Becoming a nomadic artisan: cosmos, streets and transdisciplinarity

I have constructed this chapter using several sketches. These are accompanied by intermezzo schizzo and meditations from the post- and more-than-human multiplicity called the Nomadic Detective Agency (NDA, 2024). These brief accounts and reflections are based on my pedagogical transdisciplinary teaching experiences that I have created at the University of the Arts London (UAL), which I have been associated with in different guises for the last 44 years. As a multidisciplinary learner, artist, researcher and educator, I am often drawn to forms of experimental creative academic writing. They have become ways of showing how these educational events unfolded for students, colleagues in higher education institutions, and various collaborative communities such as museums, and art galleries. Each sketch and intermezzo schizzo has an element of transdisciplinarity within it or alludes to the transversal operations that are extremely useful, and inspiring, in art and design teaching and learning practices at UAL and beyond.

I use the term ‘nomadic pedagogy’ to allude both to the way we can wander our world over the last 20 years with the advent of networked digital technologies, and to wonder about what other thinking we can use in our educational practices. Rachel Fendler (2013) describes learning with nomadic pedagogy ‘... as a process whereby learning is the change incurred when subjects enter into unfamiliar territory, in a process of discovery … [and] is inherently concerned with crossing boundaries; challenging established notions about what education, art, and research look like’ (pp. 786-793)

‘The chapter, Becoming a nomadic artisan: cosmos, streets and transdisciplinarity is strong; `nomadic pedagogy' adopts the same spirit of play promoted in the previous chapter. The detailed sketches provided in this chapter, with appropriately timed references to scholarly concepts, was particularly useful for getting a sense of how this nomadic strategy can actually be done and for readers to understand the methodology behind it.’

List of figures
List of contributors
List of abbreviations
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: transdisciplinary experiments for a more flourishing future
Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Wendy Sims-Schouten and Jack Tsao

2 Provocation 1. Tolerating discomfort: the creative unease of transdisciplinary experiments
Ken Arnold

Part I: Transdisciplinary research

3 Transdisciplinary research: doctoral, postdoctoral and professional voices
Wendy Sims-Schouten, Bart de Nil, Helen Omand and Sarah Ferner

4 Transdisciplinary architectures: children, space and climate change
Francesca Salvi, Guido Robazza and Nicola Crowson

5 Exploring art and the Earth: ReLOAD communities, transdisciplinarity and empowering youth
Rick Dolphijn and Irena Chawrilska

6 Visioning transdisciplinarity in public health
Ranjita Dhital

7 Provocation 2. To see what everyone sees but think what no one has thought
Rana Basem Dajani

Part II: Transdisciplinary teaching and learning

8 Artificial intelligence and transdisciplinary playgrounds
Jack Tsao

9 Becoming a nomadic artisan: cosmos, streets and transdisciplinarity
Mark Ingham

10 Facilitating a transdisciplinary spirit in higher education: a matter of knowns and yet-to-be knowns
Kate Maguire and Agi Ryder

11 Provocation 3. Travelling with theory: experiments in gender and childhood sexualities in the Global South
Deevia Bhana

Part III: Institutionalising transdisciplinarity

12 Institutionalising a transdisciplinary science curriculum
David J. Helfand

13 Transdisciplinary emergence: public universities seeking to provide common good
Paul Gibbs

14 Supporting transdisciplinary humanities and arts research at the Trinity Long Room Hub
Doireann Wallace, Caitriona Curtis, Maureen Burgess and Giovanna Lima

15 Two concepts of transdisciplinarity: glimpsing a trans-experientiality in higher education
Ronald Barnett and Karen Gravett

16 Provocation 4. Place, pace and scale: experimenting with transdisciplinarity within a university
Louise McWhinnie

17 Coda: transdisciplinary experiments in motion
Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Wendy Sims-Schouten and Jack Tsao

Index