Hybridizing Scholarship
An Artist's Interdisciplinary Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carrie Ida Edinger
From my research and experiences, I have found that the artist’s voice is under-represented when it comes to specific research methods and the perspective artist’s have of their practice crossing disciplinary boundaries, such as using anthropology. Following the lineage of the 1960’s artist writing from the cultural turn and media of the late-twentieth century, my paper is focused on my twenty-first-century experiences. The knowledge, from my subjective experience, is the basis for the inquiry with academic disciplines and art practice. Within my interdisciplinary practice, I have investigated the ephemeral, along with human engagement, and the physical and online social spaces. My interdisciplinary approach includes concepts related to the everyday, museum studies, and the social sciences. I have completed projects with a humanities approach that have bridged the relationship between the human element of engagement with objects and space. I have integrated technology and performative sources for the production and presentation of my recent projects. My artist’s voice within this is an underrepresented scholarship; however, my cross discipline initiative permits the inclusion of social and cultural perspectives to continue the future exploration of interdisciplinarity.
Why Professionals Must Be Narrativists: Interdisciplinarity as a Radical Act
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Gotlib, Larry Palmer
As we become exponentially more linked and wired, we are at the same time growing magisterially, existentially isolated. Our identity-constituting narratives, whether personal or professional, tend to be increasingly limited by our chosen interlocutors, professional environments, and ever-shrinking circles of others with whom we share our ever-decreasing intellectual and social energies. Why, especially as successful professionals, ought we try to imaginatively, empathetically enter a world that is not our own, feeling its odd foreignness, its disturbing otherness? In this paper, we argue that we, as humanists and humanities-minded professionals, must do the hard thing: we must interrogate the "other" by turning to, and teaching, a radical interdisciplinarity that makes possible the kind of narrative competence that moves us toward what Martha Nussbaum calls “moral competence." We have to teach others, and ourselves, to (re)connect not only with other perspectives and epistemologies, but to engage in often uncomfortable dialogues with distant others through direct encounters with narratives, with stories. We must, in other words, introduce lawyers to literature. We begin with a brief discussion of the growing need for such moral competence, especially among those whose professions tend to regard the humanities as ephemeral at best. Second, we offer an account of what we mean by radical interdisciplinarity, and how it can lead to narrative, and subsequently moral, competence. We conclude with a narrative of how an engagement with Dostoyevsky can indeed lead not only to a more enlightened legal practice, but to a more humane one. It is our hope that these deeply interdisciplinary approaches to how we understand ourselves and others will effectively counteract the master narratives of splintered professional geographies and growing personal insularities, making connections among us all visible -- and vital.
