Troubling Resonances: thinking practices and problems in interdisciplinarity

‘Trouble is an interesting word. … Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent responses to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. … staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present.’

--Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Trans- and inter-disciplinary thinking continue to resonate, with very few academic institutions professing anything except at least some affection of interdisciplinarity, yet specific disciplines remain the most consistent building blocks of academic life. Even if the Covid-19 pandemic required epidemiologists, artists, psychologists, philosophers, political scientists and social media analysts to understand the situation, these, nonetheless, rarely seem to have crossed paths.

This event aims to explore and underscore mutating lines of institutional codes of thinking and practice that might proliferate into new forms of experience and new modalities of learning.

Respecting disciplines while thinking and educating beyond disciplines requires the university to create sandboxes, play-spaces, innovative hubs, and a series of interlinked learning studios in order to jump-start and sustain an experimental aspect to the institution as a whole and its multiple partners.

Inter- and trans-disciplinary research and education often coalesce around academic practices which allow disciplines the experimental space to converge around worldly problems whose articulation provides a language to bring disciplines into conversation. Troubling Resonances looks to trouble these terms, to continue respectful engagements with different disciplinary practices’ while building interdisciplinary intersections and interventions.