Using creative methods to explore interdisciplinarity

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? 

Overview

This PhD research seeks to explore interdisciplinary practices through a range of creative methods and interventions, including poetry, collage, and performance. Hosted by the project’s Creative Club, University professionals from different disciplines and professional roles will be invited to explore and share their practices through creative approaches. This work will investigate the way creative techniques shape and inform knowledge-making practices, and what this entails for interdisciplinary projects and research.

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 creative forms of inquiry for analysing and (re)presenting the data and findings. Some examples are on the project website Research Gallery. This approach is also part-illustrated in the found-poem below, 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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