Involving Artists (and others) in Interdisciplinary Research

Metaphor analysis of ‘discipline,’ as derived from our summer 2020 roundtable with the interdisciplinary team at Cornell.

After a long slowdown related to the pandemic, it’s a huge relief to finally have delivered a report to the interdisciplinary research center team at Cornell.

Way back in the winter of 2019-20, a core working group at Cornell SIPS sought to engage a range of scholars in discussion about interdisciplinary research, toward the aim of opening a new form of interdisciplinary research center at Cornell. In consultation with Artists’ Literacies Institute, the group invited these scholars to a ‘charrette’ style structured roundtable, to draw out new ideas and better understand the wants and needs of researchers interested in interdisciplinarity.

ALI developed the roundtable structure, facilitated the discussion, and recorded and then analyzed the resulting conversation - mining it for insights into the nature of disciplines and actionable steps for moving closer to realizing a new kind of research, where the barriers and hierarchies of traditional Western academia give way to exciting new insights and freedom within a love of learning can be felt by even the most advanced practitioners.

Part of this analysis was a ‘metaphor analysis’ which isolated all the implicit metaphors used by the conversants when they discussed what ‘disciplines’ meant to them. After all, in order to achieve ‘interdisciplinarity,’ this structural understanding of ‘discipline’ itself can offer a path to a truly reimagined way of working with others. A useful composite mental image of ‘disciplines’ was formed, of a ‘territory’ that is often either arable or barren, complete with margins, centers, walls, gates and gatekeepers, or of isolated islands or containers filled with rules of conduct and penalties for breaching them. This understanding of what discipline entails gives us a starting point for building a truly interdisciplinary (or better yet, undisciplinary) research system.