DISCOVER the Global Arts + Humanities
Letter from Faculty Director, Wendy S. Hesford (May 8, 2024)
Building Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations
One of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme’s core goals is to build intellectual community and capacity for cross-disciplinary collaborations that integrate the arts and humanities. Entering my sixth year as GAHDT’s director, this is an opportune moment to reflect on these intertwined goals.
The Society of Fellows program and accompanying book series, On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities, play a major role in cultivating cross-disciplinary relationships through collaborative research and creative practices. GAHDT’s pedagogical tools likewise provide support for collaborative and trust-building processes.
Building capacity for cross-disciplinary collaborations is linked to GAHDT’s emphasis on experiential learning, community engagement and its foundational commitment to supporting faculty and students as agents of social change.
GAHDT’s Difficult Subjects: K-12 Teaching Institute, for example, brings teachers from central Ohio together for multidisciplinary understandings of challenging topics, such as American slavery, immigration, and climate justice. This year, we are excited to extend the institute through a collaboration with the College of Education and Human Ecology.
Building capacity for cross-disciplinary collaborations presents unique challenges, which include coming up against disciplinary silos and standard metrics and linear, solutions-based frameworks that may not align with collaborative research and the recursive and iterative nature of humanistic-oriented inquiry. Building capacity for cross-disciplinary inquiry necessitates moving beyond the instrumental and accumulative. Building capacity is not only about the addition of new programs but also about removing obstacles and, in some cases, repairing relationships — including those between the university and wider community. Building capacity must be multi-directional.
Ethics of Care
‘Capacity’ typically refers to the maximum amount that something can contain or produce or what someone is able to do, as in the related term ‘capability’ (OED). Both concepts are entangled in often-competing logics about autonomy and agency and theories of change.
Determinations of capacity can empower or harm. For example, as a threshold right, legal capacity (e.g., the capacity to consent) may empower. But ablest presumptions about capacity may also discriminate and infringe on individual rights. Thus, when reflecting on building capacity, we need to take into account who defines and determines capacity, and who is left out or harmed by these determinations?
These questions suggest that we ground capacity in equity. Building capacity necessitates accessible design principles and practices, equitable distribution of resources and transparent and reciprocal relations among stakeholders.
What if we were to imagine the building of cross-disciplinary collaborations and capacity for and through an ethics of care? What if capacity were understood as the capability to respond in ethical ways?
Responding ethically involves generating meaning through shared processes, establishing trust across communities leading with contextual awareness and foregrounding collective responsibility.
Mission
The Global Arts + Humanities is the gateway to the integrated arts and humanities at Ohio State. The mission of the Global Arts + Humanities is to invest in cross-disciplinary collaborations that amplify the transformative power of the arts and humanities to respond to critical societal challenges to drive social change.
Core Goals
The Global Arts + Humanities will...
- Build intellectual community and capacity across the university through cross-disciplinary research and creative practices that respond to critical societal challenges.
- Deepen student engagement in the arts and humanities through cross-disciplinary research, experiential learning and professional development.
- Strengthen the university’s capacity for transformative, community-engaged partnerships through arts and humanities methods, orientations and interventions.
- Increase Ohio State’s national recognition as a leading land-grant institution and its distinction for excellence in integrated arts and humanities through cross disciplinary collaborations.