Writing in and across Disciplines
THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY TURN: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN ACADEMIC WRITING
Stella Harvey¹, Paul Stocks²
¹Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom ²Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom
The emergence of transdisciplinarity within arts, humanities and social sciences degree programmes has promoted a reconfiguration of traditional disciplinary boundaries into more hybrid forms, entailing an unsettling of traditional academic written genres with differing ontologies and epistemologies, undoing such dichotomies as academic/vocational, theoretical/practical . This process has the further effect of placing creativity at the core of academic writing practices, resulting in new forms of written assessment very different from traditional academic writing genres. This presentation reports on two examples of transdisciplinary writing assignments undertaken at Goldsmiths, University of London. The first, required by a culture industriesrelated postgraduate programme, is an ‘academic business plan’ involving a critical and creative rethinking of a standard business genre. Our second example, undertaken by Graduate Diploma students following a lecture module on Media Arts, is an assignment combining creative media practice with reflective writing. In both cases, drawing on qualitative data, we will discuss the challenges second language students face in navigating the demands of an assignment for which there is no template, and whose emphasis on creativity makes them inherently precarious. As these types of assignments become more widespread, it seems important for academic writing pedagogy to engage with creativity and precariousness. References
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