2009
Jane Prophet
acclaimed exhibition. The rewards for cutting edge research via peer-reviewed papers and exhibitions impact positively on a researcher practitioner’s sense of self-esteem and perceived status amongst their peers (here I use the term ‘peer’ in it’s most common form, to mean someone belonging to the same societal [academic discipline] group especially based on age, grade, or status.8) This is not simply a matter of esteem or ego, a failure to publish in the ‘correct’ peer-reviewed journals (or not exhibiting in the equivalent galleries or museums) can lead to more than embarrassment, it can impact job status in academia and the loss of competitively-won commissions and sales for artists. If a publishing vehicle is found it may well be in second-tier journals or exhibition venues. For a discipline to take collaborative interdisciplinary work seriously the research needs to be recognised via dissemination (publication or exhibition) through journals/galleries that are highly regarded by each field. This appears to be a sweeping statement, but anecdotal evidence (gathered by questioning friends from the sciences and the arts over a number of years) shows that ‘specialist’ science publications rarely print papers co-authored with writers from other disciplines. In visual arts, and in the sciences, curators and editors often baulk at co-authors or exhibitors being given equal billing should they be from another discipline. Scientists are often asked to reference an artist collaborator in the body of ‘their’ paper, rather than naming them as a co-author; artists are under pressure to be named as ‘the artist’ and their collaborators differentiated by the term ‘with the scientist’. Interdisciplinary collaborations where one partner is an artist are notoriously difficult to fund and exhibit, commissioning bodies, cu162
rators and venues struggle to find a balance between ‘explaining’ the science in the work (or making the artwork explain the science) and letting the collaborative outcomes speak for themselves. Writing an expanded version of his 2005 article (originally commissioned for Nature Online) the bioinformatics researcher, Christopher Lee, articulates the problem of not easily finding an audience for interdisciplinary research outcomes: “[t]he challenges of interdisciplinary publishing are not limited simply to problems of peer review (the resistance of the establishment). Equally important is the problem of finding an audience. Since existing journals follow the boundaries of existing disciplines, there is no journal that will reach the appropriate audience for an interdisciplinary paper. Typically such an audience consists of a subset of people from many fields, who are interested in the specific intersection of fields that the paper brings together.”9 So, obstacles to publishing/exhibiting are significant, and knowing of these difficulties in advance contributes to some potentially exciting collaborations not getting off the ground. This is a vicious circle – if interdisciplinary collaboration is not valued by the ‘arbiters of taste’ then many potential collaborators will not begin to engage in such research, resulting in fewer challenges to the status quo, and less transforming of discreet disciplines. As noted by researchers working across statistics and physical oceanography, “Effectively communicating the results of successful collaborative research—and thereby increasing understanding of its value in addressing complex problems—includes having the results published in journals that are well regarded in the relevant disciplines.”10
CELL11, was a collaborative project (20012005) where the team comprised a medical scientist, an artist (me), a mathematician, a computer scientist and a curator. The collaboration explored how research into adult stem cells is having to re-address the complexity of human biology. Our experience made it clear that co-authoring with an artist in the science journals might weaken or damage a scientist’s reputation as an ‘expert’. Embarrassed if we do, shamed if we don’t Now that I understand more about what makes me blush, and what differentiates embarrassment from shame (see the Glossary) I am not so quick to avoid it or see it as a purely negative emotion. In keeping with the etymology of the word, I feel that deep embarrassment can become an obstacle to collaborative interdisciplinary research, but it is one that can be overcome. Moreover, blushing may be useful, a physical signal that I am out of my comfort zone, entering an area where I am vulnerable to failure. If this is an attribute of such collaboration, then rather than avoiding it, I should embrace embarrassment. The rush of blood to my cheeks is telling me I am on the right track. As John Keats put it, “There’s a blush for won’t, and a blush for shan’t, and a blush for having done it: There’s a blush for thought and a blush for naught, and a blush for just begun it.”12
Glossary (from wikipedia) Embarrassment is an emotional state experienced upon having a socially or professionally unacceptable act or condition witnessed by or
revealed to others. Usually some amount of loss of honour or dignity is involved, but how much and the type depends on the embarrassing situation. It is similar to shame, except that shame may be experienced for an act known only to oneself. Also, embarrassment usually carries the connotation of being caused by an act that is merely socially unacceptable, rather than morally wrong. Shame: Nineteenth century scientist Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, described shame affect as consisting of blushing, confusion of mind, downward cast eyes, slack posture, and lowered head, and he noted observations of shame affect in human populations worldwide. Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realises or believes - whether justified or not - that he or she has violated a moral standard, and is responsible for that violation.[1] It is closely related to the concept of remorse. In psychology, as well as in ordinary language, guilt is an affective state in which one experiences conflict at having done something that one believes one should not have done (or conversely, having not done something one believes one should have done). It gives rise to a feeling which does not go away easily, driven by ‘conscience’. 1. Domeena Renshaw, MD, professor of psychiatry at Loyola University in Chicago, quoted in The Psychology of Embarrassment by Charles Downey http://www.swedish.org/17005.cfm 2. Paralelo convenors’ introductory email of 6 February 2009 3. Measure your ecological footprint http://www.myfootprint.org/en/ about_the_quiz/what_it_measures/ 4. http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/embarrassment 5. http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Embarrassment 6. White, David, 2003. Proposing a Rationalist Discourse: Four practitioner stories, in Discourse, power and resistance: challenging the rhetoric of contemporary. Eds. Jerome Satterthwaite, Elizabeth Atkinson, Ken Gale 7. Shame and Guilt, 2002 June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing, Guilford Press 8. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peer 9. Original paper http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05034.html. Expanded version http://thinking.bioinformatics.ucla.edu/2009/06/01/a-new-model-for-interdisciplinarypeer-review/ 10. Statistics and Physical Oceanography, 1993. Panel on Statistics and Oceanography, Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, Board on Mathematical Sciences, National Research Council. http:// www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9028 11. CELL is a collaborative project that investigates stem cell research. The collaboration explored how research into adult stem cells is having to re-address the complexity of human biology. Human cells have been traditionally thought of as behaving in predictable ways. Stem cells can be described as the ‘master’ cells whose off-spring are the more specialised, but limited, cells that make up most of the human body. But current research suggests that at a cellular level the human body behaves in less obvious ways than has been imagined and that adult stem cell activity, which has recently become the focus of widespread attention, may be harder to define, and observe, than previously expected. As part of the collaboration, medical scientist Dr Neil Theise, a world leader into adult stem cell research, based in New York, has been working together with Jane Prophet, mathematician Mark d’Inverno, computer scientist Rob Saunders and curator Peter Ride, who instigated the project, from the University of Westminster. One aim has been to find new ways of visualising the new and contentious theories of stem cell behaviour, and to find ways to feed the visualisation back into the scientific research so that it can be a conceptual tool in the laboratory practice. Another has been to generate a range of artistic outcomes that are under-pinned by the emerging understanding of cellular activity. Funded with a Wellcome Trust sciart Award (2002) and a BioTech Award from Future Physical (2002). With support from CARTE, University of Westminster. http://www.janeprophet.com/cell.html http://www.interdisciplinary.co.uk/content/default.html 12. John Keats. O Blush Not So! Barry Kort, 2005. Cognition, Affect and Learning. Conference paper. http://knol.google.com/k/barry-kort/cognition-affect-andlearning/3iyoslgwsp412/2#
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