HEA Teaching Landscape Writing: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Innovations

1. HEA Teaching Landscape Writing: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Innovations Dr Joss West Burnham, Associate Dean & Head of Department, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

2. Interdisciplinary Studies: How else can we know? • Contexts towards understanding… • The Departmental Journey so far…2008 –to date • Quotes to frame: ‘Let Every Limit be a New Beginning’ (George Eliot, Middlemarch) ‘ It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held up as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere opposition of a pious wish), when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down –perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion – in the interests of a new object and a new language, neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. The mutation in which the idea of the work seems to be gripped must not, however, be over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemological slide than a real break’ (R. Barthes, From Work to Text.)

3. Quotes Cont’d… • ‘There is no possibility of the acquisition or creation of stable, unchanging knowledge. Instead, there is continuing spiralling. A structure of knowledge is subject to criticisms which generate principles, abstractions and new structures of knowledge, which in turn, give way before new criticisms to become new principles, abstractions and structures of knowledge in a never ending process’ (Morwenna Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self) • ‘It’s political. You can’t run a university unless it’s divided into subjects. If you try and teach the whole lot, it becomes a complete mess and the vice –chancellor goes mad, so they have to divide it up. But if you divide it up, you can’t understand it.’ (James Lovelock, ’Instead of robots taking over the world, what happens if we join them?’ Guardian interview, 31.03.14) • The Department of : ?????? • AbuseStudiesChildhoodandYouthStudiesCrimeStudiesEnglishFilmTVandCulturalStudiesOutdoorStudiesPhilosophyPsychologySociology • Human, Social & Cultural Studies • INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES