Dementias, creative arts, interdisciplinarity, methodology, disciplines. The Hub affords the opportunity to stretch the definition of what collaboration means, with the award encouraging the bringing together of professionals from varying backgrounds, including academia, the creative arts and communication.
Residents work on a two year project aiming to: explore health in its cultural and social contexts, develop a programme of public engagement, create work that is original and impactful, and produce new insights, forms of engagement, methods for conducting research or interventions. Created Out of Mind is a team aiming to explore, challenge and shape perceptions and understanding of dementias through science and the creative arts.
The team will explore what dementia means to us all, challenge traditional definitions and common misconceptions, and unlock what we can learn about art, consciousness and the brain from the experiences of people with dementia. Created Out of Mind is led by a core team consisting of project director Sebastian Crutch neuropsychology , and co-directors Caroline Evans management, strategy , Philip Ball science writing, broadcasting , Paul Camic psychology, public health , Nick Fox neurology, neuroimaging , Charlie Murphy visual arts , Fergus Walsh journalism , Julian West music practice, education , and Gill Windle gerontology.
Collaborative working shines a light on the detail, the operational, the mundane and those seemingly everyday encounters that take place during a project such as Created Out of Mind, where individuals and practices rub against each other. The Hub brings the politics of the arts, humanities, sciences and professional practice to the fore. It holds these disciplines and roles in a troubling middle-ground, whereby the discomfort of individuals often produces new and divergent approaches to the questions being asked.
Is interdisciplinarity something expressed in the outlooks of individuals, or via the collaboration of specialized teams? While there may be no one-size-fits-all resolution to such questions, interdisciplinary work, if conducted well, has the potential not just to create new avenues for tackling existing problems that cannot be addressed by a single discipline alone, but also to identify entirely new questions, problems and methodologies.
