Why Cross-Disciplinary Research Matters
Emergent | Collaborative | Transformative
From Faculty Director, Wendy S. Hesford
Across the nation, universities are contemplating how to provide an education that is global and interdisciplinary — one that promotes community-engagement and advances democracy in an increasingly diverse and changing world. Higher education in the twenty-first century presents complex challenges and opportunities for transformation.
Higher education for the twenty-first century requires a deep investment in core disciplinary competencies as well as an increased emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaborations.
We face critical societal challenges of great consequence and complexity: from the global pandemic and socio-economic disparities to global warming and forced migration, to mass incarceration and poverty, to authoritarianism and the breakdown of democratic institutions. The arts and humanities have a vital role to play in confronting these challenges — building from strong foundations in disciplinary expertise, accentuating new understandings and imaginaries, and translating knowledge into solutions for social impact.
Indeterminate in scope and scale, critical societal challenges not only require attention to global systems but to local cultures and histories, and they therefore compel a shift from crisis-based thinking to contextual thinking. The critical in “critical societal challenges” can mean urgent, pressing or necessary — but it also points to a methodological orientation.
Emergent challenges — multi-causal, multidimensional and resistant to singular solutions — push the boundaries of disciplinary understanding and call for cross-disciplinary collaborations and multifaceted solutions. The construct of solutions is but one framework for creative and humanistic orientations. Solutions to complex problems can only be transformative if they attend to a diversity of perspectives, practices and methods. This includes the recognition that methods themselves are informed by cultural histories and embodiments. In this sense, solutions are iterative and context driven. Creative and critical humanistic modes of inquiry and discovery help us to better understand these histories and their present formations. They shape how we see the world around us, how we conceptualize and categorize knowledge and how we live and adapt.
As a leading land-grant institution of the twenty-first century, The Ohio State University has a vital role to play in fostering cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural understanding essential to a healthy deliberative democracy and to imagining more socially just and sustainable communities. The university’s investment in research and creative practices that provide insight into the human dimensions of these critical societal challenges is more important now than ever.
Integrated arts and humanities methods and practices provide indispensable tools for understanding our place in the world — methods that forefront deep observation, listening and empathy, and skills to communicate diverse viewpoints and imaginative possibilities. These tools include creative action, contextualization, representation and synthesis — modes of inquiry that account for our relations, interdependencies and interconnections. Significantly, they cultivate the compassion that drives social change on local and global scales.
More than ever, we see the urgent need for integrated arts and humanities research and creative practices to apply qualitative as well as quantitative methods to understand and respond to critical societal challenges. By breaking down barriers to meaningful collaboration, Global Arts + Humanities is uniquely positioned to become a national leader in demonstrating the transformative power of cross-disciplinary collaborations that amplify creative and humanistic modes of inquiry and discovery.