beyond boundaries conference: workshop summaries and contributor biographies
Contributor Biographies
Samad Ahmadi, Charley Baker, Steve Benford, Martyn Bennett, Stephen Casey, Andrew Chong, Paul Crawford, Max Crow, Peter Golding, David Greenaway, Kevin Harvey, Maria Karanika-Murray, Susan Karpasitis, Sarah Kerr, Siobhan Lynch, Rachel Middlemass, Paul Mowbray and Lisa Mooney Smith.
 Crossing Textual Boundaries
Rachel Middlemass
This session heard from three speakers working in three very different areas:
- Matt Mead spoke about the methodology which underpins his thesis; using close reading of the literary text that follows intertextual links which steer towards a range of discourses that can cross disciplinary boundaries. He gave an example of how this works by offering a comparitive study which looked at Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, Sieboldt’s reading of Rembrandt’s painting and an eighteenth century representation of an anatomy lesson (and what information the musuem where it is displayed chooses to tell the audience about it.)
- The second speaker, Rehnuma Sazzad talked about Edward Saïd’s notion of ‘exile’ as a critical conciousness and a necessarily cross-disciplinary idea which would inform her exploration of a group of writers, thinkers and film-makers from the Middle East. To see the slides for this presentation, please click here.
- The third speaker, Sarah Karpasitis, suggests that any truly original postgraduate research must cross boundaries and find new, interdisciplinary ways to reinterpret their subject matter. Sarah talked specifically about how she is using psychoanalysis to illuminate biblical texts and Greek myth and how American films post 9/11 can be looked at through the pschoanalytical lense of trauma theory.
All three speakers agreed that working at the boundaries offered fresh perspectives and a possibility for sought-after truth and justice.
The Art of Mobility
Professor Martin Rieser
 To read The Art of Mobility handout, please click here.
Prof Rieser highlighted the problems associated with moving between disciplines.
There can be a breakdown in technologies
He invited the participants to draw a living room space from two perspectives: their own and that of a dog.
He highlighted the fact that there are always alternative ways to look at things.
Exploring Avenues to Interdisciplinary Research
Dr Rolf Wiesemes and Dr Maria Karanika-Murray
 The session started with some definitions of interdisciplinarity and with the presenters raising some of the key issues:
- Interdisciplinary research (IDR) is used when a complex problem cannot be solved by a single discipline
- There is a need for a common conceptual framework to mitigate against difficulties with terminology: the same languages does not always mean the same thing in different disciplines
- There is a need to learn the technical languages of new disciplines
- IDR has a history which reflects the changing academic landscape. New fields (ecology, biotechnology, sociology of knowledge) are inherently interdisciplinary
- Is there such a thing as a pure discipline or do we need to think about disciplinarity as a continuum from mono- to inter-?
The presenters highlighted the increasing moves within HE to support IDR through research councils and internal support mechanisms. They cited the example of the MRI Centre and the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham.
The speakers then went on to talk about the key strengths and problems involved in undertaking IDR:
Strengths
- Enables creative breakthroughs
- Facilitates discovery of disciplinary errors
- Develops flexibility in research
- Enables career mobility
- Breaks down resistance to change.
Problems
- Supervisors can be reluctant to supervise ‘breadth’
- Outsiders can miss essential facts
- There can be a tendency for naïve generalisms
- It takes time!
- Not all funding bodies are supportive
- How do you evaluate research quality of IDR.
The speakers stressed that IDR requires both expertise and good social and management skills. Good IDR can evolve from an expert-led hierarchical model to a collaborative and horizontal one.
The session ended with an exercise. The students were asked to identify a research question based on their own research expertise. They then passed this question to their neighbour, who added a perspective from their own discipline. This was repeated three or four times and then the papers returned to their original owners. In groups, the papers were discussed in terms of their feasibility.
 Using Applied Research in Multi-Interdisciplinary ways
Dr Ross Prior
Dr Prior gave in-depth biography as an example of interdisciplinarity. Communication difficulties between different disciplines was an issue raised by the floor. He facilitated an exercise which demonstrated that the modes of research were similar even if the research topics were not.
The Uses of Transliteracy
Sue Thomas
To read Sue’s blog, please click here.
Sue offered a model of behaviour in which to place transliteracy, giving three illustrations:
- It can be embedded and inward looking
- It can show awareness of outside influences
- A free radical who moves between spaces.
Immersive Frontiers: Opportunities in the Digital Dome
Max Crow and Paul Mowbray
 Max and Paul explained that they worked across boundaries to enhance the theatre experience for audiences. They can plug any technology into the dome.
Games Devices can be plugged in to allow gaming to become a collective experience.
It could be used as a tool for therapy.
Health Humanities: Crossing Boundaries
Professor Paul Crawford, Ms Charley Baker and Dr Kevin Harvey
To view the presentation slides please click here.
Notes
- Where are the boundaries and how should we cross them?
- There is a movement away from uni-disciplinary to cross disciplinary approach.
- Arts, music, literature are all moving into care – cancer care, social care, therapies. Sound scapes impact on health and wellbeing.
- There are still hierarchies of knowledge and practice maintaining boundaries but the humanities are transcending these.
- There are still spaces and gaps to explore.
Prof Paul Crawford was awarded his chair to extend the reach of humanities away from their uni- disciplinary. How far can we go in applying the humanities in healthcare education and care?
In the group:
- Scientists in the group looking to begin disciplines together to overcome the opposition between science and humanities.
- Mental health care and storytelling to save problems of users, carers and families.
- Literature and Psychology, psychic trauma.
Charley Baker looks at literature in healthcare, although it is widely accepted as a tool in medical education but still held as a poor relation to the medical textbook. Debate is moving this along though. She spoke about ethics and communication, personal growth and medical students. Also, about changing attitudes and beliefs - it’s about finding benefits and opportunities without going beyond expertise.
Please click here to access the Madness and Literature Network.
Charley introduced the concept of bibliotherapy – getting into reading groups, helping anxiety, dementia, depression, esteem and social skills.
Narrative and writing communities to wellbeing and recovery bring about tremendous therapeutic results
Q: Mental Health Networks increasing voice of service users and can bring about innovations in services. Are users effective in impacting on outcomes?
A: Some topics are difficult to deal with in networks and open forums (eg self harm). Literature is a good place to start.
Autobiographies and understanding trajectories to understand the illness
Can impact on professional values
Whichever field you are in, the predictable is not always the answer. Walking in the wrong place can bring about new spaces.
Kevin Harvey looked at social usage and application of language, combining social theory and linguistic theory. Including electronic Health Communication, particularly adolescent health language and how young people communicate.
Please click here to access the teenage health freak website, run by two paediatricians.
Looked at concerns that come through language, used key word analysis, taking data and comparing key words and the frequency of words used in health.
Young people’s language can tell us a lot about their subject experiences.
‘Depression’ and ‘depressed’ – of key concern with young people.
Key Point: clinicians are becoming very interested in remote relationships / use of technology to support healthcare.
Contacts
To find out more about The First International Humanities Conference 2010 (6th-8th August, University of Nottingham) please click here. The theme is 'Madness and Literature' and abstracts need to get to Paul Crawford by March 2010
Contributors
Dr Samad Ahmadi, Principal Lecturer, De Montfort University
Dr Samad Ahmadi is the founding chair of IEEE Games Innovation Conference and represents IEEE Consumer Electronics in the areas of AI for games and autonomous mental development. His aresa of research include application of artificial intelligence and clustering in optimisation, web mining and games. He is a member of the steering committee and an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, a member of the editorial board of the journal of Memetic Computing, an associate editor for the International Journal of Applied Metaheuristic Computing and member of steering committee for IEEE transaction on autonomous mental development. Samad was a member of Industry & Academia IT Think Tank for Microsoft UK Council in 2007 and has played an important role in developing computer science courses with use of games as their tools to make the education more attractive to younger generation.
Ms Charley Baker, Research Associate, University of Nottingham
Charley Baker is a Research Associate at the University of Nottingham, working on a Leverhulme funded project examining representations of madness in post-war UK and US fiction. She has lectured extensively on this area, and is currently completing a book for Palgrave. Charley co-founded and facilitates the AHRC-funded Madness and Literature Network. She was invited contributor for Psychiatry PRN (OUP 2009) and has recently been awarded the title of Fellow of the Institute of Mental Health.
Professor Steve Benford, Head of School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham
Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing in the Mixed Reality Laboratory at Nottingham where he explores novel interaction and communication technologies for rich and dynamic social interaction, focusing on the potential of ubiquitous computing to enhance the creative industries. For more than ten years now this has involved working with artists, ethnographers and scholars from the arts and humanities to create, tour and study a series of mixed reality performances. He is Directing EPSRC’s Doctoral Training Centre in Ubiquitous Computing for the Digital Economy, leading the MRL’s Platform grant in the Widespread Adoption of Ubiquitous Computing, Directing the Creator Digital Economy Cluster, and is also Head of the School of the Computer Science. He received best paper awards at CHI 2005 and CHI 2009, won the 2003 Prix Ars Elctronica for Interactive Art, the 2007 Nokia Mindtrek award for innovative applications of ubiquitous computing, and has received four BAFTA nominations.
Professor Martyn Bennett, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, Chair of Joint Academic Standards and Quality Committee and University Research Committee and Working Party on Research-Enhanced Teaching
Professor Bennett is a proponent of the New British History as applied to the Early Modern Period: he recently published a biography of Oliver Cromwell. Professor Bennett has written a series of internationally acclaimed authoritative works on the civil wars and revolutions that wracked the mid-seventeenth century in Britain and Ireland. His work is distinguished by the use of local and regional sources to build up a comprehensive picture of the effects of war and revolution across the British Isles. In collecting this material he has used the resources of over fifty record repositories around Britain and Ireland.
Professor Bennett is also a founder member of FORWARD the seventeenth century research seminar established at the University which provided a forum for researchers and students working on the period in related disciplines of history and related disciplines. A book of essays written by members of the forum, edited by him was published in 2005. Forward was the subject of an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement in 2000 because of its innovative practices of integrating teaching and research.
Stephen Casey, Training Officer, University of Lincoln
Dr Stephen Casey works in the Graduate School at the University of Lincoln as a Training Officer. He also conducts research in Biological Sciences, and his research interests encompass the study of evolution and population biology using molecular tools. His PhD was on the Conservation Genetics of Seahorses, a subject he is still passionate about.
Andrew Chong, School of Art and Design, Loughborough University
Professor Paul Crawford, Professor of Health Humanities in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, The University of Nottingham
Paul is also Professor of the Institute of Mental Health and Visiting Professor of Health Communication at both the Medical Faculty, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He is Co-Founder (with Professor Ron Carter and Dr Svenja Adolphs) and chair of the Health Language Research Group at the University of Nottingham, bringing together academics and clinicians to advance applied linguistics in health care settings. He has held grants from prestigious Research Councils (The British Academy, AHRC, ESRC and The Leverhulme Trust) and currently supervises 8 doctoral students in studies of language use in health care. He has delivered keynote and plenary lectures at international conferences and written over 60 peer reviewed journal papers or book chapters and 7 books, including: Communicating Care (Nelson Thornes, 1998); Storytelling in Therapy (Nelson Thornes, 2004); Evidence Based Health Communication (Open University Press, 2006); and Communication in Clinical Settings (Nelson Thornes, 2006). He referees for several publishing houses and major journals. He is a Member of the Society of Authors and the British Association of Applied Linguistics. His first novel, Nothing Purple, Nothing Black is to be made into a film by The Drama House, London/ Florida. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2007 and awarded a Lord Dearing Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in 2008.
Max Crow, Creative Supervisor, National Space Centre Creative
Max Crow and Paul Mowbray are digital film makers from NSC Creative, a computer animation studio situated at the National Space Centre, Leicester, UK. Along with a small team of digital artists they explore storytelling and science communication within immersive environments. They have created several documentary films for the relatively new format of Fulldome which have been shown around the world. http://www.nsccreative.com/
Professor Peter Golding, Chair of the EMUA Research Strategy Group, Loughborough University
Peter was appointed to the newly created Chair in Sociology at Loughborough in 1990. Originally he trained in sociology in Manchester (taking an external London University degree) and at the University of Essex. Prior to coming to Loughborough he worked for nearly twenty years at the Centre for Mass Communication Research in Leicester. From 1991 to 2006 Peter was Head of the Department of Social Sciences. In August 2006 he was appointed as the university's Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research), but remains a member of the Department.
Peter’s main research interests are in the sociology of the mass media generally, and especially in the role the media play in the democratic process, as carriers of information and images about social and public policy. He has investigated this role in looking at media coverage of social security and poverty, social work, charities, the poll tax, and more generally political communications, including studies of election coverage for the Guardian. He is also very interested in the economic and political structure of the mass media, on which he has conducted a good deal of research jointly with Graham Murdock. Recent work has looked at the social impact of new communications technologies, and at the role of the media in the development of a 'European public sphere'.
Professor David Greenaway, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham
David Greenaway is Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Economics at The University of Nottingham. He was appointed Chairman of the Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body in 2004, having been a Member since 1998 and is a Member of the Senior Salaries Review Body. Other public service appointments have included non-Executive positions on NHS Boards and advisory positions to various Government Departments.
He is the former Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy. He has published widely in academic journals. He has been an Associate Editor of the Economic Journal and is Joint Managing Editor of The World Economy. He is a Governor of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. He has completed terms as an elected member of the Council and Executive of the Royal Economic Society and as an appointed Member of Council of the Economic and Social Research Council. He was Chair of the Panel in Economics and Econometrics for the Higher Education Funding Council's 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. He has served as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Council at the Institut fur Weltwirtschaft, Universitat Kiel.
Dr Kevin Harvey, Lecturer in the School of English Studies, University of Nottingham
Kevin Harvey's research specialities lie in the field of applied sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Broadly, he is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to professional communication, with his present research, for example, focusing on multi-modal approaches to medical discourse and its practical implications for health care deliveries. Specifically this work involves a corpus linguistic exploration of electronic health messages: an examination of the health concerns communicated by contributors to medical professionals online.
Maria Karanika-Murray, Lecturer in Psychology, Nottingham Trent University
Maria’s work focuses on risk and risk assessment for work-related health, the management of work-related health, organisational interventions, the role of leadership and managerial behaviours for employee health, and interdisciplinarity. Her research has been funded by the Economic & Social Research Council, the Health & Safety Executive, the European Agency for Safety & Health at Work, the University of Nottingham, as well as a number of industry collaborators.
Together with Rolf Wiesemes, Maria co-founded the Cross-Disciplinary Research Group at the University of Nottingham in 2003. Although the CDRG is no longer active, it has helped to promote and facilitate research dialogue across the disciplines and across Universities in the UK and in Europe. Maria sees interdisciplinary work as a prerequisite of innovative, relevant, and practical research.
Susan Karpasitis, University of Lincoln
Susan has a First Class honours degree in English from Lincoln. An MA with Distinction in English Studies again from Lincoln and is currently undertaking a PhD focussing on changing representations of trauma throughout literature (broadly). Her MA examined trauma theory in post millenial literature. Susan is currently teaching at Lincoln College and for the University of Lincoln.
Sarah Kerr, Manager (job share) of the Arts Graduate Centre, University of Nottingham
Sarah completed her BA Hons in Birmingham in English Studies in 1994, and an MA in Critical Theory in 2000, followed by a foundation diploma in Art and Design and a PgDip in Museum Studies. She has always worked and studied part-time, and her previous jobs have included: bookseller; TEFL teacher in Ferrara and London; cake-factory worker; nightclub bar staff; volunteer exhibitions officer; volunteer accessibility researcher; cook; backing singer; postgraduate administrator; artist; flower-picker; freelance writer; au pair; Visual Learning Lab (CETL) Manager; Fundraising Officer. She has worked at the University since 1999, primarily in the Faculty of Arts with postgraduates.
Siobhan Lynch, PhD Candidate, Nottingham Trent University
Siobhan is currently completing a thesis on gender and digital technology at CCM, NTU entitled 'The Gathering of Music'. She has been a professional musician for nearly 20 years, and her research interests span from quantitative and qualitative studies of women in music tech/education, to grounded critical theory: particularly material-semiotic feminisms, new musicology and actor network theory. For three years, she has taught social theory, media and communication studies, and philosophy at NTU and NTIC. In this time, she has given a number of lectures on the music industry, gender and music, youth culture and creative industries.
Rachel Middlemass, School of History, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham
Rachel is just starting the final year of a three-year AHRC-funded PhD looking at 'Masculinities in the High Middle Ages' at the University of Nottingham. The project focuses on the intra-gender relations between different groups of men - particularly between clerical and secular men - and on the models of male behaviour which they upheld. She is keen for her thesis to be as interdisciplinary as possible, and her research draws on elements of psychological, sociological and economic theory, as well as on more traditional historical methodologies.
Paul Mowbray, Head Of Projects, National Space Centre Creative
Paul Mowbray and Max Crow are digital film makers from NSC Creative, a computer animation studio situated at the National Space Centre, Leicester, UK. Along with a small team of digital artists they explore storytelling and science communication within immersive environments. They have created several documentary films for the relatively new format of Fulldome which have been shown around the world. http://www.nsccreative.com/
Lisa Mooney Smith, Associate Dean of Arts, University of Northampton
Lisa Mooney Smith has worked in Higher Education for over 20 years where she has continually worked at the interface between interdisciplinary scholarship and business. She has a background in fine art and critical theory, and has more recently been engaged in research that explores how traditional arts and humanities disciplines might be better enabled to interact with the new demands of the knowledge transfer environment. She is currently the Associate Dean of Arts for Research and Enterprise at the University of Northampton, and sits on the AHRC Peer Review College for Knowledge Transfer and non-HEI engagement. She is actively involved in both national and international networks concerned to raise the impact and profile of the arts and humanities, and regularly writes on the shifts and changes brought about by KT in academic and administrative practices.
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