my professional interests are focused on the development of an
Intellectual Arts curriculum, where alternative productions to traditional
research are explored as important venues for the exploration of
progressive and socially compassionate learning. This kind of study and
production is explicitly invested with feminist projects of “difference,”
and writing outside of traditional academic mimicry (i.e., the ideological
reproduction therein.)
I see this work as an endorsement of the productions of difference, and
an interdisciplinary co-production of transgressive interpretations of
gender and history, politics, language, and the institutionalized
consciousness of Western societies. It is a feminist project, as women are
in the position to re-interpret their absences in dominant texts of
history. It is also a work of inspiring active change within ourselves as
both subjective individuals and as socially responsible participants of a
larger class.
hi all you - i thought i'd post a bit of what i've been writing to
describe my work
as Intellectual Arts - (for lack of a better name) - and this in response
to the talks
earlier about differences between interdisciplinary and
faux-interdisciplinary work.
what is written below comes in part from my resume and part of a course
description
(not that anyone in their right academic mind would hire me, hee hee) but
hey, i gotta be me.
which is why i suppose you all have jobs. huh huh. anyway, description
below is not necessarily for critique or proof, but just an example of how
i understand interdisciplinary work.
it's deliberately vague in some ways, since if it is going to be
student-oriented the interdisciplinary focus
ought to begin with the student's own disciplinary interests, n'est pas?
well anyway. have a laugh. please.
Intellectual Arts
Intellectual Arts emerge as work that includes artistic expressions of
theory and learning, as well as activism and other forms of social
activity. It is co-produced as a necessarily social process, and engages
both science and art as metaphors for re-interpreting women’s potential as
agents of change. This involves a critical participation with artistic
interpretation and creation, with post-colonial and post-structural
theories, as well as certain feminist traditions of politics and uses of
psychoanalytic theories of transgression (e.g., Julia Kristeva, Judith
Butler, Diana Fuss.)
Alternatives to Research: During my ten years of study in the differing
departments of Education, I have pursued both the traditional Educative
academic practice and an alternative intellectual practice in the arts,
including experimental writing, multimedia and video production, and
public activism. Having perceived a potential limit in the specialization
of traditional research and academic practice, I have turned towards
Intellectual Arts as an alternative production to research and study.
Intellectual Arts engages the production of new and provocative learning
opportunities to which I am wholly committed in facilitating, inspiring,
and co-developing in an intellectually progressive environment.
The Arts provide a more politically-responsive space for the development
of intellectual insights and alternative productions of the traditional
understandings of Knowledge, especially in relation to women and the
community of difference within.
Intellectual Arts turns towards more communicative expressions (through,
e.g., what Julia Kristeva has called a “thetic of poetics;”) and analyses
of history and gender, language and difference, and the possibilities of
what is yet-to-be produced in the community of scholars.
My interest is in co-producing an interdisciplinary liberal arts
curriculum for students, where sciences and arts are brought into
metaphorical relations of understanding, and Intellectualism is
foregrounded as a responsibility towards to the text, the history, the
politics, and the culture of institutional relations in Western society.
The Arts are explored as sources of alternative representations and
dimensionally complex understandings of the human condition as an
historical body of representation and relation.
There is no dominant theory informing this project; rather, there is an
interest in exploring the ways interdisciplinary study transgresses and
inspires innovative thinking of the human condition as a political
responsibility for the intellectual, where we are participants and
producers with/of and through learning. This is a site of self-awareness
and social compassion, cultivated in the contexts of progressive interests
of alternative learning.
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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