After thinking through the next brief, Project 6, and considering my position, access, and resources, I’ve decided to focus my exploration of these ideas of cross-disciplinary exchange in the academic/institutional space.
The following questions and answers form a sort of literalized dialectic. Italicized questions are part of the official project brief.
What:
What is the subject or area that you intend to research? What is the precise question that you will be addressing?
How can structured cross-disciplinary thinking be supported? What kind of systems can be enacted to foster transdisciplinary exchange? Currently, I’m looking critically at the education system because of my physical location, particularly within UAL/CSM or the category of UK Art Schools.
Why:
Why will this research be of value to you – and the world?
Disciplines are necessary. Also, spaces to emphasise information sharing beyond siloed disciplinary boundaries are needed to support creativity.
How:
How will you accomplish your project in practical terms? What will be your methodology, management strategy, and schedule?
Research, conversations, and interventions—both casual/unstructured (such as socials) and those with a more structured focus on helping people into more meaningful exchanges and participation in UAL academic conferences. My position as School Rep for multiple departments at CSM will give me further access to structural understanding and build connections between departments for students.
Interventions currently initiated:
- Two proposals were submitted for workshops at UAL academic conferences in collaboration with tutor Adam Ramejkis and one with MA Innovation Management student Poojitha Lal. Building from his recent series of sessions with CSM’s Culture and Enterprise programme, these workshops aim to introduce staff and tutors to inclusive, inquisitive, and supportive methodologies of intercultural communication through a content-based overview, active discussion, and experiential workshop. The first conference is “Who Do We Think We Are” in June 2022, and the second is EdX: Education Conference in July 2022. We are awaiting approval of these proposals.
- A Culture and Enterprise social event, holding space for students and staff to get to know each other beyond the confines of their courses. I am discussing this with Richie Manu, the Culture & Enterprise programme chair.
What if:
What are the positive implications and potential if you achieve this mastery? How will this position you (and your stakeholders) at the end of the Course?
There are positive implications for more significant support for people involved in learning and for “better” (more profound, more engaged, more creative) projects. With attention paid to the connective tissue between disciplinary boundaries, soft skills like communication and collaboration become considered legitimate sites of production and focus. Whether in the interstitial boundaries of art and commerce or institutional siloization, the emphasis remains on creating space for disciplinary slippage and cross-disciplinary exchange.
Stakeholders:
Students:
- Broadened viewpoints and exposure to different ways of thinking
- Fosters community and life-long community-fostering skills
- Strengthen work through de-siloed feedback dynamics within the institution
Tutors
- Broadened viewpoints and exposure to different ways of thinking
- Foster connections with students as balanced members of group
- De-emphasizes proctorship (one-to-many) in favor of facilitating and guiding discussions (many-to-many)
Further Questions:
How is this moving beyond the predictable? This university has existed for a long time, and I don’t see any of these systems of exchange operating, which either means no one has thought of it or no one has been able to implement them.
What are the benefits of cross-disciplinary exchange? This is a central aspect of what I’m trying to determine. Are there quantifiable ways to determine the benefits beyond anecdotal evidence? Is it self selecting? Do people in the university need this type of support? Experientially, I want it: I am a stakeholder. Why want/how benefit? It’s a form of learning through exposure and exchange; it’s a form of community building. It helps all who exchange by broadening viewpoints and exposing them to different ways of thinking. This leads to the possibility of more kinds of projects from a richer, more broadly educated/exposed perspective.
What will I spend the next unit doing? I have preliminary interventions initiated and would like to see their responses. Still, in the meantime, since I’m swivelling to a more education-focused perspective, I would like to familiarise myself with research around holistic/cross-disciplinary engagement in learning environments to better understand current critical pedagogies and strategies as specifically applicable to educational settings but also across disciplines to see if there is new information elsewhere that could be translated into an educational space.
Most people don’t have the opportunity to question the structures surrounding them. This is partly because we are used to systems being so big as to be unchangeable: they become part of the architecture (the same could be said of government or any large structure). However imposing CSM and UAL seem to be, they are relatively small institutions and have even more possibilities for change enacted from within.
If I frame this as Institutional Critique, I can tap into or nod at the lineage of art in institutional critique. Can it be applied to the institution of an art school? As Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray say in Art and contemporary critical practice: reinventing institutional critique, the act of refusal that critique involves can take the form of “participation in processes of instituting and in political practices that traverse the fields, the structures, the institutions.” But perhaps welding this idea to a more vernacular idea of care: I care about creativity and the power of the arts, creative thinking, critical thinking, and education, so much that I want better structures in place to support those who embark on the inherently unstable and unknown path being a creative implies.
Current Reading List:
Barrett, B. (2012) Is interdisciplinarity old news? A disciplined consideration of interdisciplinarity, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 33:1, 97-114, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2012.632868
Bury, J., Masuzawa, Y (2018). Non-hierarchical learning: sharing knowledge, power and outcomes. Journal of pedagogic development 8 (1): University of Bedfordshire.
Chatzidakis, A., Hakim, J., Littler, J., Rottenberg, C., Segal, L., (2020). The care manifesto: the politics of interdependence. London: Verso.
Darbellay, F., Lubart, T., Moody, Z., (2017) Creativity, design thinking and interdisciplinarity. Singapore: Springer.
Fish, S. (1989). Being Interdisciplinary Is so Very Hard to Do. Profession, 15–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595433
Graham, Mekada (2007), The Ethics of Care, Black Women and the Social Professions: Implications of a New Analysis, Ethics and Social Welfare, 1:2, 194-206, DOI: 10.1080/17496530701450372
Hakim, J., Chatzidakis, A., Littler, J., & Rottenberg, C. (2020). The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.
Moran, Joe (2002). Interdisciplinarity. London; New York: Routledge.
Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. London: Verso.
Oakley, K., Pratt, A., & Sperry, B., (2008). The art of innovation: How fine arts graduates contribute to innovation. London: NESTA.
O’Neill, P., & Wilson, M. (Eds.) (2010). Curating and the educational turn. London : Open Editions.
Pope, Rob (2005). Creativity: theory, history, practice. London: Routledge.
Raunig, G., & Ray, G. (2009). Art and contemporary critical practice: reinventing institutional critique. London, MayFlyBooks.
Sennett, Richard (2012). Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven: Yale University Press.