Research team

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Aims

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research is popular right now, featuring heavily in funding calls and projects. But what does it mean, and how does it work in practice? This research asks: 

• How do creative methods and arts-based interventions shape interdisciplinarity in higher education research contexts?  
• How do participants experience such methods and interventions? 
• What can we learn about interdisciplinarity through speculative writing, poetry, collaging, and performance? 
• How do these methods and interventions disturb interdisciplinarity and, in turn, how do interdisciplinary encounters inform the use of such approaches? 

Above: A poem encircled by seven paper dolls made from mixed media collage and coloured inks; each doll is differently dressed and displays a different ‘attitude’; one doll is an apparent fusion of the human and beyond-human.

Overview

This PhD research seeks to explore interdisciplinarity through a range of creative methods and interventions, including poetry, collage, and performance. Over the duration of a series of workshops, University staff from different disciplines will be invited to work together across, and between, disciplinary perspectives and experiences to explore some of today’s most pressing concerns including biodiversity loss and habitat change. This work will explore how we can best harness people’s creativity to address these big issues, and where the creative process might take us.  

Creative methods will be used as a means of data collection and analysis, and to facilitate and disrupt interdisciplinary working. PhD researcher Rebecca Edgerley plans to use performative and poetic inquiry for analysing and (re)presenting the data and findings. This approach is part-illustrated in the poem-image (above), which fuses her own words with found text from the UKRI Cross Research Council Responsive Mode Pilot Scheme’s funding opportunity criteria (released in June 2023): 

Unlock

disruptive

reciprocity

unexpected

ideas changed

together

no clear ‘lead’

only each other.

Above: Once upon a time in Orford Ness. A collage of an imagined past/present/future. Formerly administered by the Military of Defence during the world wars and the Cold War, Orford Ness is now deemed an important nature conservation area and Site of Special Scientific Interest. The site is protected and restricted in its use and access; to mitigate contamination of, and contamination from, the area.

Impact

“Drawing upon scholarship from Science and Technology Studies, and Arts-Based Research, the intention is to show the workings of interdisciplinary labour in unfamiliar, perhaps surprising ways; ways which might resist conventional presentation and dissemination.”

Rebecca Edgerley, PhD Student – University of Exeter

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