Weeds in the Cracks, Interdisciplinarity and Music Technology in Higher Education

This article discusses how we can better facilitate interdisciplinarity in our Higher Education systems, specifically looking at “Music Technology” or “Computer Music”, and considering the term in its widest meaning. It reflects on current practices for the future, focussing on interdisciplinarity as such, and the contextualised interdisciplinary challenges relevant specifically for the subjects of music technology

EDI, “Whiteness” and Researcher Careers (Extended Abstract)

As of January 2022, there were only 38 Black female professors in UK Universities (Arday, 2022), representing 0.16% of all UK professors. This is in contrast to 165 black professors (0.7% of all professors), and to 6,980 female professors (39.6% of all professors) from a total of 23,525 professors in the UK (HESA, 2023). This paper will be presenting various debates of recent years around academic diversity, coloniality and “whiteness” in UK Higher Education and reflect specifically on what this means within a Research Culture / REF context. It will present some of the critical underpinnings, problematise our mainstreamed EDI-contextualised approach and focus on what implications this has for supporting researcher career progression at the professorial level. If “invisible and uncontested whiteness moulds the social-cultural and intellectual imaginaries within higher education (…), suppressing alternative ways of perceiving the world” (eds. T. Welikala & C. Boehm, 2023) then it will and demonstrably has already affected our progression into more diverse, socially just, academic research cultures. This presentation offers a lot of avenues for delving deeper into this subject, provides an example of how “whiteness” has affected interdisciplinary career progression, and puts forward some strategies for moving forward

A brittle discipline: Music Technology and Third Culture Thinking

Five years ago I wrote an introductory article for a journal, in which I considered the state of music technology degrees in our universities in the UK. Having seen where higher education (HE) policy has taken us, and having had the fortunate opportunity to be heavily involved in shaping genuinely interdisciplinary provision that considers interdisciplinarity with all its warts and perks , I thought it time to consider the implications of HE policy on interdisciplinary subject areas, to explore specifically the gaps that I identified five years ago and to consider how the current climate is affecting them. This article will cover the ever-widening disciplinary gaps that are appearing in HE and focuses specifically on those gaps that are substantially affecting various interdisciplinary areas of learning and research in HE. It uses music technology as an example case study. Even the process of placing of this article into an academic journal demonstrates the existing challenges; in its interdisciplinary nature its eligibility to feature in a subject-specific periodical might be questioned despite its high relevance for it. The article also attempts to demonstrate models that support interdisciplinary teaching and research, which hopefully are able to mind and furthermore mend various existent gaps. With any luck it will disrupt some of our pre-postmodern concepts of what a university is, to be superseded by a more postmodern acceptance of society as constructivist learning communities, and universities as enablers of these communities. In this exploration, I follow a trajectory, from exploring to mending the gaps, and then finally to discussing in detail a specific methodology that represents one way forward out of the interdisciplinary quagmire

Plants, people, and place: complex, mutualistic, and co-evolving global patterns through time

My thesis studies and analyses the suite of distinctive plant taxa which persist in small patches of vegetation growing in close association with archaeological habitation sites in the southern Cape, South Africa. The unexpected correlation and overlap between botanical taxa collected at 75 site complexes, and ethnobotanical data collected in collaboration with modern Khoi-San communities in the same area, is explored and interrogated. Although sparse, reports of the same suite of taxa recovered from archaeological excavations in the Cape provinces provides depth of time to the study, linking the past to the present. The three-way correlation of a suite of plants closely associated with humans and habitation sites through time, allows for triangulation of the data in order to validate and cross verify the results using more than one frame of reference. Both the plants and the knowledge about their uses have persisted in spite of historical attrition, and alienation of land and language, suffered by the Khoi-San over the past 300 years. Drawing on a large body of primary and secondary data, and using an interdisciplinary, abductive and pragmatic mixed methods approach, a pattern can be traced throughout Africa and globally. Regression analysis strongly indicates that the most ubiquitous taxa were selected for a purpose and are not randomly present in association with humans. Botanical, anthropological, and archaeological studies seldom focus on the inter-connectedness of people and plants at the sites they inhabited. Very little research into modern vegetation in close association with the sites has been undertaken, and vegetation mapping has not captured the occurrence of these site-specific small vegetation patches recorded during my surveys. The topographically, geologically, and vegetatively complex and varied southern Cape, and greater Cape area, is extremely rich in archaeological sites and history. This study suggests that the value of site-specific plant taxa to humans throughout the aeons of pre-agricultural history, persists into the present. Due to tolerance of a broad range of climatic and environmental variables, there is value in the study of these ancient and neglected useful plants in the face of climate change. That this vegetation is so closely associated with archaeological sites of cultural and historic importance confers an urgency to recognising the existence and significance of the distinctive and possibly anthropogenic vegetation surrounding the sites

The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox; Protection and Development of the Dutch Archeological-Historical Landscape and its European Dimension

To what extent can we know past and mainly invisible landscapes, and how we can use this still hidden knowledge for actual sustainable management of landscape’s cultural and historical values. It has also been acknowledged that heritage management is increasingly about ‘the management of future change rather than simply protection’. This presents us with a paradox: to preserve our historic environment, we have to collaborate with those who wish to transform it and, in order to apply our expert knowledge, we have to make it suitable for policy and society. The answer presented by the Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape programme (pdl/bbo) is an integrative landscape approach which applies inter- and transdisciplinarity, establishing links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning, and between research and policy. This is supported by two unifying concepts: ‘biography of landscape’ and ‘action research’. This approach focuses upon the interaction between knowledge, policy and an imagination centered on the public. The European perspective makes us aware of the resourcefulness of the diversity of landscapes, of social and institutional structures, of various sorts of problems, approaches and ways forward. In addition, two related issues stand out: the management of knowledge creation for landscape research and management, and the prospects for the near future. Underlying them is the imperative that we learn from the past ‘through landscape’

Plants, people, and place: complex, mutualistic, and co-evolving global patterns through time

My thesis studies and analyses the suite of distinctive plant taxa which persist in small patches of vegetation growing in close association with archaeological habitation sites in the southern Cape, South Africa. The unexpected correlation and overlap between botanical taxa collected at 75 site complexes, and ethnobotanical data collected in collaboration with modern Khoi-San communities in the same area, is explored and interrogated. Although sparse, reports of the same suite of taxa recovered from archaeological excavations in the Cape provinces provides depth of time to the study, linking the past to the present. The three-way correlation of a suite of plants closely associated with humans and habitation sites through time, allows for triangulation of the data in order to validate and cross verify the results using more than one frame of reference. Both the plants and the knowledge about their uses have persisted in spite of historical attrition, and alienation of land and language, suffered by the Khoi-San over the past 300 years. Drawing on a large body of primary and secondary data, and using an interdisciplinary, abductive and pragmatic mixed methods approach, a pattern can be traced throughout Africa and globally. Regression analysis strongly indicates that the most ubiquitous taxa were selected for a purpose and are not randomly present in association with humans. Botanical, anthropological, and archaeological studies seldom focus on the inter-connectedness of people and plants at the sites they inhabited. Very little research into modern vegetation in close association with the sites has been undertaken, and vegetation mapping has not captured the occurrence of these site-specific small vegetation patches recorded during my surveys. The topographically, geologically, and vegetatively complex and varied southern Cape, and greater Cape area, is extremely rich in archaeological sites and history. This study suggests that the value of site-specific plant taxa to humans throughout the aeons of pre-agricultural history, persists into the present. Due to tolerance of a broad range of climatic and environmental variables, there is value in the study of these ancient and neglected useful plants in the face of climate change. That this vegetation is so closely associated with archaeological sites of cultural and historic importance confers an urgency to recognising the existence and significance of the distinctive and possibly anthropogenic vegetation surrounding the sites

Land whisperings and a poetics of newplace and birthplace

The creative component of this doctoral submission, entitled Land Whisperings, comprises a selection of seventy-five poems, ten short stories and a novella. The connecting theme of this body of work is the emphasis on the landscapes of three continents: Australia, my birthplace, Italy, my wife Rita\u27s birthplace, and China, where I have visited and taught for many years. These locations have also been the subject of substantial research and field experience over the past four years. Since I am an Australian, there is a natural predominance of Australian settings for the poetry and short stories. The selected creative works also demonstrate differences between writing about a birth land as place, opposed to foreign landscapes and cultures that have been \u27adopted\u27

Imperfections

This open access book synthesizes the swiftly growing critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational framework of imperfection studies. In recent years, the trend to present the notion of imperfection as a plus rather than a problem has resonated across a range of social and creative disciplines and a wealth of world localities. As digital tools allow media users to share ever more suave selfies and success stories, psychologists promote 'the gifts of imperfections' and point to perfectionism as a catalyst for rising depression and burnout complaints and suicide rates among millennials. As sound technologies increasingly permit musicians to 'smoothen' their work, composers increasingly praise glitches, noise, and cracks. As genetic engineering upgrades with swift speed, philosophers, marketeers, and physicians plea 'against perfection' and supermarkets successfully advertise 'perfectly imperfect' vegetables. Meanwhile, cultural analysts point at skewed perspectives, blurry images, and other 'deliberate imperfections' in new and historical cinema, painting, photography, music, and literature. While these and other experts applaud imperfection, scholars in fields ranging from disability studies to tourism critically interrogate a trend to fetishize imperfection and poverty. They rightfully warn against projecting privileged (and, often, emphatically western-biased) feel-good stories onto the less privileged, the distorted, and the frail. The editors unite the different strands in imperfection thinking across various disciplines tools. In fourteen chapters by experts from different world localities, they offer scholars and students more historically grounded and more critically informed conceptualizations of the imperfect. This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com