About

Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

About Ralph Windle

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the TRIPLE KIND.

SYNOPSIS

Through the medium of a collaboration with Sheffield University I was able, in January 2010, to publish a Review of the University’s ambitious ‘Arts/Science Encounters’ Programme 2009. I post here the Synopsis of the Review which  appears in full below (’Arts/Science Encounters: A Review’).

Given my own, and the wider national interest in the Arts/Science scene since 2000, I also included within the Review a short tour d’horizon of the UK’s more widespread progress towards its often stated ambition of more effective cross-disciplinary interchange between our ‘arts’ and ‘science’ communities.

This Review therefore includes ( II The World About Us; and III Responses) a brief but necessary account of the uneasy gestation, since the year 2000, of the UK’s wider approach to this supposed arts/science divide. Long a topic for abstract debate and policy confusion, the pressing realities of climate change, threatened economic melt-down, and challenge of global, real-time communication have revived appetites for action to match much past rhetoric; and for freer flows of ideas, creativity and innovation between our ‘artistic’ and ‘scientific’ elites.

Subsequently ( in IV. The Sheffield Initiative; V. Oh! The Wonder Of It; and
VI . Engaging Reality ) I go in some detail through the 16 events, with the help of key participants, and attempt some analysis of what seemed to be happening in them which made them special. The real essence of their success and future promise was not simply to have staged fascinating dialogues between impressive practitioners from the arts and sciences; but to have involved, as co-equals, a lively and energised public. Overall, I conclude that the Sheffield ‘Encounters’ were an impressive new entry on this national scene.

Finally ( VII . Postcript ) I welcome the continuity into a second (2010) Sheffield ‘Encounters’ series; and , given the implications for change already clear from this experience, I list :-
                         i.     making a reality of cross-disciplinary research,
                   ii.     curriculum change for school and undergraduate teaching,
                   iii.    rethinking of internal faculty relations and
                   iv.    more commitment to sustained community involvement

as the obvious areas about which ‘minds should now begin to refocus on some of the bigger, longer-term, strategic implications of this success’.

Not just locally, but nationally.

Ralph  Windle