Taking Pause: The Role of Art and Literature in Reimagining Human-Nonhuman Relations and Transdisciplinary Collaboration

Abstract

The academy’s separation of the arts from the sciences constricts researchers’ opportunities to engage with works of art and literature that pause our time-worn processes of data collection and analysis. From the works of Humboldt and Goethe to more recent writers and artists, literature and art offer us moments to stop and think differently about the ways in which we interact with our environment and others, human and nonhuman. In moments of enchantment, awe or stillness, we might lose ourselves, and imagine other less anthropocentric ways of being in the world and new transdisciplinary forms of collaboration.

Keywords:

• Affective knowing
• human-nonhuman relations
• literature and imagination
• pausing
• transdisciplinarity

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 We distinguish between “learning to be affected” (J. Lorimer, 2010, p. 502) by animals, or trying to “tune in” to an animal’s habits and emotions (Bear, 2011, p. 302), and anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhumans. A change in human subjectivity such that animals become more than “background” or threat, servant or plaything of the (centred) human subject is an acknowledgement of “the other’s” subjectivity and its relationship with one’s own. In “mov[ing] animals from the shadows,” we might learn more about “what it means to be ‘animal’” (Bear, 2011, p. 303), which might then extend to empathy or compassion (Carter & Palmer, 2017, pp. 223–224; Clark, 2011, pp. 53–54; Karlsson, 2011, p. 282)).