The Potential of the In-Between
From Faculty Director, Wendy S. Hesford
As a university-level initiative, the Global Arts + Humanities (GAH) invests in creative and humanistic approaches to critical societal challenges and solutions. It formalizes the university’s commitment to fostering an institutional ecology of collaboration and serves as an integral facilitative resource and bridging mechanism for cross-disciplinary work across campuses, colleges, departments, centers and institutes. GAH has helped elevate Ohio State’s status as a national leader in the integrated arts and humanities and made a significant impact in transforming research culture at the university.
The Global Arts + Humanities has transformed research culture by creating opportunities for collaborative knowledge-making and reorienting research to the collective potential of those who come together to address shared questions and concerns. Our team fellowships and research grants, field schools and symposia create opportunities for faculty and students across the disciplines and community members with diverse experiences to gather around seminar tables, to engage as interlocutors in digital dialogues and symposia and to co-write and contribute to collaborative publications.
We might think of these opportunities and the cross-disciplinary spaces they create as in-between spaces. Cross-disciplinary spaces call forth forms of critical engagement focused on what emerges between us as a community as well as what lies within us as individuals. In-between spaces have been theorized by scholars across the disciplines as third spaces, interstitial spaces, dialogic spaces, deliberative spaces vital to civic engagement, and coalitional spaces that invigorate social action. In-between spaces are spaces of relationship.
Like the seminar tables around which we gather, what is in-between us both connects and separates us. To focus on the in-between therefore is not to devalue what distinguishes us, such as our disciplinary expertise, but to demystify disciplinary assumptions and norms. To focus on the in-between is also not to idealize collaboration, as the act of coming together in and of itself does not constitute a generative in-between space. Rather, we might think of the in-between as both a site/space and as a practice, as generative collaborations require continually negotiating productive forms of engagement and elevating our shared potential.
The Global Arts + Humanities has created tools (a card game and a digital platform) to assist cross-disciplinary research teams in demystifying disciplinary protocols, developing meaningful engagements and expanding notions of impact.
I invite you to learn more about the important work that the Global Arts + Humanities has done to transform research culture at Ohio State.