Engaging life-world problems and doing participatory research and education creates new dynamics of power, knowledge and desire. What is desirable? What is good? What is relevant?
In an educational context, one implication is that students bridge their acquired skills, knowledge and competence to practices, networks, themes and topics that go beyond disciplinary orientations.
“Students are citizens […] with the ability to contribute to society. If they are able to ‘stay with the trouble’ they are also able to reposition their disciplinary perspective and establish an innovative perspective on learning and education.” (ERASMUS+ project description)
A motto-like reason for transdisciplinary education is that ‘real-world problems don’t know disciplinary boundaries’.
The Oxford Handbook of Transdisciplinary Research points to four core concerns of transdisciplinarity:
“First the focus on life-world problems; second the transcending and integrating og disciplinary paradigms; third participatory research; and fourth the search for unity of knowledge beyond disciplines.” (Frode 2010: 29)
Transdisciplinary modes of knowledge creation are all about questioning disciplines, creating communities, involving non-experts and disturbing sedimentary, institutional regimes.
Involving stakeholders into the learning environment may create new dynamics and conflicts. Multiple interests play themselves out at the same time. Student learning may be the primary raison d’etre of the collaboration seen from the educational institution, which yes, wants to engage with society, and also at the same time must ensure its own critical and independent position. At the same time, involved organizations invest time, effort and resources into the collaborations and may want to benefit directly from the collaboration, by receiving new concepts, models and insights – hence judging projects from the perspective of individual or organizational gain.
This melánge raises the question, how to ensure an open and safe learning environment, where participant’s interests coexist, where there is room for trial and error, and where all of the implicated parties experience value creation. A stakeholders code of conduct is one possible way of scaffolding situations of collaboration and navigating interpersonal and inter-institutional dynamics.
In the chat during the ERASMUS+ project meeting May 25, 2020 we started sharing resources for a research-based unpacking and unfolding of the notion of complexity.
Perhaps we can continue this shared sourcing and generation of a bibliography through comments to this post? I have found some of the references, which were mentioned in the quick chat exchange and entered them below. Perhaps: add comments about why this work is highlighted and add more titles and recommendations…?
“Stakeholders Code of Conduct for Transdisciplinary processes” is the Intellectual Output 2 in the Erasmus+ project on Transdisciplinary Education in the Arts and Sciences.
The primary intention behind this intellectual output is to educationally scaffold how to involve stakeholders in collaborative projects. Transdisciplinary education seeks to engage (with) practice – in education and in research. Sometimes called a ‘modus 2 – new kind of knowledge production’, the idea is to involve external parties in research, either as ‘requirents’, (for example organizations working with a specific challenge), or as ‘involved parties’, for example by thinking of and involving the people who are affected by specific topics, issues and matters of concern. This kind of modus-2 knowing radically breaks with traditional disciplinary organization, in that “the context of application” is included in the validation and legitimization of knowledge.
From their specific expertise and position in society, the idea is that stakeholders contribute to research and education and in this way become part of the research and learning environment.
However, engaging life-world problems and doing participatory research and education creates new dynamics of power, knowledge and desire. What is desirable? What is good? What is relevant?
I am Director of the transdisciplinary research centre Experience Lab, which involves collaboration, co-creation and co-writing with practitioners and researchers from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, from Art and Archaeology over Business to Computer Science and…
Zoology.
(Well kind of.) (More precisely: Biology). (And) – (if this is of interest?): My independent creative work typically engages with nature, natural environments, plants and animals. My doctoral dissertation was on staged, mediated and museum-based experiences of Natural History, here communicated in a short article).
Anyway:
I curate knowledge.
I work at the intersection of experience, technology, art and design. As a practice-based researcher I curate knowledge across the Humanities, Natural, Technical and Social Sciences, promoting experiential, creative and aesthetic modes of engagement.
I have done research-based exhibition work with the UNESCO natural heritage site Stevns Klint, the performance-inspired museum of natural history Naturama, the Danish cultural heritage museum for World War 1, the Open Air Museum of the Danish National Museum and more. I am academic chair of the Roskilde University Museum Partnership RUCMUS.
As an educator, I supervise BA, MA and PhD projects, and my teaching portfolio includes courses on practice-based research, performative communication, creativity and design thinking, experience and research methodology. I chaired the Roskilde University interdisciplinary Performance Design graduate and undergraduate programs from 2013-2016, with 150+ students and great colleagues.
I currently supervise two PhD candidates in curatorial research and experience-based exhibition design.
I promote innovation with care.
I work for the development of sustainable, nourishing and inspiring environments, taking into consideration moral-aesthetic and normative-ethic features. In my consultancy work, I help create digital-spatial architectures for human experience.
I do business consultancy on design and innovation with care and am appointed member of Innovation Fund Denmark’s multidisciplinary Industrial Research Committee.
The Erasmus+ team fully and deeply embraces: – matters of concern – collaboration – commitment (conflict)
All partners agree to focus on: A. “Innovative Transdisciplinary framework”; [working definition] Transdisciplinarity, in this approach, is a context- and issue-specific combination of scientific knowledge, artistic knowledge and societal knowledge. Students are trained in working with these different kinds of knowledge domains. In addition, they become aware of what they as students – within a specific discipline or domain – can contribute to addressing complex societal concerns.
B. Refocus of ‘Stakeholder code of conduct’ to “Codes/matters of concern/conflicts”; Concerns/conflicts as a fruitful intersection and potential learning space.
C. “Team teaching approach” in which unlearning is the key focus and collaboration, composition, commitment (conflict), concerns are fully integrated.
D. “Re-imagination of the learning space”, test sites for boundary crossing.
Deliverables project: E. The proposed outcome and aim of the project is a “Tuning document for Transdisciplinary Education combining Arts & Sciences” (note, an additional ‘Toolbox’ could be a means to ensure the translation of the tuning document to practice). For each outcome a tuning document will be composed.
F. All adaptable for specific use in partner contexts, open enough to customize. The adaptation takes place within each institution. So, falls outside the Erasmus+ project.
I am a practitioner of divergence, who turns black holes into disco’s to give rise to new energies, experiences and forms of thought. My hope is to create moments and momentum in which the possibility of another world feels real and appealing. I want to unleash a mental revolution. I do so by changing cognitive maps of experiencing the world and use forms of thinking that are in the present logics of today recognized as “naive”, “wild” and “childish” and outcasted as a regressed form of thinking In my practices I reclaim their relational attunement to the world that in the hegemonical ways of thinking and education are lost. In retracing them, I develop enchanted adventurous practices that invite and make people think and study together with and within our cosmic surroundings in deviant fashion. Consequently, my praxis calls into question, the standardized ways of knowing and play with the preconditions of value and recognition, subvert social conventions, seek to affirm that intellectuality comes in many forms and will state over and over again that “there can no be social justice without cognitive justice”.
I have currently the following practices, see for more: www.denkfiguren.com
Diffracting Worlds
Sanatorium Octopussy Conceiving a Tentacular Conciousness, Ludwig Museum Cologne, 14 july 2018
With diffraction glasses the spectator has another look at reality, one beyond mirrors and representation and I show the entanglement of all organisms, creating a new experience of reality that embodies the importance, of openess, magic, and care.
Fictioning Alternatives
More than Human Rights – Model United Nations Amsterdam, The Netherlands/ 12 July 2017
Fictioning Alternatives is a form of storytelling that creates alternatives to the dominant fictions that make our post-truth, populist and the Anthropocene a reality today. This practice creates new communities and forms of belonging and give voice to the fragile state of the world, without anthropomorphizing it.
Wild Thinking
Wild thinking interferes with the performative neurotypical and violent imperative of being civil in presenting and generating our thoughts in academic institutional settings. As a result, wild thinking reclaims wild not as unmanageable, or just being too much. Wild thinking opens up other forms of knowing, by moving, shocking, stuttering, and stammering, allowing childish behavior, precarious bodies and dressing up to come into the arena of knowledge production.
Body Anarchiving
My body, like yours, is an anarchive. It is not solely an archive that holds memories, or experiences that belong to the human generations before me. My body like yours can be activated in other ways and make different kinships. I activate my monstrous, animalistic, non-human traces to put my body in new iterations, to explore the limits of community in Western imaginations and encounter my vulnerable self without interruption.
Movement workshop by dance maker Connor Schumacher during Collaborative Worldmaking course
I am a lecturer in the Humanities at Erasmus University College, member of the lectorate Transdisciplinary Education Innovation at Codarts University of the Arts, and am involved in the development of transdisciplinary (teacher) education across three higher education institutions: Codarts, Willem De Kooning Academy and Erasmus University. Currently I am writing my PhD dissertation on innovative educational practices that combine artistic, scientific and societal knowledges, and take a new materialist approach to rethinking collaboration, transdisciplinarity and educational research. In my educational practice, I work with SF and alternative futurisms to encourage students to question how we construct the narratives of the future, past and present.
Recently I have been developing an educational practice inspired by the notion of worldmaking and re-worlding, called Collaborative Worldmaking. Collaborative Worldmaking was developed as a pedagogical tool to introduce students to transdisciplinary research and education in the context of the transdisciplinary minor Re-Imagining Tomorrow Through Arts & Sciences, in which students from a range of academic and artistic disciplines attempt to approach complex societal problems by combining artistic, academic and societal forms of knowledge. During collaborative worldmaking, students collectively imagine and explore an alternative reality, guided by examples from alternative futurisms. In small groups, students are instructed to visit their newly imagined world and, inspired by small exercises in collaboration with experts (such as an architect, social worker, dancer), develop the intricacies of their world. The created sketches, concepts, objects and stories bring to life narratives that offer new perspectives on current societal issues through a process of defamiliarization. In addition, collaborative worldmaking exposes students to the core components of a transdisciplinary approach. Based on Thompson Klein’s (2013) five clusters of meaning found in discourses on transdisciplinarity, collaborative worldmaking enables students to: 1) experience integration of disciplines when collectively creating an alternative world; 2) engage in non-hierarchical collaboration with participants from different knowledge domains and levels of expertise and specialisation; 3) explore complex and entangled systems and become aware of their own situated perspective in those systems; 4) apprehend, and engage with, diverse forms of knowledge; 5) interrogate existing hegemonic narratives and truth claims through alternative futurisms and realities. As an approach for transdisciplinary education, collaborative worldmaking allows students and other participants to work together to imagine alternative worlds and instigate change in our own, damaged, world.
