PostNormal Times

0:00: Host Andrew Vosko welcomes guest Gloria González-Morales, associate professor of psychology in the Division of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University.

1:41: Gloria describes how she became interested in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies. 

5:46: Gloria responds to Andrew’s question as to how she negotiated the culture of the discipline of psychology with her desire to be transdisciplinary. Gloria uses the example of Pablo Picasso as someone who first had to master a certain domain and area of expertise before innovating.

9:09: Andrew talks about the “trans-” prefix in three ways: transcending, transforming, and transgressing. Andrew relates disciplinary knowledge to the way he learned other languages. 

12:40: Gloria discusses the importance of travel in her graduate education and work. 

14:54: Andrew asks Gloria to compare collaboration in the United States with her international experiences. 

17:00: Andrew and Gloria discuss some of the challenges of doing collaborative work in a disciplinary structure. 

19:26: Andrew and Gloria consider the million-dollar question: how to transform the university.

21:13: Gloria considers innovation in universities from the perspective of behavioral organization.

25:54: Andrew and Gloria discuss problems with the perceived separation between academia and the “real world.”

31:51:  Andrew talks about how the trend toward specialization has created the need to reassess foundations, foundational learning, and foundational principles. Gloria elaborates on the problems that specialization creates for inclusivity.

34:47: In response to Gloria, Andrew describes a gap in the thinking on inclusivity.

37:10: Gloria describes a student’s dissertation on the distinction between inclusion and belonging. 

39:58: Andrew and Gloria exchange ideas on how to approach and cultivate allyship.

42:00: Andrew raises the conflict between the relational and transactional approaches.

44:17: Gloria discusses another student’s dissertation on high-quality connections as opposed to the concept of social exchange.

51:00: Andrew talks about different versions of transdisciplinarity as challenges to the traditional scholarly life.

0:00: Host Andrew Vosko welcomes Dionne Bensonsmith, adjunct assistant professor of applied gender studies at Claremont Graduate University and visiting professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

1:20: Dionne describes her work with the Reproductive Justice Community Institutional Review Board and Mothers on the Frontline, a nonprofit organization focused on children’s mental health.

4:00: Dionne discusses the challenge of reconciling disciplinary rules and requirements in a PhD program with her own needs. 

5:48: Andrew talks about identity and professional roles and the need for agility to prepare oneself for multiple jobs and types of jobs in the future.

7:00: Dionne talks about working with new graduate students on identifying their “superpower.”

9:42: Dionne talks about her academic journey as, at first, a student-athlete. 

11:58: Dionne talks about her pivot from political science into philosophy and navigating various disciplinary boundaries. 

15:00: Dionne talks about her pivot to more personally motivated research.

16:11: Dionne talks about how finding a spot in gender studies (an inherently interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field) allowed her to do research and teaching that was sustainable for her and her family. 

18:00: Andrew describes the typical arc—inception to ossification—of a discipline.

19:30: Andrew talks about balancing the institutionalization of a field and dynamic growth. 

21:00: Andrew talks about navigating one’s identity in one’s work and the opportunities in opening up new disciplinary spaces. 

23:00: Dionne talks about deploying philosophy and philosophical frameworks in the contexts of her work with nonprofits focused on children’s mental health. 

25:00: Andrew talks about transdisciplinary work in contrast to the “standing on the shoulders of giants” mode of thought. 

27:00: Dionne talks about her entry into transdisciplinary thought via the notion of intersectionality.

30:00: Andrew describes what he calls “disciplinary awareness,” that is, the ability to assess a discipline from a sociological perspective.

32:00: Dionne elaborates on Andrew’s comments on the importance of reflexivity and bridge-building.

36:00: Andrew and Dionne discuss the value of applied knowledge.

37:53: Dionne describes her experience teaching in the Applied Gender Studies program. She talks about the classroom as a transitional place to develop theories toward practical ends.

44:05: Andrew talks about an important skill set for the future—that of the translator. 

47:52: Dionne describes an applied gender studies class. 

50:00: Dionne talks about humanities students encountering the issues of positionality and ethics in their research. 

52:00: Andrew segues to the concept of allyship.

Host Andrew Vosko welcomes this episode’s guest, David Maggs, Fellow on Arts and Society at the Metcalf Institute, a Toronto-based institution focused on the performing arts, climate, and poverty reduction.

Maggs describes his background at foundations in Canada and Europe, including the Institute for Advanced Studies and Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany, and the trail back to the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia.

Vosko directs the conversation toward the notion of transformative change. Maggs describes growing up in Newfoundland and experiencing the cod moratorium in the 1990s, the collapse of the cod fishing industry, the primary industry for the region. He observes how the historical moment of living through the collapse of a culture has informed him in a variety of different ways.

From this example of a “world collapse,” Vosko extracts transdisciplinary notions including “situated knowledge” and “lived experience,” as well as the challenge to metaphysics.

Maggs discusses how “world collapse” became more directly biographical in his experience as a professional classical pianist, when, in 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (Canada’s equivalent of the BBC) suddenly ended its subsidy of classical music.

Maggs responds to Vosko’s observations about how such crises lead to various choices, including whether to join a new world, create a new world, or adapt oneself to fit into the changing world. 

Vosko and Maggs discuss the emergent nature and capacity for adapting to different crises via personal transformation and reinvention. 

Maggs discusses how he went from the art space to the world of sustainability.

Vosko relates the notion of world collapse to his own experience growing up in Detroit in the shadow of the American automobile industry crisis and how it related to a “systems understanding” of the world.

Maggs details the integration of his arts experience into the study and practice of sustainability. 

Vosko connects Maggs’ move to the need many have to study things that reflect their values, as well as the potential clash – especially in highly polarized times – with the values of an institution, organization, political movement, or even the discipline itself.

Maggs details the integration of art and sustainability science.

Noting that he works in two worlds – arts and academia – Maggs expresses concern over the decline in the appetite and capacity for disagreement, and how students are currently under great pressure to conform ideologically and expressively.

Vosko and Maggs discuss the capacity to frame questions in generative ways to circumvent dogmatism.

Vosko discusses how we are dealing with the residue of modernist philosophy that assumes there are “correct” answers to complex problems, versus emergent ways of thinking.

Maggs likens the challenges of the early years working in the arts and sustainability to being a “llama on a cow farm.” Since that time, he observes, there has been an explosion of interest in the role of the arts in addressing complex problems.

Maggs identifies the significant factors in moving the needle on sustainability. What exactly is transformative change and how does it happen? 

Maggs talks about what has been missing from the sustainability equation: the notion of being. 

Maggs relates the transformative change in Canada to the emergence over the last two decades of indigenous identity among the constituency that had experienced the cod moratorium.

Host Andrew Vosko, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at Claremont Graduate University, welcomes Gwen Garrison, a faculty member in the School of Educational Studies.

Garrison describes the characteristics that define her academic path and life journey, including the search for truth and the passion for storytelling – from English literature to data visualization. She also describes her doctorate work at Claremont which included quantitative and qualitative methods, now called mixed methods – in other words, a transdisciplinary approach.

Vosko describes his own first steps in understanding different modes of meaning-making as an undergraduate Asian language and literature major.

Understanding as a woman the need for advanced degrees to contribute at an executive level, Garrison describes her journey from CGU to Washington DC, how she became part of several large educational associations, and how she now works as a consultant to large national and international organizations.

She describes the need to understand administrative data; becoming conversant in economics, political science, sociology, and other disciplines; and opening herself to other ways of seeing.

She shares how an encounter with a grandfather clock as a teen gave her a love of challenges as well as an appreciation for the value of humility.

Vosko shares his own experience with “epistemic humility” through inter-professionalism and the training of medical students.

He asks Garrison about her theological training and the notion of developing and integrating different types of knowledge.

Responding to the question of how the data field has evolved over the last decades, Garrison describes working with different types of data.

They discuss the challenge of managing change and the "arc of innovation".

Vosko and Garrison discuss the need for multiple modes of reception and educational work as co-creation.

Host Andrew Vosko welcomes this episode’s guest, Jeremy Hunter, associate professor at CGU’s Drucker School of Management, and executive director and founder of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute.

Jeremy summarizes his work at the Institute—and experience in over 20 years of teaching—as helping leaders evolve in a world that is continually changing. 

Andrew raises the notion of growth through challenge. Jeremy shares his personal challenge in dealing with a diagnosis of a terminal illness at 20. He describes how he refocused his life and channeled his attention in directions that were life-giving, which led him into a range of experiences and interests, from East Asian studies to public policy and urban planning to human development and working with the University of Chicago, and then eventually to Claremont in 1999. 

Jeremy discusses his recent work, helping people negotiate transitions. He finds human evolution to be the heart of the matter. Andrew connects this to aspects of his home field, neuroscience and the topic of neuroplasticity. 

Andrew talks about transdisciplinary scholars who have stressed teaching people how to identify their ontological, axiological, and epistemological spaces in order to work collaboratively.

Jeremy relates the question of common cause to having a core stance of generosity, finding that we have become far too good at reactivity, such that defensiveness has become the basic posture of conversation in the United States.

Andrew and Jeremy discuss different modes of knowledge, including emotional knowledge, that have been ignored by the traditional models of disciplinary scholarship.

Jeremy shares his thoughts on work as the ideal training ground for learning, using the everyday challenges of life as opportunities for growth, and the importance of curiosity.

They discuss the fundamental weakness of a critical orientation towards the world, as having produced a destructive mindset, which has degraded the value of some scholarship.

They discuss transdisciplinarity as an attitude toward the world, and the rigorous integration of multiple modes of knowledge.

What does it mean to become a transdisciplinarian?  It's a journey about building bridges, crossing boundaries, and those important moments in our lives when we can either choose to compartmentalize or connect.

Shamini Dias talks with Andrew Vosko about growing up in a Catholic-Buddhist-Muslim culture in Malaysia and being educated at the National University of Singapore, which combined the arts and social sciences in one faculty. Her academic background includes education in anthropological linguistics, semiotics, and early modern literature, while her artistic endeavors included mime, theater, and improvisation as well as writing, painting, and collage.

An expert in pedagogy from K-12 to university and graduate school, Shamini talks about the sharp drop-off of artistic identities in grade school: By the sixth grade, once enthusiastic youngsters are embarrassed to say they are artists and have grown fearful of play and risk-taking. Her work in arts integration then involves bringing art, all kinds of arts—theater, drama, painting, collage—into, for example, the science classroom. 

Andrew and Shamini consider the question of “play as privilege" and discuss multiple approaches to transdisciplinarity, including that being explored at CGU, focused on questions of equity and justice. 

Integration is finding common ground, or what Basarab Nicolescu called the “included middle.” 

Andrew notes that the “trans” in transdisciplinary stands for three things: transcending a discipline, transforming oneself, and transgressing orthodoxy.

Andrew and Shamini consider the future of the academy and the potential of transdisciplinary thought to transform higher education – to become, perhaps, the new liberal arts for the 21st century.