An Inquiry into Interdisciplinary Collaborations
November 1, 2019 | 3:00 – 5:00pm | FREE / RSVP
Room 4390 – SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Join four SFU faculty members from FCAT, FASS & Education as they reflect on recent explorations in Interdisciplinary Learning, with Dara Culhane (Anthropology), Peter Dickinson (SCA), Rob Kitsos (SCA), and Elizabeth Marshall (Education).
RSVP to Sarah Louise Turner
Performance, Place, and Sensory Ethnography
In this presentation, Dara Culhane and Peter Dickinson will discuss a course they co-taught in Spring 2019 that considered the theoretical and methodological intersections among performance studies and two emerging fields in anthropology: multisensory ethnography, which explores entangled relationships among embodied sensory experience and historical, cultural, and political contexts; and multimodal ethnography, which engages media in conducting, analyzing, and communicating fieldwork.
Students were asked to take as their primary objects of study their immediate sensory environments, using a series of walking exercises to engage with questions of Indigenous territorial sovereignty, to account for different micro- and macro-performances in and of the city, and to attend to how different “sensescapes” (including those not traditionally included in the Western schema of five senses) help reveal sedimented layers of history and belonging. Among other assignments, students were asked to keep a journal recording the field notes from their walks; and to complete a final trans-medial project that could combine writing, drawing, video, sound, and live performance that applied the embodied research of their walks to ideas of sense- and place-making.
Fairy Tales, Composition, and Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Elizabeth Marshall and Rob Kitsos will discuss their co-taught course entitled “Challenging Normal” in which students used fairy tales to examine the idea of perception and how we learn to see difference. Through course readings, compositional practices, and interdisciplinary collaborations, undergraduate students from a wide range of faculties re-formed fairy tales, such as Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” into embodied texts. As students created their performances they made visible and challenged representations of “normal” embedded within familiar fairy tale narratives. Marshall and Kitsos present ‘making as a way of thinking’ as a method of interdisciplinary inquiry that invites students to think and make in ways that challenge normative images and scripts.
Presented by the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Faculty of Education.