Call for Participants at 4S/EASST conference 2024: Creative Partners? Repositioning the Arts in Transdisciplinary Collaborations

Next to our own panel on ethics of artistic research, partners and former colleagues of the research centre What Art Knows organize an interesting panel at the upcoming 4S/EASST conference in Amsterdam. The call closes on 12 February, 2024. More information is available under https://www.easst4s2024.net/.

Creative Partners? Repositioning the Arts in Transdisciplinary Collaborations

Veerle Spronck, Peter Peters, Denise Petzold

Recently, transdisciplinary collaborations play an important role in research on societal transformations and processes. Examples are the rise of generative AI (Faisal, 2023) or issues of sustainability and climate change (Rödder, 2016). These transdisciplinary projects often promise to address societal challenges by creating more ‘robust’ and democratic knowledge, for example through alternative modes of knowledge production that bring researchers and societal actors together (Schikowitz, 2020). Given the range of scholarly disciplines and (societal) stakeholders involved, however, tensions, difficulties, and conflicts are inevitable (Felt, Igelsböck, Schikowitz, & Völker, 2016). While scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) can explain how these problems emerge and play out, the aim of synthesizing different bodies of knowledge and solving such conflicts and tensions remains.

In such transdisciplinary collaborations, the arts are often seen as “creative partners” for cooperation. They are for example expected to facilitate the communication between societal stakeholders, or act as vehicles for social critique or commentary. In this panel, we propose to see the arts not as “instrument” or “creative solution-producer”. Rather, we ask how the arts can inspire transdisciplinary practice, proposing that the arts are at the core of the very societal transitions that transdisciplinary collaborations seek to address. We re-attend to the arts as practices that can interrupt, distract, deviate, slow down, create discomfort, interrogate, problematise, and confront. By doing so, we critically address the conflict-solving approach that STS scholars have attached to transdisciplinary projects.

In this combined open panel, we therefore not only invite papers, we explicitly invite artists, (social) designers, musicians, writers, and artistic researchers to share their proposals for workshops, experiments, prototypes, performances, or other artistic inventions too. Together, we aim to explore methods, ways of attending, and collaborative work practices that can inspire STS researchers to rethink the position of the arts in transdisciplinary projects.