London Interdisciplinary School ©2019
In 2017, researchers coined the term “eco-anxiety” in response to the rise in severe anxiety related to our relationship with the environment. Issues surrounding big data, data protection and privacy may lead to a similar anxiety disorder evolving, and eventually being established, in the near future.
Some of the Explore ID students took a look into intensive farming and its effect on biodiversity.
Through June and July this year, I participated in the online learning experience ‘Explore ID: COVID-19, Complex Problems, and Interdisciplinarity’. This course delivered by LIS brought together 53 students from around the world, applying an interdisciplinary approach to learn about and respond to some of the challenges the world faces due to the pandemic.
Traditional education at all levels is being threatened by COVID-19. Both in the short- and long-term, it will need to be reinvented . This is a crucial complex problem for society, one that will require an interdisciplinary approach to understand and address.
From Black Lives Matter to the Hong Kong Protests, 2020 will go down in history as a banner year for social movements. But the practice of activism, described as “the use of direct and noticeable action to achieve results of a political or social nature”, has been a fundamental component of the history of humanity.
For five weeks over June and July, we ran an intensive short course exploring the relationship between COVID-19 and interdisciplinarity. Participants were invited to write a blog post relating to the work they’d done during Explore ID, and, in what follows we present one such blog.
Goal 11 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals refers explicitly to ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’. It has ten targets, which include ensuring access to safe and affordable housing and basic services, expanding public transport, providing inclusive and accessible green spaces and public spaces, and reducing the environmental impact of cities.
Carl walks us through different ‘cultures’: academia vs the so-called real-world; science vs arts… How do these cultural dialogues evolve? And what impact does this have on society?
Ed and some of the LIS Ambassadors in our learning community have a discussion on interdisciplinarity. What does it mean to be inter-disciplinary? Cross-disciplinary? Post-disciplinary? Multi-disciplinary? Trans-disciplinary?
A big risk of talking about “problems” is that we leap to try to focus on “solutions” before we understand what the problems are and how they might be related.