CUCo will host a research symposium featuring workshops from CUCo’s researcher-in-residence Ohad Ben Shimon and inter- & transdisciplinarity researcher Annemarie Horn. Participation is open for all current Spark and UCo grantees, and anyone else with an interest in inter- and transdisciplinary research.

Please send an email to cuco@ewuu.nl if you would like to join for the afternoon.

Date             Wednesday, March 19
Time             15:00 to 17:00 (followed by drinks)
Location          CUCo’s Nest (Utrecht Science Park)

The Magic Touch

Ohad Ben Shimon

What do inter- and transdisciplinarity have to do with embodiment/the body? Can we imagine inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations as an ‘energy’, or force? Can we put into practice a tentacular thinking-feeling that practices what it preaches?

In my lecture-workshop, rounding up my one year period as a researcher-in-residence at CUCo, I would like to put into practice a tentacular thinking-feeling, focused on the sense of touch. Here scholars will be invited to reflect together what happens when we come to sensing, and touching our own, and each other’s bodies, and how a whole new ‘untouched’ field of transformative knowledge material could be read, shared and discussed. I will also share some insights from the series of interviews I conducted with twelve CUCo researchers from various research groups this past year.

Cao Fei, El futuro no es un sueño (The future is not a dream), Buenos Aires, 2024

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We’ve got to integrate; but how?! While knowledge integration is considered a key characteristic of interdisciplinarity – and one of the competences in the CUCo programme – it is also widely acknowledged as one of its biggest mysteries and challenges.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating

Annemarie Horn

In the past year, CUCo and Annemarie Horn have explored knowledge integration in interdisciplinary teamwork. Particularly, we aimed to balance seeming contradictions. How can we make use of disciplinary diversity without essentializing disciplines? How can we do justice to complexity, without being paralyzed by uncertainty? And how can we provide concrete handles for an open-ended process? For us, the metaphor of food and cooking gave meaning and language to our thinking about knowledge integration. We share our first insights and reflections and further explore the uses of this and other metaphors to understand, think about and do knowledge integration. We may not be able to provide a recipe, but how can we learn to cook?