NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

Edition 22, 2019 – Our Interdisciplinary World

Our Interdisciplinary World
By Jenny Wilson — Is this the future of creative arts or the end of specialised practice?
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A Brave New World for Art
By Associate Professor Keely Macarow — Judging from a quick glance at today’s news cycle, it is clear that we live in uncertain and debilitating times in which our political leaders lack leadership and imagination in addressing climate and humanitarian emergencies that demand human and ecological justice.
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Learning by the book
By Dr Caren Florance — What do photographers and poets have in common? Despite the contemporary ease of digital publishing, they both yearn for the authority of a physical book. Funnily enough, this is also the case with academics, but here we are thinking about non-traditional outputs, so I won’t go there.
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Catalysing Entanglements – Toward a specialised creative practice
By Associate Professor Jonathan Duckworth — I am fascinated by research that brings together the arts, design, science and technology having worked collaboratively across these domains for most of my academic career. My own interdisciplinary journey began with two research projects funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Australia Council for the Arts through their Synapse initiative.
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Interdisciplinarity in practice: Casual academics, regional universities and doctoral supervision
By Dr Elizabeth Ellison — At one stage in my academic career, I spent time teaching into a broad postgraduate degree in which my teaching team and I coordinated cohorts of students in study areas. Mostly, these were what we might consider to be traditional discipline areas, such as creative writing or interactive design. I, on the other hand, was the coordinator of the cohort of “Interdisciplinary” students.
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A Beautiful Tension
By Professor Jon Cattapan — Arts training institutions, and indeed the artworld itself, reflect the complex and rapid shifts of information and technologies available to us. Is it really possible to be immersive and discipline-specific in a world where access to many knowledges provides such rich counterpoints and ruptures to singular practices?
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Artistic Criticality
By Professor Ross Woodrow — Creative arts research is probably too widely established in Australian universities to be dislodged by any argument against its validity. Even so, judging from past attempts at exclusion of the creative arts from consideration as research by the Australian Research Council and the OECD with its Frascati Manual, reform will not involve reasoned argument.
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