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During the workshop “Interdisciplinarity around small reservoirs” (at the French Institut de Recherche pour le Développement [IRD], Montpellier, December 2015), twenty researchers from a wide range of academic fields – including hydrology, sociology and agronomy – experienced the development of an interdisciplinary reflexive dialogue. Encouraged to share their research experience on a common object – small reservoirs – the participants explored their different practices and conceptions of interdisciplinarity between natural and social sciences. This exploratory experience highlighted two distinct interdisciplinary postures. The first one emerges from the perception that understanding hydrosystems requires associating multiple scientific approaches to account for the multidimensional water-society relations. Seen as a way to analyse and represent complex objects and systems, the objective of this interdisciplinary posture is to favour linkages and complementarities between academic disciplines. The second posture’s objective is rather to explore disciplinary boundaries and identify new research issues by combining and confronting the approaches of multiple researchers. Researchers explore their mutual methodological and conceptual boundaries, draw out the contradictions resulting from their respective approaches and build upon these conclusions to define innovative research questions. While interdisciplinarity is often expressed in the singular form, this workshop invites us to see it as a being plural and built through the multiple practices that nurture interactions between people and disciplines.