Disciplinarities: Snippets from the Seminar

Opening Talk: Accounts of the Anthropocene from the Yanomami people, with reference to Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros De Castro’s anthropology of perspectivism, help one to explore the meanings of engaging with other forms of knowledge on both the epistemological and ontological levels.

Opening Game—Discipline Snap: Delegates formed pairs to play “Discipline Snap,” a game that involved participants calling out “Snap” while holding imaginary cards in the air. In the first round, the subject was numbers, in the second academic disciplines, and the third subject was stakeholders or other potential knowledge-bearers. If a matching number, discipline, or stakeholder was called out, the colleague who called out “Snap” first was the winner.

Discipline Slam: Each participant was given one minute to describe the academic discipline(s), profession, or knowledge community to which they felt they belonged, and to indicate its relevance to the Anthropocene. Even though participants had been trained in different disciplinary realms, many shared similar research questions, methods, and preferred readings. Some observed, in fact, that there seemed to be more in common between Campus participants than those of many other, more discipline-focused conferences.

Introductory Lecture I: Bronislaw Szerszynski’s introductory lecture put forward the possible dimensions of interdisciplinarity, which is formed from different degrees of interdisciplinary integration across and beyond disciplines, various practices of interdisciplinarity as well as the various different goals and motivations of interdisciplinarity. The strength of interdisciplinarity lies in the fact it can be creatively agonistic between forms of knowledge and thereby serve to disrupt ontological objects of knowledge. Szerszynski suggested that it was necessary to distinguish between forms of knowledge, explicit or tacit, individual or collective, and that this division formed the basis for Alice Lam’s typology of embrained, encoded, embodied, and embedded knowledge. The processes of knowledge transformation were considered through the work of Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi: the externalization that turns tacit into explicit knowledge; the combination of forms of explicit knowledge; the internalization involved in learning through doing, thus giving explicit knowledge a tacit dimension; the socialization of individually-held tacit knowledge through field-building.

Introductory lecture II: Mark Lawrence’s lecture looked at interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity with reference to climate geoengineering. In the context of anthropogenic climate change and historical attempts at controlling the weather, various techniques have been proposed, including removal of carbon dioxide on land and at sea, and planetary albedo modification. Toward this aim, different academic disciplines have been involved in climate geoengineering research (from the physical sciences and engineering, to political science and philosophy) and, in addition, wider societal issues, such as governance and ethics, have come to the fore.

Experiential learning game – Performing Burning Issues:
In the first round of the Learning Game, one person’s opening statement was followed by someone else’s response that began “No! But …” before their own opinions and ideas as alternatives were offered. In the second round, the same format was used, but now the responder began “Yes! And …” before they presented their own ideas, complementary to the other person’s statement. In the third round, each participant again began “Yes! And …” although now a physical response was required. Now the responder had to act out his or her idea by striking a frozen pose, which was meant to connect in some way to the poses struck by earlier participants, resulting in a collective human-concept “sculpture.”

Group Work:

• Compassion and connectedness – on how to connect to the fate of individuals;
• Practices of the self – Molly – about a molecule and its journey;
• Creative experiments – developing an archive and web platform that allows users to navigate through diverse narratives of matter;
• Sharing – focusing on Haiti’s journey from independent utopia to dystopia; • Radical education reform – looking at the school as a microcosm of the planet;

Wrapping it All Up: Participants questioned the dominance of the interdisciplinarity approach, which is seen as a precondition to better problem solving (the logic of integration). Delegates reflected on how to situate knowledge if the Anthropocene is approached as an entanglement that we are in, rather than as a problem to solve. Perhaps what the Anthropocene does is force us to recognize that disciplinary knowledge is less about the world than in the world; that it participates in the world’s becoming. Hence, working across disciplines can be a means by which to achieve greater knowledge, especially if it helps to cultivate friction between disciplines rather than to integrate them. In this way, disciplinarities promote comparing incommensurable things, so that categories are questioned, rather than simply compiled as data. One approach that made use of creative experiments as radically interdisciplinary modes of research is described in the essay “Feeling/Following“.