Transdisciplinary Creativity: Eco-social Justice Art

Catalog description

Transdisciplinary creativity develops new knowledge, metaphors, visualizations, and insights through performative renderings from dialogue, collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. Transdisciplinary creativity is the coming together of two or more disciplines in order to create something more than the individual or the community by recognizing, combining, and utilizing knowledges of all participants. Moreover, transdisciplinary creativity is a social process that develops sense-abilities. Sense-ability is the capacity to attend to the sensory and sensation, as a collective affective awareness of the environment. Students in the course will explore how different methodologies enhance understanding of complex issues such as sustainability, climate change, climate diaspora, environmental racism, and resource depletion. The national and international scope of environmental conversations is forging alliances across disciplines around urgent matters such as climate change. Rather than STEAM being used as an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics, STEAM is explored, in this course, in terms of collectives such as EcoArtTech, in which their work is eco-social justice action to create STEAM. Moreover, STEAM is considered as transdisciplinary creativity for eco-social justice. From a transdisciplinary view of STEAM, works of art are not an appendage or a singular discourse. STEAM is a transdisciplinary approach to environmental issues. STEAM as an action emphasizes ecology, transdisciplinary research, and creativity as a social process.