Seizing the moment: Innovation as a call to action

Sally Kitch and Diana Ayton-Shenker

The idea of “futurecasting” requires an implicit integration of science, technology, the humanities and arts in order to best visualize where our society may be headed. As important as technological applications may be, (where would we be without the COVID-19 vaccine?) this approach is incomplete. Getting to the root cause of global challenges and existential threats requires probing questions and deep dives beyond the quick fix of technical problem-solving alone.

While effective and promising technological advances already exist to address many environmental and health problems, puzzling questions remain. Why have humans allowed our planetary home to reach its current degraded state? Why aren’t environmental protection technologies more widely supported and implemented? Who bears the brunt of environmental hazards and why? How is environmental injustice related to racial injustice? How is the sexual violence against women that continues unabated related to the ongoing history of climate change denial? What role might social justice issues play in some people’s refusal to take a COVID-19 vaccine? What role might climate change denial play in anti-vaxxers’ refusal to accept vaccine science, and vice versa? How do attitudes toward the planet reflect underlying racial hatred and misogyny in the U.S.? How might those attitudes be changed?

For seven years in a row, Arizona State University has ranked #1 for innovation, according to U.S. News & World Report. More than a distinction, this designation is a call to action. It inspires the entire ASU community, including its network of partners beyond our campus boundaries, to continuously advance the university’s educational and research capacities – now and well into the future – so that we, as a global society, may innovate and inform action toward a better, more just and sustainable world. We are inspired by the challenge to innovate, especially when facing an alarming syndemic – defined by Merrill Singer in the 1990s as the biological and sociological interactions that diagnose and define conditions – of intersecting crises as we do today: the COVID-19 pandemic; systemic racial injustice and violence; growing economic inequity; and cascading environmental catastrophes.

ASU, as well as higher education in general, must assume its responsibility to impact the world in tangible, enduring ways. Seize the Moment, a new humanities and arts-based collaboration between the Humanities Lab, ASU-Leonardo and the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, is designed to help answer that call. The aim is to find concrete and catalytic ways to address the current multi-part syndemic of threats to human flourishing, social equity and planetary well-being that the COVID-19 pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated.

Solutions to these challenges cannot be achieved by a single approach or discipline. Seize the Moment encourages new, sometimes radical collaborations across the arts, humanities, scientific and technological disciplines that rarely interact on university campuses or among political leaders or policymakers. This approach is exemplified by the project’s major ASU partners — the Humanities Lab, Leonardo/ISAST (the International Society of Arts, Sciences, and Technology) and the Global Futures Laboratory. Seize the Moment is predicated on the idea that cross-disciplinary collaborations create the new vocabularies, exploratory lenses and innovative world views and methodologies required to address the complex, intersecting challenges of this unprecedented time.

Seize the Moment’s collaborative studentfaculty teams take up compelling questions, which are too seldom considered together. Teams bring the insights and wisdom of diverse training and experience to bear on developing integrated strategies that are critical to longterm future-building. Seize the Moment projects may address straightforward symptoms, like sea level rise or COVID-19 deaths, as well as underlying quandaries, like the human tendency to harbor prejudices, succumb to misinformation, struggle with conflicting values, resort to denial, confuse fact and fiction, and blur distinctions between truth and lies. Seeing and addressing such root causes of complex challenges requires all the tools in the academic toolbox, often beginning with the cultural insights of the humanities and the social and emotional impact of the arts.

At the core of Seize the Moment are the team-taught, interdisciplinary, problem-focused Humanities Labs and Leonardo Labs for undergraduate and graduate students. These labs recognize the importance of the humanities and arts as partners with other fields for achieving the deep investigation required for resolving humanity’s most intractable and complex challenges. Faculty teams represent humanities disciplines and programs — such as literature, history, philosophy, and gender and racial studies — and science, social science, engineering and arts disciplines from around the university. All labs produce impact outcomes that address their social challenges through action, from policy documents and public engagement events to podcasts, community dialogues and art projects.

The unique format of the Humanities Lab provides a platform for innovative learning and research experiences for faculty and students that align with ASU’s mission and aspirations to address future-focused themes and solutions — needs such as sustainable fashion, epidemic emergences, deconstructing race, indigenizing food systems and a range of issues pertaining to food, health and climate change.

Leonardo’s creativity lens, scholarship and practice provide compelling research resources and platforms from its global network, programs and publications to complement the ASU and Global Futures expertise. Team-taught, online Leonardo Labs provide a transdisciplinary arts, science and technology framework to challenges such as humanizing digital culture, navigating chaos, embodied healing, and art-science responses to COVID-19. Each lab cultivates the 5 C’s of core creative competencies: creative communication, collaboration, content generation, critique and contemplation. By inaugurating this series of online Leonardo Labs, Seize the Moment recognizes artists as critical drivers of social change, leading the way in how to make sense of the world, shape futures and forge meaning. Seizing this particular moment challenges societies everywhere to change the way they do business. Our world demands novel approaches to defining and resolving intractable problems that may seem to defy even the possibility of solution. By engaging student-faculty teams in addressing those problems without the limits of discipline or major, Seize the Moment models intergenerational action for use beyond university walls. This interaction and engagement is what fuels the level of innovation, both in product and in thought, necessary to address current and future challenges.

Sally Kitch is University and Regents Professor of womens and gender studies, and founding director of the Institute for Humanities Research and of the Humanities Lab at ASU.

Diana Ayton-Shenker is the executive director of Leonardo’s partnership with ASU, where she is professor of practice jointly appointed with the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering.