Creation across disciplines

Karen Herland

Interdisciplinarity has been interpreted in numerous ways by intellectuals, academic associations and, most recently, funding bodies that reward, and sometimes require, collaboration between fields.

Graduate students in the Humanities Doctoral Program held a symposium, Creation of the New: Interdisciplinarity and the Arts, to explore some of these questions. They also used the event to launch Pivot: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Journal of Visual Culture (see next article).

Gareth Hedges heard about funding made available by Board member Miriam Roland for a conference. Fellow grad students Jane Gabriels and Joanne Hui also volunteered time to make it happen.

“It can be very difficult in a small and dispersed department to develop a sense of community and collectivity, but students really came through,” Hedges wrote in an email.

The symposium invited professors and artists from across North America to present aspects of their work that somehow negotiated the boundaries between art practice and theory. After a full afternoon of individual presentations, all five invited guests assembled for a panel discussion moderated by Film Studies professor and director of the Humanities Doctoral Program, Catherine Russell.

Russell began the discussion by pointing to her own 1999 book, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video, which was intended as a dialogue between ethnographers and film makers.

Erin Manning (Studio Arts and Film Studies) said her practice as a dancer has greatly informed her intellectual work. “For myself, and many of my students, I see a move to ‘thinking across disciplines’ instead of deep thinking within one discipline.”

Jonathan Sterne, of McGill’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies, warned against simply accepting ‘interdisciplinarity’ as a panacea to erase the problems associated with traditional disciplines.

He said that his own book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, was produced in response to some of the intellectual one-upmanship he experienced from academics who tossed around terms like “modernity” and “visuality.” “[As a musician,] I lived in a very rich audio world that didn’t seem that primitive to me.”

Artist and author Darren O’Donnell explained his work’s relationship between art and theory by saying that “I use my art to test out if the things that I read in the social sciences are true or false.”

Andrea Assaf, a theatre director, collaborated with Dora Arroela on a piece exploring the experiences of women they worked with on both sides of the Tijuana border. They performed excerpts of the piece while in town. Assaf called for “an understanding of artistic practice as an articulation of theory.”

During the discussion, one student said she had entered the PhD program to access equipment and opportunities unavailable to her outside of the academy. She enjoys being immersed in the rigors of theoretical course work, “but now I don’t have time to write my script or pick up a camera.”

Manning added that creating new forms of knowledge or expression that synthesized different approaches could easily take a person a decade to accomplish, and that’s a luxury few people can afford, realistically or financially.

The discussion pointed to the potential for collaborative work, where people with differing expertise can come together. But the academy tends to require individual dissertation work, and does not acknowledge that type of joint effort.