Summary of the Project
"Dialogues Between Two Cultures" is a 2002/3 academic year lecture and
seminar series made possible thanks to a Focus Grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities awarded in August 2002 to Erik Fisher, Humanities Advisor to
the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado,
Boulder (UCB). The grant, along with matching funds from additional sponsors,
supports a multidisciplinary group of faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences
and the College of Engineering and Applied Science at UCB to engage in a nine-month
exploration of the concept and place of dialogue as a means to understand and
overcome the divisions between the two cultures of science and the humanities.
Participants will study various instances of dialogue (broadly understood) and,
with the aid of visiting scholars who are familiar with collaborative programs
in science and the humanities, will practice dialogue amongst each other in monthly
seminars, post-lecture discussion periods, and in online forums.
The purpose of the "Dialogues" program is to develop an intellectual culture and social framework that inspires and encourages multidisciplinary collaborations, primarily for the purpose of growing what is presently a budding program in the humanistic study of science and technology called the Technology and Culture Curriculum Initiative. Course offerings would be intended for equal numbers of students from the "two cultures" and would be highly interactive - employing dialogue much in the same way the faculty group will work together in shared inquiry. At issue is the "intellectual divide" that separates our students, faculty, and citizens from one another, effectively isolating pockets of knowledge and halting the spread of interdisciplinary paradigms and models of collaboration.
Topics include "The Science Wars," "Art and Technology," "Philosophy and Mathematics," and "Science and Politics" among others. The results and recommendations of the lecture and seminar series will be documented in four separate reports, designed to inform the targeting of a national grant proposal that seeks to institute a campus wide program that can be feasibly exported to other institutions.
Overview and Objectives
The "Dialogues" project is designed to allow a cross-college, multidisciplinary
faculty group to both study and practice cross-disciplinary exchanges between
faculty trained in science, engineering, and mathematics on the one hand, and
the arts, humanities, and social sciences, on the other.
Each month, a core group of participants from the College of Arts and Sciences,
the College of Engineering and Applied Science, and the College of Architecture
and Planning meet on consecutive days to read and reflect on a stimulating collection
of humanistic and sociological texts that deal with various relationships between
what can be termed the "two cultures" of science and the humanities.
This core faculty group will be joined by a number of visiting scholars who
will shed light on how their own work with the "two cultures" pertains
to the topics under consideration and the practical objectives we have for curricular
reform.
In between these meetings, faculty are able to monitor and exchange ideas and respond to specific questions electronically and by means of a public online forum. Visiting scholars will be encouraged to take part in this form of the conversation over the course of the project.
Readings and presentations will all focus on some aspect of "dialogue" - whether understood as a conversation, collaboration, clash, interaction, interrelation, or the like - about or between the two cultures. Visiting scholars will present a public lecture about their work in established and innovative cross-disciplinary settings, emphasizing collaborative activities they are involved with. Public lectures will be followed by an additional 40 minutes for questions and discussion. The next day, the visiting scholar will lead the seminar participants in an intellectually rigorous two-hour sustained discussion. Part of the focus of each seminar will be to reflect on what participants would want undergraduate students to get out of a hypothetical seminar on a similar topic or reading, and on how this might be achieved through classroom discussion.
The selection of texts, the presence of visiting scholars, and the resulting conversations are all intended to facilitate a better understanding of the intellectual and cultural divides that can work against - but can also enable - fruitful collaborations among humanists, social and natural scientists, and engineers. Such understanding, and the dialectical process that is intended to lead us there, is essential to the kind of meaningful and sustained discourse we want to encourage on our campus.
Our goal is to lay an intellectual and cultural foundation at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) that will in turn lead to continued multidisciplinary collaborations and transdisciplinary investigations, particularly in the classroom. We thereby intend to simulate precisely what we desire our students to experience in a projected suite of new and revised undergraduate seminar courses that bring students of both colleges together to engage in the humanistic study of science and technology.
Technology and Culture Curriculum Initiative
Our work together in laying this foundation will build on existing and innovative
efforts to improve relations between the participating colleges in order to
thereby enhance the impact of humanities education on our separate student bodies.
The colleges of Arts and Sciences and of Engineering and Applied Science have
worked for over a year to develop the "Technology and Culture" curriculum
initiative - a course development program that awards competitive grants to
multidisciplinary faculty teams who will collaboratively design and teach courses
that explore connections between science and technology on the one hand and
the humanities on the other. So far, the Technology and Culture initiative has
supported five team-taught courses and plans are underway to support five additional
courses in the near future. These courses are intended to be undergraduate seminars,
made up of equal numbers of students from both colleges.
Part of the original motivation for the outreach activities between the two colleges stems from the new accreditation requirements for engineering schools, known as ABET 2000. The impetus by ABET and the impression that engineering students were not seeing much relevance in their humanities course selections, encouraged focused efforts to create a more "humanistic engineer" who would be sensitive to the non-technical cultural context of engineering solutions. Conversely, arts and humanities students have complimentary needs - frequently deemed to be those of "technical literacy" - that could be addressed by the same courses; thus, a symbiotic union of sorts was envisioned.
In developing what could lead to a national model for integrating technical and humanistic knowledge (in both directions), we hope to create frameworks for shared inquiry between disparate realms of the academy. By immersing ourselves in dialogue with the help of visiting faculty, we will be in a unique position to map out for ourselves - and institutions like UCB - methods and objectives for integrating the humanities into the technical curriculum.
Dialogue is central to our objectives partly because this is what we wish to bring about in the classroom; but also because we believe it is a necessary precondition to any teaching, research, technical design, or civic and professional activity that takes into account the diverse methods and perspectives of various notions of expertise. Consequently, students from both colleges will benefit from an expansion of disciplinary boundaries that empowers out-of-the-box thinking that is only possible once the life of the mind exists independently of the cultural and intellectual axioms that are all too often taken for granted. It is our premise that understanding disciplinary boundaries that have contributed to the fragmentation of knowledge will also lead to a more coherent worldview.
Needless to say, much of the current academic and civic discourse is concerned with an easier exchange of information between, and shared purpose across, cultural and professional boundaries that would aid us in times of political and environmental stress. Whether working for a more secure national infrastructure, a more sustainable form of engineering, or a more viable popular aesthetic - such efforts run the risk of collapse if interlocutors can't grasp the whole.
Lecture and Seminar Topics
Our initial month of activities in September will center on identifying the
Two Cultures as such and exploring areas of separation and collaboration. Daniel
Cox (Physics) and Scott McLean (Comparative Literature) will present their work
at UC Davis in collaboratively teaching about intersections of nature and culture
through the perspectives of both literary and scientific approaches. They will
assess the strengths and limitations of each approach in providing narratives,
and will explain how their work leads to the introduction of new paradigms in
the individual disciplines. Cox and McLean will then lead us in a discussion
of C.P Snow's classic Two Cultures and F.R. Leavis' response.
October activities will be devoted to the notorious Science Wars. Allan Franklin (Physics) will provide a general framework within which to consider the conflict and will talk specifically about his contributions to the debate. Franklin will then join us for a discussion on The One Culture? A Conversation about Science, a collection of essays and critiques from both sides that includes several rounds of responses. We will pay particular attention to the way in which aspects of the "conversation" focus on the disputed benefits and methodologies of the sociology of science.
In November we will explore connections between science and religion. Arthur Zajonc (Physics) will give a presentation of his research on the roles of science and religion in the history of light based on his Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind. Zajonc will link his own work to the Kira institute's ongoing investigation into "ways of knowing" drawing from scientific, philosophical, and religious expertise. Zajonc will then guide our seminar on the series of sustained exchanges between religious thinker J. Krishnamurti and quantum physicist D. Bohm that are contained in The Limits of Thought: Discussions. These two prominent figures employ a sophisticated and open method of dialogue that can be traced to their own work in vastly different fields.
In December, Cheryl Geisler (Rhetoric and Composition, Information Technology) will lead us in an investigation of disciplinary boundaries understood as both (1) boundaries between affiliated disciplines and (2) boundaries between a discipline and the society it is designed to serve. Geisler will describe her recent work on the impact of information technology devices, focusing in particular on the ways that multiple disciplinary perspectives are being interwoven to provide an understanding of socio-technical phenomenon robust enough to sustain the development of both humanistic and engineering knowledge. Our seminar readings will consist of a conceptual taxonomy of multidisciplinary activities and a description of a collaborative, multidisciplinary course. Geisler will help us consider practical applications of broad, abstract conceptions of disciplinarity to the classroom, particularly with respect to written assignments.
January will feature the work of international artist Natalie Jeremijenko (Engineering), who will give a talk on the Engineer as Artist. Jeremijenko will discuss her work and technological innovation in general within the context of the art world. She will contrast the roles that critical theory and centrist perspectives play in the generation of new designs. Jeremijenko will then lead a discussion on K. Goldberg's The Robot in the Garden, which explores various modes of the operation of philosophy and critical theory within digital art and the Internet. Jeremijenko will bring with her an exhibit of technological art that will be on display in the College of Engineering and Applied Science's Connections Gallery. She will give a second public talk about the exhibit itself.
In February we will explore the role of mathematics in philosophy under the
guidance of Robert Sacks (St. John's College). Sacks will lecture on the implications
of the treatment of absurdity in Euclidean and Non-Euclidean geometries for
understanding ancient and modern thought. He will then lead us on a discussion
of Plato's Meno, which contains a geometrical proof at the heart of a Socratic
investigation of epistemology. We will compare Plato's "intuitive"
approach to science and mathematics to Euclid's axiomatic program, considering
the effects on the generation and valuation of knowledge. CU faculty participant
John Martin will also give an informal talk on the implications of Godel's incompleteness
theorem for postmodern theory.
A second St. John's College tutor, Howard Fisher, will join us in March to deliver
a lecture on the employment and merits of dialogue in Galileo's Two New Sciences.
Fisher will then lead our seminar on Heidegger's Modern Science, Metaphysics,
and Mathematics, in which Heidegger claims that mathematical physics both project
and are the products of ontological assumptions that inform methodology.
Our April topic will be Science and Politics. Robert Frodeman (Philosophy) will argue that relationship between science and society is not an automatic one: there is nothing intrinsic to the process of science which means that its results will be relevant to the community that funds this work. Says Froedeman, relevance is a social and philosophical category; the humanities, therefore, have an essential role to play as bridge between science and society. Our seminar will be based on P. Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy. Kitcher radically suggests a democratic and practical evaluation of scientific agendas that excludes the "elitist" conception of science as simply the methodical advancement of knowledge about nature.
Finally, May will be devoted to understanding and applying a sociological framework for analyzing interactions among multi-cultural networks. Michael Groman (Technology, Culture, and Communications, UVa) will demonstrate and apply the three states of discussion he theorizes to be possible among actors and their environment. The third state derives directly from the work of Krishnamurti. The goal of the final seminar session will be to extract lessons from all that has been done during the year, focusing on how to generate and maintain deep multi-disciplinary dialogues. The reading, "Turning Good into Gold" (Gorman, Mehalik), will highlight the new framework for understanding multi-cultural networks united by a common purpose that will be illustrated by case-studies of environmental innovation.