The Creativity of Culture and the Culture of Creativity Research: The Promise of Integrative Transdiciplinarity - Alfonso Montouri and Gabrielle Donnelly
Social and cultural changes brought about by the digital revolution have led to changes in the discourse and practices of creativity, such as an increasing focus on collaborative and everyday creativity. These developments may reflect the deeper changes of a shift from modernity to a new networked era, whose outlines and implications are not yet clear. We argue that in order to contextualize, understand, and articulate, the relationship between social and cultural changes, and the interconectedness between technological, cultural, economic, and social as well as psychological factors, researchers cannot be limited to the perspective of a single discipline. A transdisciplinary approach, rooted in the epistemology of complexity, can be used to address the challenge of integrating material from diverse sources and multiple dimensions, from the cognitive to the social. Trandisciplinary scholarship of integration is viewed as complementary to more specialized, disciplinary research.
Transdisciplinarity: Challenges, Approaches and Opportunities at the Cusp of History
Abstract:
Until relatively recently science, engineering, art and design each had their own history. Increasingly they are becoming to be understood as components in the broad sweep of the production of knowledge for the good of humankind and the supporting environment. The most convincing evidence of this is in the shift in concern for the immediate and medium-term to the long-term sustainability of the earth as a nurturing environment e.g. approaches to climate change, water resources, holistic science, the socio-political and economic, as a global problem. The recognition of the interrelation and interdependence of hitherto discrete histories as important calls for new modes of interaction that are more than opportunist, convenient or problem-driven. This calls for more strategic approaches to transdisciplinarity as the organizing principle for research collaboration.
The Hidden Third and The Multiple Splendour of Being - Basarab Nicolescu
Abstract:
There is a big spiritual poverty present on our Earth. It manifests as fear, violence, hate and dogmatism. In a world with more than 8000 academic disciplines, more than 10000 religions and religious movements and more than 6000 tongues, it is difficult to dream about mutual understanding and peace. There is an obvious need for a new spirituality, conciliating technoscience and wisdom.
What is progress in transdisciplinary research? Christian Pohl
In disciplinary research progress is reached and assessed by referring to the state of research in a specific field. But what is progress in transdisciplinary research, where several disciplines and further societal actors may be involved? Based on the conception of transdisciplinary research as a collaboration of academic as well as non-academic thought-styles, and based on the understanding of transdisciplinary research as research that develops a comprehensive, multi-perspective, common-good oriented and useful approach to a socially relevant issue, the question of progress is discussed for four view- points: (a) the people concerned about the issue are much less interested in the question of progress in transdisciplinary research than in a better handling of the real world problem; (b) members of a disciplinary, business, governmental or civil society’s thought-style, who gain a more comprehensive understanding of an issue through the transdisciplinary research process, are more interested in further elaborating the issue within their thought- style, than in general lessons on progress; (c) progress on the level of personal experience mainly means that members of academic or non-academic thought-styles realize that they are a member of a specific thought-style among others. Progress would be made by integrating this experience in general education and special training; (d) finally a lot of general lessons can be learned and elaborated as tools, cases studies and approaches form the perspective of a thought-style interested in how to understand and manage transdisciplinary research.
Piibe Piirma
Hybrid Practices - Art and Science in Artistic Research
Piibe Piirma’s PhD dissertation “Hybrid Practices. Art And Science in Artistic Research” is an art-based research, that is focusing on her artistic experience by collaborating different Science labs in Estonia and explores hybrid art and theories of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary art forms, bioart and citizen science.
Piirma’s dissertation is mainly based on her personal new media art practice and curatorial work (2012–2015). Her theoretical study deals with a variety of hybrid art forms, art&science collaborations of Estonian and internationally known artists, and inter- and transdisciplinary studies of in general. Piibe Piirma’s art-based research consists the analyses of her solo exhibitions “Hybrid Practices”, “Hybrid Practice – from General to Specific” and curatorial work of the international exhibition “Rhizope” and related conference “Art and Science – Hybrid Art and Interdisciplinary Research” (EAA 2014).
The objective of Piibe Piirma’s dissertation is to utilise theoretical and practical approaches to seek answers to questions pertaining to co-functioning of different disciplines (art and science). The term is used in this dissertation for artwork in which the two of them, art and science, meet is “hybrid art”. Although new and exciting directions far exceed the established genre definitions and evaluation criteria permit, she holds that the phrase “hybrid art” is the best characterisation of artwork that transcends the boundaries of different and at ostensibly incompatible disciplines. How science impacts art or vice versa becomes clearer through practical examples of art and collective initiatives, which are described in the various chapters and sections of this dissertation.
Living on the border: knowledge, risk and transdisciplinarity by Tom Horlick-Jones and Jonathan Sime
Abstract:
Transdisciplinarity has been hailed as a potentially effective means of addressing increasingly complex societal problems, the nature of which cut across the boundaries between orthodox disciplinary knowledges. In this paper we are concerned with an approach to achieving a form of transdisciplinarity which entails making linkages between scholarship and practice, as well as across disciplinary boundaries. Such ‘border-work’, we suggest, provides important options for engaging with a range of practical economic and quality of life related problems. Moreover, it offers new and challenging possibilities for scholarly work and understanding. We discuss some practical and conceptual difficulties associated with discipline-based investigations, and illustrate these difficulties by focusing on risk-related phenomena. Here we argue that much of what is interesting and important about the character of risk tends to be lost by the generalising, decontextualising and reductionist tendencies of discipline-based research. Finally we consider two existing approaches to establishing a practice for border-work. These have both attempted to combine an appreciation of the active character of practical reasoning by human agents with the constraining and affording nature of social and material contexts.
Re-thinking inter- and transdisciplinarity: Undisciplined knowledge and the emergence of a new thought style by Frederic Derbellay
Abstract:
There has been a visible increase in academic productivity in the field of inter- and transdisciplinarity (ITD) over the past decade. Does this greater visibility mean that ITD has entered a ‘golden age’ crowned with universal success, or does this new approach still face difficulties of an institutional, individual, epistemological or methodological nature? Does the researcher who situates himself between or beyond disciplines represent a new scientific profile that is transforming traditional disciplinary identities? Finally, is ITD a simple recombination of existing disciplines with varying degrees of originality, or does it embody a new thought style that calls for the dedisciplinarization of academic structures and the full recognition of its transgressive status? In this paper I shall attempt to answer these programmatic questions and shed light upon the following elements: the inter- and transdisciplinary approach is underway and still - beyond its potentialities and success - faces some obstacles; interdisciplinary research is often promoted or claimed, but it is sometimes not recognized as a form of research in its own right; and taking seriously the issues of ITD involves rethinking disciplinary identities. It represents a new thought style and a promising future for education and research.
Rethinking inter- and transdisciplinarity: Undisciplined knowledge and the emergence of a new thought style (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267760897_Rethinking_inter-_and_transdisciplinarity_Undisciplined_knowledge_and_the_emergence_of_a_new_thought_style [accessed Oct 4, 2017].
The Calling of a Creative Transdisciplinarity by Ananta Kumar Giri
Abstract:
A relational approach to the problem of interdisciplinary studies is presented and arguments made for rethinking our disciplinary identity from our experiential and aspirational vantage point of transdiciplinary participation. But transdisciplinary participation requires overcoming our disciplinary chauvinism and an openness to the perspectives of other disciplines. In transdisciplinary participation, the other perspective, the other disciplines, need recognition and invitation into the hard core of the disciplinary self and for this the method and weltanschauung of the conventional interdisciplinary research is not enough. Interdisciplinary research now calls for a transdiciplinary interrogation, opening and enrichment which transforms the pious hopes and waiting for interdisciplinarity into a calling of transdiciplinary striving
The calling of a creative transdisciplinarity. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223037021_The_calling_of_a_creative_transdisciplinarity [accessed Oct 4, 2017].
The Potential of Transdisciplinarity by Helga Nowotny
A transformation is occurring in the relationship of science and society. A new mode of knowledge production is at the heart of this transformation. Much of the thrust of innovation is coming from new links between traditionally segmented producers and users of knowledge. Contextualization of research around the interests of stakeholders fosters a more “socially robust” knowledge that transgresses disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The ancient Greek agora is a model for a new transdisciplinary forum.
Book: Transdisciplinary Higher Education A Theoretical Basis Revealed in Practice Gibbs
This book is not just about thinking or acting in transdisciplinary ways, but about being transdisciplinary. To achieve this requires a deconstruction of our current way of acting within the definition of being that others impose upon us. Transdisciplinarity is a phenomenological perspective of reality and its manifestation in the world in which we exist. In this sense, it is a disjunction from the disciplinary, or multi- or interdisciplinary, approaches to our being in the world. I rather think that it is the primordial way of being that shatters both the hegemonies of the knowledge of the powerful and their interpretations of how the world should be seen. It is a reclaiming of that which is essential the being of Being, stripped of limits set by professions, disciplines and morality. Transdisciplinarity is an onto-epistemological approach to the world. It seeks to change and to understand, not to observe and comment, while recognising the value that these activities can bring to the reality of our transdisci- plinary world.
Journal: Special Issue: Transdisciplinary Problematics Edited by Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford and E ́ ric Alliez
Problematizing Disciplinarity, Transdisciplinary Problematics 3
Peter Osborne
I. Legacies of Anti-humanism
Introduction to Serres on Transdisciplinarity 37
Lucie Mercier
Transdisciplinarity as Relative Exteriority 41
Michel Serres
Foucault’s Point of Heresy: ‘Quasi-Transcendentals’ and the Transdisciplinary Function of the Episteme 45 E ́tienne Balibar
Logics of Generalization: Derrida, Grammatology and Transdisciplinarity 79
David Cunningham
Reading Transdisciplinarily: Sartre and Althusser 109
Nina Power
Introduction to Guattari on Trandisciplinarity 125
Andrew Goffey
Transdisciplinarity Must Become Transversality 131
Fe ́lix Guattari
Structuralism’s Afters: Tracing Transdisciplinarity through Guattari and
Latour 139 E ́ric Alliez
II. Transdisciplines
Contradiction of Terms: Feminist Theory, Philosophy and Transdisciplinarity 159
Stella Sandford
Identity and Intervention: Disciplinarity as Transdisciplinarity in Gender
Studies 183 Tuija Pulkkinen
Temporal Drag: Transdisciplinarity and the ‘Case’ of Psychosocial Studies 207
Lisa Baraitser
Morin Edgar - METHOD (vol 1)
Method
is Edgar Morin’s key work, consisting
of six volumes published between 1972 and
2004, in which the author outlines a discursive
loop that goes from the human to the natural
and from the natural to the human. One can
approach the work from any of its volumes and
find this discursive loop.
Transdisciplinary Methodology of the Dialogue Between People, Cultures, and Spiritualities - Nicolescu
Abstract
When two people try to communicate there is, inevitably, confrontation: representation against representation, subconscious against subconscious. As this confrontation is subconscious, it often degenerates into conflict. A new model of civilisation is necessary, whose keystone is the dialogue between human beings, nations, cultures and religions for the survival of humanity. Inthe formation of a new model of civilization, the methodology of transdisciplinarity is crucial.
THE HYBRID ARTIST: Research into the professional practices of visual artists in Australia by Stephanie Curtin
This thesis investigates artists’ labour markets in Australia, specifically the under- investigated subject of hybridity in the practices of visual artists. It is common knowledge that artists often hold multiple jobs to support their artistic practice, also applying their skills in applied work in the creative industries. A recent study in the Netherlands and Belgium has observed the emergence of a hybrid artist who can no longer be said to have multiple jobs as their autonomous and applied practice blur, so that it is not possible to make a clear distinction between the two. There are different positions on what this means for the autonomy of the artist, that it is a threat to the autonomous space of the artist, or that the romantic ideal of artistic autonomy should no longer retain as much relevance in contemporary art.
Hybridity and Ambivalence: Place and Flows in Contemporary Art and Culture by Nikos Papastergiadis
Abstract:
Today the movement of ideas, capital and people is faster and wilder than at any point in history. Globalization has made the world more interconnected. The flows of traffic in this new network have not only accelerated to new levels, but the directions of movement have multiplied and abandoned the well-worn paths. The cultural dynamics of globalization have presented new challenges to the existing models for explaining the forms of belonging and the patterns of exchange that are occurring in the world. Culture is no longer understood as the discrete and unique expression of activities and ideas that occur in particular places. No culture can exist in isolation. The process of hybridization in the deterritorialization of cultures and peoples demands new theories of flow and resistance and is compelling artists and intellectuals to rethink their methods. Cultural critics and curators are also in need of new conceptual frameworks. There is an urgent need for a new vocabulary in art discourse that is able to make sense of the complex forms of representation that are incorporating images from different locations and that simultaneously activate signs that contain within them a multiplicity of other signs, each embodying a series of contrary or competing codes. To do justice to both the complexity of the artwork and the intellectual potential of these new conceptual headings we need to develop frameworks that can address both these signs of difference and the process by which signs are made out of the plays with difference. The concept of translation can serve as a tool that can both make sense of the broader dynamic of cultural exchange and explain specific forms of cultural representation. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which contemporary artists and art writing deal with issues of mobility and attachment. What sort of place does art connote if it is constantly evoking the shuttling between places? In what language can the artist articulate the recognition that translations fail as often as they succeed? How does a bi-lingual or a bi-cultural person speak their mother-tongue and see the world, which operates in a different or hybrid language? These questions push the available conceptual frameworks for cross-cultural exchanges to the limits. In this article I re-examine the conceptual viability of the term hybridity in light of the new debates on creolization and globalization.
Bhabha, hybridity and identity by Antony Easthope
The article argues that Homi Bhabha's important and provocative accountof culture in relation to hybridity relies heavily on Derrida's account of differance and is liable to some of the same reservations - that it risks a'privileging of difference' and an inadequate theorization of identity. This,it is suggested, leads to unwelcome consequences in both the analysis oftexts and the understanding of contemporary politics.
Bhabha: Hybridity and Identity. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270849478_Bhabha_Hybridity_and_Identity [accessed Oct 4, 2017].
Hybrid Art Forms by Jerrold Levinson (1984)
Jerrold Levinson defines hybrid art forms as “art forms arising from the actual combination or interpenetration of earlier (existing) art forms.” [8] Then he goes on to categorize hybrids as juxtapositional (additive), synthetic (fusional) and finally transformational in which visual music –in the form of abstract color film- is considered as. But for Levinson, because of the transformation of music (western classical music) into abstract film is not structurally and thematically possible therefore he claims visual music as a nonexistent art form. Nevertheless he mentions that these kind of nonexistent art forms could someday exist “by appeal to radically new means and media that technological advance will make available.” [9] - see related to article link
October 03, 2017
Rigorous Interdisciplinary Pedagogy by Simon Penny
Abstract:
The emergence of media-arts and digital cultural practices has provided a highly charged context for the development of interdisciplinary pedagogy, combining as it does, practices and traditions from historically, culturally and theoretically wildly divergent disciplines. This paper addresses aspects of effective interdisciplinary educational process, attending to questions of pedagogy, theory and institutional pragmatics. In my analysis, the key components of such a project are: deep technical training and understanding; deep training in artmaking and cultural practice; deep theoretical and historical contexualisation, and an open and rigorous interdisciplinary context which maximally facilitates the negotiation of these often divergent ways of thinking and making. In building such interdisciplinary practice in the context of a campus, one abruptly confronts the discontinuity between rapidly changing fluidity of the contemporary moment and the relative stasis of institutionalised disciplines which have an investment in maintaining their identity in the face of such change. Implicit in the project then, is not simply the development of a context for deep interdisciplinary invention, but the formation of practitioners who are neither artists nor engineers, or who are equal parts both. In either case, this formation confounds the disciplines and creates a vacuum of institutional context which has resounding implications for the survival and flourishing of such initiatives and their practitioners.
In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a subject' (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object, which belongs to no one. Roland Barthes [1]
The main point to realize is that all knowledge presents itself within a conceptual framework adapted to account for previous experience and that any such frame may prove too narrow to comprehend new experiences. Neils Bohr [2]
THE HYBRID ARTIST: Research into the professional practices of visual artists in Australia - Stephanie Curtin
Abstract
This thesis investigates artists’ labour markets in Australia, specifically the under- investigated subject of hybridity in the practices of visual artists. It is common knowledge that artists often hold multiple jobs to support their artistic practice, also applying their skills in applied work in the creative industries. A recent study in the Netherlands and Belgium has observed the emergence of a hybrid artist who can no longer be said to have multiple jobs as their autonomous and applied practice blur, so that it is not possible to make a clear distinction between the two. There are different positions on what this means for the autonomy of the artist, that it is a threat to the autonomous space of the artist, or that the romantic ideal of artistic autonomy should no longer retain as much relevance in contemporary art. In order to observe whether this is not an isolated phenomenon, this thesis investigates whether hybridity can also be observed in the practices of Australian visual artists by obtaining data through an online survey distributed to alumni of a visual arts school based in Sydney, Australia. This thesis specifically focuses on whether there is an increase in the levels of hybridity in practice and in attitude for more recent graduates. The findings reveal that there is no consistent upward trend in hybridity levels over time, however it does reveal that graduates from the 1990s onwards are increasingly hybrid in practice and in attitude until the mid-2000s when attitudes shift, marking a clear opposition to the blurring of an autonomous and applied practice.
Transdisciplinary Methodology of the Dialogue Between People, Cultures, and Spiritualities Basarab Nicolescu
Abstract
When two people try to communicate there is, inevitably, confrontation: representation against representation, subconscious against subconscious. As this confrontation is subconscious, it often degenerates into conflict. A new model of civilisation is necessary, whose keystone is the dialogue between human beings, nations, cultures and religions for the survival of humanity. Inthe formation of a new model of civilization, the methodology of transdisciplinarity is crucial.
Helping Doctoral Students Write - Pedagogies for Supervision
Helping Doctoral Students Write offers a proven approach to effective doctoral writing. By treating research as writing and writing as research, the authors offer pedagogical strategies for doctoral supervisors that will assist the production of well-argued and lively dissertations.
It is clear that many doctoral candidates find research writing complicated and difficult, but the advice they receive often glosses over the complexities of writing and/or locates the problem in the writer. Kamler and Thomson provide a highly effective framework for scholarly work that is located in personal, institutional and cultural contexts.
The pedagogical approach developed in the book is based on the notion of writing as a social practice. This approach allows supervisors to think of doctoral writers as novices who need to learn new ways with words as they enter the discursive practices of scholarly communities. This involves learning sophisticated writing practices with specific sets of conventions and textual characteristics. The authors offer supervisors practical advice on helping with commonly encountered writing tasks such as the proposal, the journal abstract, the literature review and constructing the dissertation argument.
The first edition of this book has helped many academics and thousands of research students produce better written material. Now fully updated the second edition includes:
January 03, 2023
The Routledge Companion To Research in The Arts
The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts is a major collection of new writings on research in the creative and performing arts by leading authorities from around the world. It provides theoretical and practical approaches to identifying, structuring and resolving some of the key issues in the debate about the nature of research in the arts which have surfaced during the establishment of this subject over the last decade.
Contributions are located in the contemporary intellectual environment of research in the arts, and more widely in the universities, in the strategic and political environment of national research funding, and in the international environment of trans-national cooperation and communication. The book is divided into three principal sections – Foundations, Voices and Contexts – each with an introduction from the editors highlighting the main issues, agreements and debates in each section.
The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts addresses a wide variety of concepts and issues, including:
-the diversity of views on what constitutes arts-based research and scholarship, what it should be, and its potential contribution
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the trans-national communication difficulties arising from terminological and ontological differences in arts-based research
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traditional and non-traditional concepts of knowledge, their relationship to professional practice, and their outcomes and audiences
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a consideration of the role of written, spoken and artefact-based languages in the formation and communication of understandings.
The Conflict of the faculties Henk Borgdorff
"In this emerging field of research, artistic practices contribute as research to what we know and understand, and academia opens its mind to forms of knowledge and understanding that are entwined with artistic practices. Henk Borgdorff also addresses how we speak about such issues, and how the things we say cause the practices involved to manifest themselves in specific ways, while also setting them into motion. In this sense, this work not only explores the phenomenon of artistic research in relation to academia, but it also engages with that relationship. This performative dimension of the book is interwoven with its constative and interpretive dimensions. Borgdorff's aim is not only to advance knowledge and understanding of artistic research, but to further the development of this emerging field."-