Transdisciplinarity for creative futures: what barriers and opportunities?

Abstract

The call to ‘creativity’ has become increasingly familiar as a catch‐phrase of higher education policy. Much current academic and policy discussion, however, is based on assertions of the importance of ‘more creativity’ without any clear sense of what the implications are for the disciplinary cultures that organise knowledge work within universities. This paper explores ways that transdisciplinarity can assist in making creativity more evident in the teaching and research activities of universities. It draws on transdisciplinary activity in the Creative Industries Faculty of one Australian university to explore this issue. The argument put here is that a transdisciplinary knowledge environment has a greater capacity to inform creative work futures. Such an environment is not so easily created in practice, as the paper demonstrates by elaborating lessons learnt from a transdisciplinary re‐structure within the authors’ own university context.

Keywords:

• transdisciplinarity
• higher education
• creative industries
• research policy
• leadership and management