went further, describing what Engineers Against Poverty later called “a merry go round of buck passing.” The Queen Mary University of London School of History and Social Sciences delivered the most searing verdict in 2024: Grenfell was not a mere “failure” but an act of “institutional violence,” where “routine decision-making by private construction companies and local authorities prioritised their own immediate economic benefit, in ways that knowingly produced an imminent threat to safety.” This is what escapism looks like in practice. Not laziness. Not malice. But a disciplined, professional, polite refusal to connect the dots—until the dots kill people.
The Impossibility of “Beyond Scope”
In a truly interconnected knowledge world, ontologically, there is no outside. Every issue touches every other issue—if not directly, then through chains of causation and feedback loops. The question is never whether a connection exists. The question is whether we are willing to follow it. Claiming something is “beyond scope” in this environment is like claiming a river is beyond the watershed. It makes no sense. The water flows anyway. The only honest boundary is a provisional, transparent, revisable one: “We will start here, knowing that we may need to widen the lens as we learn. We are not closing the door; we are pacing our attention.”
Breaking Imposed Boundaries: The Case for Extradisciplinarity
We have spent years advocating for interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. These are necessary but not sufficient. They still operate within the shadow of established disciplines. They ask permission to connect. What we now need—what the Grenfell tragedy screams for—is extradisciplinarity. This means refusing the very architecture of imposed boundaries. As philosophers Carl Mitcham and Robert Frodeman have argued in their work on “critical interdisciplinarity,” we require a horizontal approach “moving beyond the academy into dialogue with the public sector, the private sector, and community and stakeholders.” And crucially, they call for “a vertical axis where academic research is self-consciously integrated into the multiple contexts of contemporary life.” The Enterprise Knowledge Graph Foundation, in their Openness Principle, makes this practical: true openness means the ability “to connect, access, and reuse data and knowledge across boundaries.” It requires us to “confront multiple versions of the truth” and “challenge assumptions.” Extradisciplinarity does not wait for permission. It assumes that all knowledge is connected until proven otherwise. It replaces the univariate outlook of disciplinarians with a multivariate outlook that welcomes complexity, alternative analyses, and the messy, fertile ground where real problems exist.
From University to Extraversity: The Institutional Shift We Refuse to Avoid
But extradisciplinarity cannot thrive inside the university. This is the hard truth we must now speak. The modern university is not a neutral home for knowledge. It is a machine for producing and policing boundaries. It rewards depth within a narrow column. It grants tenure for publications that stay inside a single field’s scope. Its departments, faculties, and assessment criteria are designed to say “beyond scope” as a mark of professional competence. The university, for all its rhetoric of innovation, remains intellectually sterile on precisely this point: it cannot reward the person who refuses to stay in their lane. It punishes the generalist, the connector, the one who follows the problem wherever it leads.
Therefore, if we genuinely advocate for extradisciplinarity, we must simultaneously advocate for migration from the concept of the university to that of the extraversity.
The extraversity is not a rebranded university. It is a different institution entirely. It does not have departments. It has hubs organized around real-world problems—the housing hub, the climate hub, the health hub, the algorithmic accountability hub. In the extraversity, no one can say “that is beyond the scope of my current work” because the scope of all work is defined by the problem, not by a discipline. An extraversity researcher working on housing does not “stay in their lane.” They are required to understand the fire safety, the mental health impacts, the political economy of building materials, the history of racial segregation in housing policy, and the data infrastructure that tracks tenancy. If they refuse, they are not doing extraversity work.
The extraversity does not have examinations that test memorization within a silo. It has demonstrations of systemic intervention: show us how you changed a system, not how you recited a syllabus. The extraversity does not have academic journals that reject articles for being “outside our scope.” It has open problem repositories where any relevant connection is welcomed, debated, and refined. The extraversity does not have a tenure system that rewards safe boundary maintenance. It has a renewable practice fellowship that rewards risk-taking, connection-making, and public accountability for real-world outcomes.
Most importantly, the extraversity does not produce graduates who are experts in a single field. It produces practitioners of interconnectedness—people who are comfortable with multivariate analysis, who see every issue as a window into every other issue, and who have been trained to ask not “is this within my scope?” but “how does this connect to everything else we care about?”
But What About Depth?
A predictable objection will come: “If everyone is connected to everything, no one will know anything deeply.” This objection is the last refuge of the disciplinarian. It assumes that depth and breadth are opposites. The extraversity rejects this entirely. True depth in a complex world requires breadth because no phenomenon of significance is isolated. You cannot understand a housing fire without understanding regulation, poverty, mental health, and supply chains. The deepest knowledge of cladding chemistry in the world did not save Grenfell. What was missing was not chemical depth but connectional depth. The extraversity trains for connectional depth as the primary intellectual virtue.
Enough Is Enough
We have criticized the escapist choice before. Now it is time to stop tolerating it. Every time we accept a lazy “beyond scope,” we block the critical reasoning needed for our hardest problems. Climate breakdown will not respect departmental boundaries. The next pandemic will not check which agency is responsible. Algorithmic harms do not care about your PhD’s disciplinary home. The world is diminishing—ecologically, socially, politically—and we cannot afford the luxury of small thinking. The university, as currently constituted, is complicit in this small thinking. The extraversity is our way out.
Enough is enough.
If we are serious about reintegrating knowledge, we must reverse the burden of proof.
Old rule: Assume something is beyond scope unless shown otherwise.
New rule: Assume relevance until a transparent reason to set it aside is given. And that reason must be revisited regularly.
When someone says “that’s beyond scope,” ask them four questions:
· Are you stopping action, or stopping thought?
· Would the connection change your conclusion if it were included?
· Can you name the specific resource, time, or competence constraint—or is this just discomfort?
· Will you revisit this boundary at a known future moment?
If they cannot answer clearly, they are not making a methodological choice. They are escaping. And we no longer have the luxury of accepting that.
A Call to Build
Critique without construction is just another form of escape. So let us be clear: we are not just against the university. We are for the extraversity. This manifesto is an invitation to build. Wherever you are—inside or outside existing institutions—start acting as if the extraversity already exists. Refuse to say “beyond scope.” When others say it, name it as escapism. Form problem-based hubs, not departments. Reward connection, not boundary maintenance. Train yourself and others to see the whole picture, because the whole is greater than its parts and the parts cannot be greater than the whole. Demand that your institution change, or leave it and build something better.
As we have written before, if our current institutions continue to resist the knowledge reintegration wave, they risk being the academic and intellectual dinosaurs of the 22nd Century and beyond.
The scope is the world. And the world is connected. Act like it. Enough is enough.
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Author Note: Oweyegha-Afunaduula is an advocate for extradisciplinarity and the extraversity. This article is a call to action. No more silos. No more excuses. No more “beyond scope.” Join the extraversity movement.
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I am a retired lecturer of zoological and environmental sciences at Makerere University. I love writing and sharing information.
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