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Paper short abstract

What happens when researchers across disciplines combine art and creative writing to reflect on their research? This paper will explore how academics engaged with the art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in an experimental interdisciplinary encounter designed to disturb our relationship with ‘research’.

Paper long abstract

What happens when researchers – from environmental sciences, sociology, and politics – engage with creative writing as a way of reflecting on their own research? Ekphrastic writing is a literary device in which a work of visual art is described in detail, going beyond mere description to opening up dialogues between the viewer, the work, its (imagined) creator, and (imagined) audiences. This presentation presents findings from PhD fieldwork, which explores connections between arts-based methods and inter-disciplinary practices within academia. The project responds to calls for more in-depth empirical study of inter-disciplinarity, building upon the work of (e.g.) Sørensen and Traweek (2022) who consider the university as a necessary “homework” for STS scholarship and the field’s interest in epistemic regimes. Whilst inter-disciplinarity continues to be celebrated as a panacea to complex world problems, ambiguities about its purpose and impact persist. Through diverse forms of creative inquiry, I will show how exercises, like ekphrastic writing, gives people something new to know, albeit it in unfamiliar and strange ways. Extending arguments put forth in (e.g.) Solbu’s (2018) ‘physiology of imagined publics’, ekphrastic writing reveals the uncertainties and ambivalences that abound in individuals’ understandings of their research, as participants are invited to explain their work to others via imagined dialogues between characters in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings. The insights presented here inform how we might better support knowledge-making practices within academia, recognising, like Stengers (2015), that our capacity to think and feel as academics requires help in order that we, too, might be of help.