In the summer of 2018, freelance journalist Inge Janse interviewed Robin van den Akker, Senior Lecturer in Continental Philosophy and Cultural Studies and academic programme coordinator of the Humanities Department at Erasmus University College Rotterdam, and Renée Turner, artist and Senior Research Lecturer at Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute. They discussed a wide range of topics: hybrid forms of research, tackling wicked problems, knowledge coalitions and artistic, sociological and cultural imaginations. The excerpts below have been edited for clarity. To listen to the podcast of the full interview, visit www…
Inge Janse: Climate change, mass migration, plastic soup and discrimination—we live in a complex time full of wicked problems. Nevertheless, because of their complexity, wicked problems are often simplified to keep things comprehensible and digestible. In this podcast, Robin van den Akker and Renée Turner talk about the threats of the modern time, the solutions that hybrid research has to offer and practical examples of doing so. They hope to convey the message that complexity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially not for academics, education and research.
[largecolorblock]Keywords: wicked problems, differences, commonalities, methods, the arts, cultural studies, specializations, lingua franca[/largecolorblock]
Robin van den Akker: By combining different disciplinary fields and seeing what kind of differences and commonalities are occurring, you can map the cultural moment. That is what we are trying to do. So it is about a combination of various bodies of knowledge, you could say. It is empirical knowledge in the sense that you are looking at economic and social structures. It is knowledge that derives from artistic fields, and it is knowledge that derives from a discipline like cultural studies, which again, uses all kinds of different methods.
Renée Turner: You optimize all these points of view and there’s a kind of beauty to thinking about how to respond to the present, and moreover, how to respond with a longer view. Within the current political climate, we’re constantly being asked to respond to nanoseconds of information disseminated by the media. Working with the arts and humanities together, there’s a sense that you can take that longer view. This comes back to the issue of complexity. How do we think complexly about things when we’re constantly being driven towards simplicity and oversimplification?
Renée Turner: Working together across disciplines, certain questions arise: How do you establish a lingua franca, while also keeping the specialization of what cultural philosophy brings and the kind of language it uses? And the same question can be asked of the visual arts. What do visual languages bring to the table that perhaps cultural philosophy cannot? And then what happens when you bring those languages together?
[largecolorblock]Keywords: responsive versus reactive, response-ability, complexity, collective solutions, knowledge coalitions[/largecolorblock]
Renée Turner: We’re continuously pressured to be reactive and not responsive. For example, imagine I’m a designer. If I constantly have to be reactive, I can never ask the question of ‘Well, is this actually the problem?’ I’m being told this is the problem and it requires a design solution. But if I can be responsive, I can say, ‘Okay, let’s slow down a minute here and examine where the crux of the problem truly is.’ This is where you need other forms of scholarship involved to carefully analyse the situation, which takes more time than we’re used to allocating at the moment.
Robin van den Akker: I think there are two interrelated issues. One is that problems are becoming larger. Climate change, and by that I mean human-induced climate change, is probably the biggest threat ever. We are the first generation—when I say ‘we’ I mean Millennials— that actually realizes this is happening, and we are rapidly approaching a dangerous situation. This is one of the largest imaginable problems ever. On the other hand, we are also very good at blowing things out of proportion and then virally spreading it through all kinds of social networks. It is a paradoxical situation in that regard. But both contribute to the fact that our ‘response-ability’—I mean, that’s a great term by Donna Haraway—our capacity to respond, in a responsible manner, is both being diminished by these two trends because it’s the existential threats that can make you sort of numb, right? Where should I act and what is the scale on which I can act? And the second triggers instant affective emotion-driven responses all the time.
Robin van den Akker: When you are able to combine various perspectives and not only in a sort of academic disciplinary manner—but when you are indeed able to combine different kinds of knowledges—you become very much aware of the fact that in order to solve all kinds of social or economic problems, you need to be engaged with many different people who are in the same sort of problem-solution mode for many different reasons. And you become aware that you have to come up with a collective solution that takes into account all these backgrounds, perspectives and voices.
Renée Turner: I was thinking about knowledge coalitions and believe that in this political time we need them in order to understand what is happening around us. That’s not to say somebody who is specialized misses out. Perhaps they find their knowledge coalitions in other places. But we’re trying to create those coalitions through RASL—it makes it an easier, more naturalized process.
Robin van den Akker: It requires very sophisticated antennas and sensibilities and languages to allow for these knowledge coalitions.
[largecolorblock]Keywords: beyond conventions, experimentation, testing, failure, artistic imagination, sociological imagination, cultural imagination[/largecolorblock]
Renée Turner: To answer the questions—what would you want your students to gain through the RASL network, what would you want staff to gain? It is to be challenged and to see beyond conventions.
You literally test things and test them together. This is the interesting thing about hybrid research. If you want to open up and change traditional research methodologies, the only way you can do that is to experiment and allow for failures.
Robin van den Akker: Artistic research leads to knowledge production through a very specific form of imagination, the artistic imagination. But there’s also such a thing as the sociological imagination, which looks at individuals and how they should be situated within a web of social relations. And the sociological imagination is tending more and more towards empirical knowledge. Which is great. I’m not against that at all, just to be sure. But then we also have in the humanities something that can be called the cultural imagination, through which you do research into culture and meaning, and those entities never contain a stable meaning. That is hard to study empirically. It’s more like a mode of interpretation. So I think the challenge will be to find out not only what it is when we talk about artistic research here at RASL but also how it can be combined with and compares to these other forms of imagination—the sociological imagination and the cultural imagination.
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