Beyond interdisciplinarity: Situating practice in the art-geography nexus
Jethro Brice (University of Bristol), Dr JD Dewsbury (University of Bristol), Prof Owain Jones (Bath Spa University), Dr Merle Patchett (University of Bristol)
The proposed session explores new ways of activating the productive nexus of art and geography: moving beyond familiar, discursive, models of interdisciplinarity to engage seriously with the immediate material efficacies of contemporary art as a mode of spatial enquiry.
Recent geographical work has shown a lively engagement with the possibilities and affordances of artistic practice, to incorporate atmospheric and material affect. Art methods are appreciated for their capacity to elicit multiple concurrent registers – to address the nexus of differing, yet interdependent, systems of meaning and doing. Such work has adopted various approaches to cross-disciplinary practice, including critique, conversation and collaboration. What is increasingly apparent – yet remains relatively unexamined – is the potential for new ways of working the relation of art and geography not as two separate systems working alongside one another, but as a generative encounter in which the full potential for new understanding is elaborated in the nexus of creative experimental practice. Rather than a simple borrowing of methods from other disciplines, what is at stake is a dissolution of boundaries in which the very nature of enquiry in certain areas of the social sciences and humanities becomes coextensive with modes of enquiry developed within contemporary art.
This session invites methodologically innovative interventions that are situated explicitly within the nexus of artistic and social-scientific-humanities research, extending the scope of such work beyond familiar, discursive, models of inter-disciplinary practice.
Submissions may wish to address, but are not limited to, the following areas of interest:
- Affective, material, and non-representational methods
- Historical alignments of artistic and geographical enquiry
- Innovations in collaborative method and form
- Challenges and affordances of cross-disciplinary practice
- Can a-linear, non-productive rationales persist and thrive in academic spaces?
- Witnessing practice-based research: terms of evaluation
- Outside the sand-pit: beyond art as public engagement panacea
- Experiments with matter and its different organised forms
- Problems and possibilities for more-than-human ‘participatory’ methods
- Understanding the ‘visual’ beyond discourse and representation