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Seeing the Whole: Art, Ecology and Transdisciplinarity

Haley's refereed journal article produced the elements for a critical epistemology of Transdisciplinarity, from an arts-based, practice-led research perspective, providing an opportunity for a robust re-framing of the topic, at a time when it is being appropriated and distorted by the jargon of deterministic management development programmes. It consolidated three of Haley’s 2011 conference papers, to international audiences from sociology of the arts, restoration ecology and aesthetics disciplines. Feedback from these different audience disciplines and cultures contributed to the notion that ‘transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines.’ (Nicolescu 2008), and that art may be the discipline best disposed to realising it. The article further expanded Haley’s concept of ecological art from concerns of complexity to practice as a form of ‘transdisciplinarity’ (Nicolescu 2002), thereby advancing knowledge of both the practical processes and conceptual basis for ecological art and research focused on social and environmental activism. A position was, then established, to re-examine Haley’s use of the evolutionary biological term, ‘species nova’ or ‘to see anew’ (Haley 2000), that explored and critiqued patterns of behaviour based on normative beliefs emanating from science practice, that reveal social psychosis, or loss of reality. The linguistic shift to ‘nova species’ from Roman law provided further insights into the perceptual transformation of material to form, from the Stoics to Aristotle, and then to ‘seeing’ as the cognitive act of understanding knowledge. This, in turn, opened the possibility for arts-generated knowledge, derived from ‘question-based learning’ (Haley 2007), or ‘eco-pedagogy’ (Haley 2003) to be a liberated, creative knowledge, ‘that includes a system of values’ (Nicolescu 2006). This approach has prompted invitations to lead symposia at two Society for Ecological Restoration World Conferences (2011, 2013).