When we speak of the interdisciplinary logic of oral health, we echo the words of Barry and Born (2013) that what we have come to know as the mouth today has taken this form because of the array of institutions, actors, technologies and practices that have been directed at it through time. Barry and Born's edited collection on interdisciplinarity provides a comprehensive outline of the many different kinds of interdisciplinary work that currently exists and the wide-ranging interdisciplinary relationships between the social and natural sciences and between the arts and sciences. Is then, our book interdisciplinary? The book's orientation around a central theme with the involvement of multiple disciplines seemingly suggests so. But what does it mean to be involved in interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences on the subject of oral health? Interdisciplinary work is not straightforward. In the growing debate about its nature and purpose, certain disciplines have been vicariously described as parasitic, trespassers or poachers, taking approaches and ideas from other territories (Osborne, 2013), while others have been described as interlopers (Barry and Born, 2013). Interdisciplinary collaborations have also been seen cynically as a way to generate funding and described as little more than arid rhetoric, with the literature on interdisciplinarity called bloodless, sterile, profoundly uninteresting and conservative (Fitzgerald and Callard, 2014; Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015). Yet, the space of ‘interdisciplinarity’ is of course, like the mouth, a historical and sociological artefact and as such is an object that offers numerous opportunities as well as constraints (Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015). Interdisciplinarity can therefore also be useful, and like Barry and Born (2013), we see it as a way of generating new questions and reflecting on existing problems associated with oral health and dentistry.

In order to generate new questions and to reflect on existing problems, we need to identify where our project lies in relation to current work on oral health. From Barry and Born's identification of two alternative forms of relationship between disciplines within interdisciplinary work (the ‘subordination-service mode’ and the ‘agnostic-antagonistic mode’), we can determine that most existing research on oral health to date falls within the ‘subordination-service mode’. In the ‘subordination-service mode’, the social and behavioural sciences have commonly been called upon to help supply a social perspective or to explain errors in measurement in research within oral health and dentistry, or to provide ‘higher order skills’ as a way of enhancing dental education and dentists’ personal and professional development. For example, the theoretical background and methods from the sociology of childhood have been used to help improve the ‘voice of the child’ in dental research (Marshman et al., 2007, 2015). Likewise, researchers have drawn on the theory of social practices in relation to the management of carious teeth in children during a large-scale clinical trial. Here, sociologists have helped to examine what it means to be ‘doing dentistry’ during the clinical trial (Marshman et al., 2020).

In the same vein, the social sciences have contributed to making dentistry more accountable beyond the profession and enabled dentists to see things from the user's perspective. For example, Exley et al. (2009, 2012) examined decision-making processes associated with the costs of having dental implant treatment and highlighted that private healthcare involves assessing not only the provider but also the product. As such, patient decisions to engage in private health care are ‘distributed’ beyond the single event where treatment is said to happen. This was not found to be the case with patients in relation to implant treatment where patients seemed to be poorly informed; these patients could very well have been exploited because of their trust in their providers. This research directly challenges the wholesale embracing of implant technology by the dental establishment without proper consumer protection. Moreover, in ground breaking work, Horton and Barker (2009, 2010) highlighted the critical role that oral health care workers play in ‘racialised’ politics in North America. Using the tools of critical anthropology, the authors demonstrate how dental health care workers are not simply promoting oral health when they work with Mexican American farm workers but are also promoting a ‘racialised’ politics that talks of Mexican Americans as containing the ‘stain of backwardness’, which has been a threat to the success of oral health in North America over the past century. In doing so, those involved in dental public health are furthering concerns about the pollution of the American population writ large and are thus furthering the goals of the ‘neoliberal’ state to promote self-governance.

Whilst Exley indicated in 2009 that there was a ‘lack of a’ sociology of oral health, it might now be said that this project is well underway. This is certainly less true when it comes to the arts and humanities. Oral health and dentistry have drawn less on the arts and humanities than the social sciences, particularly in the UK, presumably because their insights are considered more abstract and diffuse and accordingly, their contributions are poorly understood. More commonly, the arts and humanities (along with the social sciences) have played a subordinate role to medicine more broadly and indeed, their potential service to medical practice and pedagogy is a key reason for the foundation of the medical humanities field several decades ago and the teaching of medical humanities electives in medical schools and colleges across the world (e.g., see: Arnott et al., 2001). Nonetheless, the arts and humanities are beginning to be seen as useful to dentistry, particularly in dental education (Smyth Zahra et al., 2018; Smyth Zahra and Park, 2020). Its advocates argue that the similarities between the professions of medicine and dentistry mean that the same insights gained from the arts and humanities in medicine can also apply to dentistry. For example, the arts and humanities’ provision of ‘a grounding in humanistic values, principles, and skills’ can promote a more person-centred, holistic and reflexive approach to dental care, as opposed to a paternalist, reductionist model of healthcare (Howley et al., 2020). Such approaches, enriched by the arts and humanities and grounded in ethics, are also predicted to reduce or remove the high levels of workplace stress that dentists commonly report once in practice (Smyth Zahra and Park, 2020), although research on whether this is the case has yet to be conducted. Moreover, art museum-based pedagogy is thought to build clinically relevant skills and promote learners’ professional identity formation through activities including visual thinking strategies and group poems (Chisolm et al., 2020).

The aforementioned examples demonstrate that an interdisciplinary programme of research centred on oral health is in development and that this programme is seeking to enable oral health care to become more responsive (and indeed more responsible) for its impact on the society around it, particularly in the areas of inclusion, consumer protection and professionalism. This is important for dentistry because without such critical reflection, the profession may very well lose its protected status in society. The various disciplinary perspectives included in this book support this position by promoting a greater degree of reflexivity than would have been possible without their input, particularly on the current zeitgeist in dental public health around the social determinants of oral health. While the work of Watt (2007) can be seen as a key point of contact within dentistry of the necessity of understanding the central importance of the social determinants of health to oral health policy, work beyond dentistry is necessary too. Indeed, the recent statement of the Behavioral, Epidemiological and Health Services Research (BEHSR) Group of the International Association for Dental Research that to ‘achieve optimal oral health globally, there is consensus that action is needed to advance and further integrate behavioral and social sciences as applied to oral health, healthcare, and training’ (BEHSR, 2020) suggests that work to date has not gone far enough. But we suggest that the BEHSR Group's recent call for a greater degree of insight into middle ...