Description
Critical-Connective Tissue brings together scholars, practitioners, and experts from fields such as literature, sociology, women’s studies, media studies, design, information studies, mathematics, political economy, religious studies, media technology, and environmental history to deliberate on a set of questions, for which the connectivity between the humanistic and other domains, the university, and the outside world plays a key role.
At the center of attention is the “how” of deploying humanistic and critical knowledge at scale to respond to the complex, intriguing, and often urgent issues the world is facing, which is necessary to build stronger university-level capacity to respond to societal challenges and complex problems across issues, perspectives and disciplines. Such engagement needs to be outward-facing and richly collaborative across knowledge traditions. It also needs to touch ground, be lived, as well as structural and sustainable. Additionally, it must be critical and constructive at the same time (critiquing, studying, writing, deconstructing, contextualizing, challenging, imagining, changing, designing, building, making), also in relation to the capacity building itself.
The humanistic/critical brings both disciplinary/domain knowledge (for example in relation to one important topic, the environment: research on the emergence of the idea of ‘environment’, literary responses to environmental catastrophes, the infrastructural inversion of climate data models, climate governance and climate justice, the individual and collective ethics of flying, and the representation of heterogenous datasets as interpretation) and critical, challenging, and convening powers (e.g. the ability to deconstruct systems, challenge conceptions of reality and imagine new possibilities, and facilitate/curate meaningful exchanges across diverse constituencies).
These four questions provide a way to approach these issues:
What are the mechanics and techniques associated with making critically grounded change?
[epistemic repertoire, transversal knowledge production, curation, pedagogics, design practice, accumulated experience, difficulties]How can we mobilize critical-constructive capacity beyond individual initiatives/issues with critical edge and imagining-building things?
[at scale, generic, truly outward-facing, policy, frame shifting, scholarly, building on what is out there, sustainable and just capacity]How can we learn from and build on a set of meaningful tensions?
[situated-general, academic-civic-corporate, engaged-disengaged, individual-collective, human-more than human, “free”-instrumentalized, bottom-up-curated-top-down, inside-outside, slow-fast]What does the above mean for the university moving forward?
[trust, framing, infrastructure, convening power, potential, business models etc.]
The work aims to bring into contact multiple lineages, sets of experience, and strands of previous collective work. A basic assumption is that achieving high-level impact moving forward to a large degree depends on what is already there and what is emergent. What configuring, convening, curating, critiquing, and constructing is needed to take on major challenges and problems? What are the important intangibles (such as humility, curiosity and generosity)? How do we frame ourselves and others to allow uncertain, unknown and sometimes uncomfortable collaboration? What is the critical-constructive tissue needed?
This research initiation effort has received generous support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and also from Arizona State University and Malmö University. Key collaborators include Sha Xin Wei, ASU, Sally Kitch, ASU, Matt Ratto, University of Toronto, and Maria Engberg, Malmö University, as well as a growing network of people, series of conversations, and projects over the past decade.
Please check back for updates!