Textbooks as opportunities for interdisciplinarity and planetarity

How can we write textbooks to reach audiences beyond a single discipline? This is an increasingly important question as higher education curricula around the world are being re‐worked to create more opportunities for student learning across disciplines on topics that are of pressing planetary relevance. It is also an important question for those of us who write and teach as geographers in contexts such as the USA , where the discipline of Geography is marginal on many campuses and not well understood by most college students, administrators, governments and employers. This paper offers reflections on the challenges facing such interdisciplinary writing by using an example of a textbook on globalisation developed in a Geography department in the USA but designed for teaching on global studies and global problems in multiple disciplinary, institutional and international contexts. Reaching audiences across disciplines faces numerous hurdles, including our own disciplinary infrastructure for publishing as well as the uphill promotional pathway through which any textbook becomes known, established and used for teaching. It also means negotiating thorny questions about the disciplining of dissent and the counter‐possibilities for meta‐learning about planetarity inside our contemporary global teaching machines.