Guest Lori Anne Ferrell—dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Claremont Graduate University—and host Andrew Vosko share their thoughts on the roles and overall value of historians and humanists across collaboration, business, and transdisciplinary thought.
0:00: Host Andrew Vosko welcomes guest Lori Anne Ferrell, dean of the School of Arts & Humanities.
4:22: Lori Anne describes coming to transdisciplinarity from her background in history, religious studies, and English.
7:10: Andrew connects the value of historians and historians to the importance of temporal thinking.
8:50: Lori Anne and Andrew talk about the humility required of the historian and transdisciplinarian and the danger of assuming that they are wiser and smarter than people of past eras. Lori Anne describes eras of the past as foreign cultures.
11:18: Lori Anne talks about the value of historians in collaborative and business contexts.
13:17: Andrew talks about design thinking and the skill set of the historian.
16:30: Lori Anne elaborates on the value of humanists in entrepreneurial settings and on collaborations with the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management.
20:00: Andrew and Lori Anne discuss the integration of the arts and sciences through design thinking.
26:10: Andrew and Lori Anne discuss the challenges of managing new technologies, such as ChatGPT, and the conceptual advantage of humanists.
33:10: Lori Anne and Andrew elaborate on temporal, linear, and cyclical modes of thought, plus the necessity of historical thinking in successful transdisciplinary work.
40:30: Andrew talks about design thinking as a way of managing complexity.
41:18: Andrew talks about the term wicked problems and its centrality to transdisciplinary work.
45:45: Andrew and Lori Anne discuss the need for multiple types of humility: epistemological, axiological, etc., and the kind of humility required for collaborating with those with whom we may disagree.
47:42: Andrew discusses the challenge of collaboration across different points of view as the metaphysics of dilemma.
54:13: Andrew responds to Lori Anne’s question on transdisciplinary thought’s engagement with religion.
ANDREW: Welcome to PostNormal Times, a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world, where stakes are high, and innovation is crucial. In this series, I get to sit down with some of my favorite minds to explore new ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. I'm Andrew Vosko, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at Claremont Graduate University. Welcome to the show.
ANDREW: I want to welcome everybody back. I'm very excited today—you can hear it in my voice—because we have one of my favorite guests who was a longtime co-host of mine and who is the dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. And there's a title here that I'm going to probably butcher so you're going to have to correct me on the name: the Louis and Mildred Benezet Chair in the Humanities. And the director of the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Award—
LORI ANNE: You got it all!
ANDREW: It’s the largest (or almost largest) – poetry prize in North America?
LORI ANNE: It’s almost the largest, now. Yale got all snotty and decided to do something better. But we still have a better rationale for it. These are the only big awards that go to people at mid-career. So, we're actually, in some sense investing in the future of poetry.
ANDREW: It is such a cool prize. It is such a cool program that we have ,here. And I have to say that Lori Anne Ferrell is one of my very, very, very favorite people atin ClaremontGU. And one of the people thatwhom I spent two seasons of podcasting with in the past on a show called Sharing Air, whereon which we talked about the intersection of news, tech, science, the humanities, and the world we lived in, all while we all couldn't literally share air with each other in real time.
LORI ANNE: It was survival mode!, it was survival mode.
ANDREW: Ah, those days!
LORI ANNE: They were. WWe thought they'd never end. But we're glad they did.
ANDREW: Well, and now we're back. Now, you know, the thing that we talked about when we're starting the show is that it's not news, it's not a conversation we have aboutof business as usual,. bBecause nothing is business as usual anymore. And we areWe’re refraining from using the phrase of the “‘new normal,”’ because that’s is an awful phrase.
LORI ANNE: I hate it.
ANDREW: It’s is a terrible phrase. But what if we thought of like, well, with the world's kind of dynamic and, changing, and there have been lots of periods of time whenre, you know, things awere constantly changing. You're one of those people that havewho’s studied this. Am I right? You're a scholar— –
LORI ANNE: You mean like the English Civil War and the Protestant Reformation?
ANDREW: There isn't like… In terms of those milestones that appear on a timeline, I think you're kind of familiar with a couple of those where there was some kind of upheaval that happened.
LORI ANNE: Oh, yeah, I work on anyonething thatwho got their head cut off or got burnt at the stake.
ANDREW: Thanks. Hey, how far are we from that?
LORI ANNE: Hopefully, very far,, hopefully, very far. aAlthough, you know, religious violence is still out there and along with also great cruelty and violence. I think now, one of the things that's interesting is that... Wwe’re are constantly saying in, you know, well, a"At least we're not the barbarians who still go and watch people get beheaded,” right? Who wWatched the guillotine or. wWatched, you know, Charles I of England the First get his head cut off (, which he deserved to get because he was a bad king)?. But, you know, why would that, you know, what kind of audience craves that kind of violence?
And then I think, “Tthe ones that who are sitting around playing video games right now and blowing up stuff.”
ANDREW: Or they show it on social media.
LORI ANNE: As you know, I don't do social media, so. And part of the reason is I can't believe that that would exist there. ABut you know, anyway, so I think we do have an appetite for violence,. aAnd in times of great stress and change, that little bit of the veil that keeps us civilized, gets pulled backa little bit. EAnd even for those of us whothat are would never…... we’re anti- violent, there’s the sense of being on at… thate sense of being about to combust, the sense of being just unable to look at the news anymore, or to deal with the next thing weyou hear—, the kind of, you know,we run in circles and, scream and shout, and the attitudes of the world right now , they are wearing on us.
And we're suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from the last two years of the pandemic.
ANDREW: Oh, yesah.
LORI ANNE: We're scrambling to find out what these things mean. This is why it's , you know, like, it's really great to be thinking about it being in the past, because you have all the time in the world to sort it out. Those folks are dead. They've been headless for years. Right?
ANDREW: Okay, so can I ask – Jjust so you can situate everybody with your area, your perspectives, and whereat you're coming at this from: – I know that your have some background that combines history, religious studies, and English. So, how do you describe yourself to somebody who you've met for the first time, while you're standing in line at a very busy airport in Chicago, where all the flights have been canceled?
LORI ANNE: Usually what I say is, “I'm trained in in history and English literature with an interest in religious subjects, and I use literary texts as my evidence.” So, I'm a literary historian of religious conflict.
ANDREW: So, you got a few different disciplines that you're playing around with, but you tend to study dead people,. Yes. Okay. Kind of like, you know, llong dead people. OAnd one of the things that I've appreciated in conversations with you— – and I do with other people who have kind of a historical take— – is the concept passage of time and how that comes relates to the modern day.
And what I mean by that is historians – and you have said this line once before that you were quoting someone else –... that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhymes. Historians think that, in that way, they can'll understand that what we're looking at now has existed in some cousin type of version, before. They've seen this. NYeah, nothing's new under the sun.
One of the things that’s is most important for transdisciplinary approaches is understanding the temporal foci with of whatever it is that you're looking at. TAnd this is one of the great things that we could do here at this institution, at CGU,. where we have a large number ofmany people who study some version of historical things—: texts, religious texts—, and they fit that it fits into this larger frame of idea called temporal thinking. And Tthat's when you're dealing with any problem in front of you, thatand you gothave three choices of how to look at it: Yyou've got the past, the present, and the future.
And so, most of us in the disciplinary spaces, look at it from in thea present tense, and we're like, “Wwell, let's look at the data, let's analyze it, and then decide.” TAnd that's where consultants are hired and that's where … I mean, that's how the world works in a lot of these decisions. But mMost things that are complex don't work like this as the present data would let you know, because the present data are … They're defined by the windshield that you're looking through. And Yyou miss a lot of things, you miss the other 270 degrees of the circle.
But complex things from the past have had a lot of people analyzing them and . And the context is much better understood. UAnd usually, when you don't know what happens when all the variables are there, but you can identify them in a past situation and, you'red be like, “I can't predict what’ll will happen in the present,. bBut this is what happened in the past, when the same things were there.” It's a really, really powerful tool that people don't tend to use when they're doing this kind of analysis. Iin between that past- tense understanding and, the present- tense understanding, you're like, “Okay, let's start imagining what futures are going to look like from this.” And you understand that, you know, futures can happen with five outcomes, and you ask what would be required for those five different outcomes to happen.
I think that oOne of the cool things that is an opportunitiesy for transdisciplinary studies as a whole is really embracing the historians to teaching everybody temporal thinking., because I think that's something that's really missing from a lot of our own disciplinary spaces . bBecause we tend to only want to think in one timeline., Wwe don't want to think in other timelines aboutof what made something work, or what could make it work in the future.
LORI ANNE: I think that's… Wow, Tthat's super smart. I think Wwhat really struck me about what you were saying was that you're talking about the value of perspective. And that, partly wWhen you're working with data right now, I will remind you of something: Ddata doesn’t not read itself, it doesn’t not interpret itself., it does not … It tells you what's and it's important,. yYou have to have it, and. iIf you work without it, you're a liar—. bBut you have to factor in the idea of interpretation., right?
ThisWhich is not me saying that it's all loosey- goosey. What the past does is, it reminds us of is two things at the same time. One is... that these things happen. There are things that which rhyme, there are common sorts of core problems of humanity. It's not a question of us being so stupid that, we can't solve them. They get solved in different contexts in different centuries,, right? aAnd all of those solutions madke sense. TAnd that's what I love about historical thinking, which is that it may be about something that I profoundly disapprove of, like: burning women, because they're witches. That’s stupid. ...and it's also not true. However, I do understand why 16th- century people did it.
So, the question there is to say, if “Can we know what the driving forces wereare, to that madke them interpret their data the way they did: o, which is ‘Tthis woman, you know, walked by my cow, and it fell down and died, she must be a witch.’” I find it valuable that we realize that now we now have much better ways of thinking about things like that. But we’re are still tending towards other versions of magical thinking and superstition. ..., because…
My two my two favorite things, I especially Wwhen I used to teach in the history of Christianity program, one is that I do didn’t not like to hear people act like they were're smarter than people were 2,000 years ago. We're not—, we're just different. And by the way, what do you think people 2,000 years from now arewe're going tonna think?
And talking about what you're talking about whenre we work transdisciplinarily—, you must come to it with openness and humility. HAnd I think that historical thinking at its best puts you in that place, because you don't have any effect on the past. Your only job is to understand it, and recognize that it isn’t not you, you can’tnot domesticate it, you can’tnot dress it up like a cat and put it in a baby buggy and push it all around. It’s is the past. I wouldn't go so far. … I don't think it's a foreign land, b. But I do think it's another culture.
So, you learn cross- cultural thinking as well, not simply in the way we often talk about cross- cultural thinking now, but that the past is a culture that we don't get to domesticate or we don't get to colonize. Right? So, our job then is to face it with the understanding that we have a job to do and that our job will be good now, but it may not look adequate 200 years from now., so I
ANDREW: MSo, I think most of what you're saying is really, really resonating with me. aAnd I'm thinking, “Wwhy aren’t you not writing the resume headings for all of the graduates on what a historian brings to the table?” What's the difference between the way you're approaching this and the way, somebody might be reading this in an HR department when they're looking at a historian graduating? Those skills that you're talking about of being able to contextualize data and interpret it from multiple viewpoints to apply critical thinking to , you know, complex scenarios without their own … and historians being able to remove themselves from their own lenses, when they take on different contexts—…
LORI ANNE: Critical thinking requires humility.
ANDREW: Humility’s is a big piece. How does that translate?
LORI ANNE: Right? Hi. So how would you do that for HR? Well, this is where I think actually, we are making…... You talk about what we do here at CGU, and I think this it doesn't happen in all places. It definitely didn't happen when I was a grad student myself., right? I think we were trained to be anything but humble, a. And if you were too humble, you just kind of didn't you know, you kind of washed out.
ANDREW: But the humility was kind of like a double-edged sword. It was like, “Wwe're humble, but we're better than everybody else.”
LORI ANNE: We’re humble-bragging.
ANDREW: We’re were loci- flexing, ins the new terminology refers to.
LORI ANNE: But I think, actually, wWhat we’re are starting to realize is that— – and this is another way that I think we will reach across boundaries— – we’ve have learned to think about the skills that make us what who we are in theas acquirerssition of this much knowledge,. aAnd they go beyond just knowing a bunch of stuff. I mean, it's a truism: Yyou can know a bunch of stuff, but if you don't do anything with it … iIt's the things we do with it that we should be able to speak to, and say, “Hhi, I have a degree, I have an advanced degree in history, that means that I'm able to shape contexts.contexts, that means that I'm able to think through problems with perspective, and that means that I can write clearly and explain to people the situation. … I can actually interpret data, because I have a large lens through with which to view it. And I'm also a person who realizes I don't have the full answer. And I can't change the things that I have to work with. Right, I'm you know,… I'm not going to be lecturing, I’ve learned not to lecture the past. So, I'm also great at working with other people, with other ideas.”
We have tremendous interpretive power, but no other power—, we can't change the past or make it us.
So, I think that might’ve have sounded nice. I don't know if the HR person will be like, “Tthank you, next!”.
ANDREW: You hope that they have some humanities background to appreciate it.
LORI ANNE: Actually, people with history degrees, advanced history degrees, get lots of cool jobs, because they because they can… I think most people see those skills and what they do. They work not only as professors, and teachers, and instructors, but they workalso for museums, and they work for any place that has basically what I think of as the care and the feeding of the past forin the present., right?
And I love the partwhat you said about thinking about the future. I think it's probably something that we don't do enough of sometimes. But that care and feeding of the past for a present audience is always looking towards the future, because that audienceey might not come tomorrow, right.? MaybeOr you're going to get new stuff, or we're going to find out that that stuff never belonged to you to begin with, or we're going to find out that, you know, everything you said about it, you know, is like thea wrong T-r Rex head., right?
So the past makes the past makes us… I was going to say the past makes fools of us, but that's not what I want to say. What I want to say is that there aree's lots of great jokes that historians use that are things like pictures of like, ancient people sitting around, having a big party, and someone's saying “Ssomebody's going tonna say this is some religious gig when they when they look at this 2,000 years later.” We actually know we're wrong.... You know, we know that we're wrong. But I don't think that we're relativists, though.
ANDREW: Okay, so there's a distinction. When I heard you describeing a lot of these other skills, one of them … or a couple of them fell into this family of like, design.: that Hhistorians would be amazing with design, in part because they understand context and the ability to empathize, (which are the first steps in any kind of design process: is understanding your audience or understanding what's being looked for). HSo how do you pick up the clues of what's important to thoese people? Is it the same process that you use in design that it sounds like you use when you're able to empathize with somebody who just burned a witch— in, you know, whatever…
LORI ANNE: Or understood their—…
ANDREW: Or accepted that somebody was burned as a witch. Not that that's—, again—, is not a positive empathizing, but the fact that you can empathize is a very important skill for any kind of design process that's used all over the business worlds today. And then the other thing that I thought was interesting is that when you… when you learn content, and you learn about this war, and then thatis war, and then this other war, and then this war, or this, this terrible event, or this wonderful event, orand whatever it was—, it's almost like how in design, you're experiencing athe prototyping phase. So, the prototyping is, “Ookay, we don't know how this is going to work, but we have a model of something and we're going to throw it out to the audience, and we'll see what happens to it.” Like, “Ooh, no, okay,. let's do this a second time. The First World War wasn't enough, what happens int theh second one?”.
LORI ANNE: I never thought of prior wars being prototypes.
ANDREW: But I feel like there's there are some very useful design skills that come in out of this kind of study that somebody could easily just apply to ..., if you were doing, you know, business- to- consumer kinds of things that are really lucrative ... if people caring about that, that side of the house, or that could be inor to a social good., or Iit could be in almost any field, because those kinds of skills are extraordinarily transferable.
LORI ANNE: You know, it's interesting, because whenever people say, “design thinking,” I start getting really kind of sweaty, because I think I don't understand it. My younger sister is doing this stuff now and up in Silicon Valley. And when she talks to me, I get it. Because I figure it's like every other kind of really difficult concept. Sometimes you can overthink it. And I think there must be something that's extraordinary about design, where it might just be a way of patterning and realizing outcomes. But you're looking at me, I can tell by the look on your face that I just said that wrong.
ANDREW: No, no, no, no, that's not at all what I’m doing.
LORI ANNE: But what I was thinking was, while you were talking about it is was that the assumption of design has been sitting behind so many things that we've been doing at the School of Arts and& Humanities for a really long time without us being the people that who talk about design thinking., right? I've been saying for years that the School of Arts &and Humanities—, besides the fact that it's the best and the most wonderful school—, is also school that can work with any other school in this university, because we have places in which we complement each other and we look for outcomes together., right?
So, I absolutely believe in that with every fiber of my being. ..., and because you use business, I will just say that iIt's kind of exciting, because we’re are really planning some great collaborations with the Drucker School of Managementthe Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, not just sharing a building with them in a few years, the Cadigan building, but also making a rationale for that sharing., right? We're going to build it and then we're going to do the work that comes from that.
So, for example, in entrepreneurship—, why aren't humanists, and artists, creative artists and pianists, and painters, they're entrepreneurs, right? The person that you're describing whothat goes into the HR, the HR person of a company that they have never been trained to go and work for, are instead bringing, hi mould me... saying, “I'm here, I bring you all the skills I have, which most places prefer, you know.”— And so, tthey’re walking in as an entrepreneur of their own life.
So, that side of what we're doing, there's the design interface. And I hope I'm using these words, right. But for example, something else is happening over and at the Drucker School which is, you know— – you'll probably interview somebody from thereDrucker who’llthat will tell you about all this— – is this kind of midlife education, the SOAR pProgram ... (which is I always forget what that stands for). But what I realized is that taps oninto another strength of arts and humanities, which is it's extraordinary, fulfillingness. ..., that the side of this… I don't want to become so useful in design that we don't just remember that we also need this beauty. We need this—… iIt's not uselessness per se—, but we need things that exist for their own sake. Right? And that would be Shakespeare, or modernist poetry or painting, or a symphony, all of those things, they exist as human documents for our delight, and for our growth. And you can put that, right? I mean, that itself, understanding that means that these are the contributions that it makes and the design there is that…...
These are people whothat lived by design. They had an idea,. tThey had to form an outcome, and they prototyped that, too. You were talking about wars, but I think that's also the case with concertos,. right?. Right? You're a musician. I'm not. But you know, or there was a great book that came out a few years ago, that was the notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop. and the way pPoets write and rewrite, and rewrite, because they absolutely have to have the right word. And it's not right.... That’s is a very interesting form of design thinking for me, which is: Tthere's the idea, there's the word, it's the second- best word, and it's no longer producing the outcome. The thing, which is driving the writing of the poem isn’t not being realized. So, that's prototype one, or project two. And you know, whether you take it out, and you read it in front of people, and they tell you what they think about it, or you're the one that's who’s prototyping it yourself., right?
You know, to my mind, her most gorgeous poem, One Art, which is just feels to me, like, so precise, and so heartbreaking. She rewrote that a million times. And if you look at how she started, you're kind of like, “Mmeh, sorry, you lost your girlfriend.” You know, I mean, it's just a really interesting way of thinking how… I think we need to learn more about design thinking. sSo we can talk more in those terms, and. iIf for no other reason than that everybody else is.
ANDREW: Well, I think that yes, it's true that iIt's quite a trend right now to talk aboutin design thinking. . And I used to teach a course and still teach a course when I can on this kind of art- science integration. And tThe idea behind the course is that because if we're ever going to create some kind of like Aristotelian life division between how we think about andor attack the world, it’s through the science and art thing. that happens.
In the sciences, it’s very much this kind of deductive model., Yyou build on the knowledge that someone else has left for you to take on to the next step, so that it's standing on the shoulders of giants, it’s objective, it’s truth. … TAnd then that the art is this creative expression, and it's a derivative of something that you're able to process in this holistic way that you can't do through theis deductive model. And so yYou're catching a holism, that someone else can't, and through some divine, transcendent activity, you've created— –
LORI ANNE: I love this group of clichés.
ANDREW: Right, like so this is where the two extremes lie ... aAnd the truth is, knowledge is of course, it's traveling back and forth between all these things.
LORI ANNE: We're not… Everybody's standing on the shoulders of giants, and nobody is.
ANDREW: And because all these truths exist at the same time,. iIt's like, “Yyes, you’rewe're your own person. Yes, you’re are also reliant on your parents and your grandparents and your ancestors and the people whothat taught you in school—.”
LORI ANNE: “And thank you for the data, and also thank you for, you know, the sonnet so that I could write my own write my own non-sonnet.”, right.?
ANDREW: But I think when we introduced design, it kind of changed the perspective of the knowledge that we were trying to create, because it was a little more blatant about it. So, if you went for self and/ other as your two categories, other is the generalizable idea of science, and self is thea creative expression drive for art. Then the other piece, is, excuse me, then the in-between or the one that forces you to think about perspective, is design. You can do either, but for whom, at the end of the day, for whom?
Because when you say this is generalizable knowledge, is it that it’s t's generalizable only for the people whothat read the same language you do? Then it's not generalizable. Or generalizable for children?
LORI ANNE: Children are far too precise.
ANDREW: Yeah,. aAnd they're better at actually understanding the truth about how knowledge is not one or the other. They haven't been tainted yet with these ideas, so they get it. But you know, tThis kind of history thing that you're talking about made me think about it, but it'as a “‘Ffor whom?”’ question. In what way is this knowledge generalizable? What are your parameters for you can makinge this generalizable?”
LORI ANNE: And how useful is that under those circumstances?
ANDREW: Exactly. To what end? For what purpose? And then, on the art side, it's, you know, that it can't just be for one person's expression, because an audience must exist to interpret that. And then there's a relationship between…... TI mean, that’s has been a conversation for a long time, b. But design really forced you to understand the dance of perspectives that are involved with whatever kind of knowledge that was being presented.
LORI ANNE: Would you also use a word like intention? That seems to me when people are trying like trying so hard, like,: “Lori Anne, listen to me. This is what design thinking is.” Part of it seems to me to be grasping, in a way that's much stronger than one might expect, … the idea of intention. aAnd in some sense, reinscribing that word with an idea of knowing what you're doing. ... Now, I hope that doesn't sound weird. No, it's again, like talking about the skills that you bring.
ANDREW: Because hHalf ofa design is figuring out what is the actual problem is. IAnd so, if your problem is, “I'm standing on the shoulder of a giant and it's whatever they’ve handed me,” or if your problem is, “I have this feeling inside and I need to create it today.” … You didn't find a problem in either way, you were just kind of were reacting to something.
So, design does bring that intention back and says, “Ookay, but like, what is it you want to do? What is it you're trying to do?” And I think that wWhen you ask about intention, then you also have to define the context very clearly. .... And so for those that are sensitive to context, or insensitive to context, maybe. If you're the scientists who had copy-pasted their methods from everybody else in their field that we use—: laboratory rats, and they were kept onat this kind of feeding schedule, with a light/ dark schedule in their rooms, And this is the time that we started the experiments—, are you without actually processing how frickin’ generalizable allis this is to human health at some point?
And I get why you do it— (standing on the shoulders of giants—), I get it. But then on the on the other side of it, you do need someone to remind you—, you need a concept to remind you—, that what was the point of doing this was.?
LORI ANNE: Right. You have to yYou can't forget what you went in to solve to start with. I don't know if you saw Tthe New York Times today, but there was an article about this new treatment forof strokes, where they can go in, now, basically, and take the clot out. You’re a medical guy, so this will be interesting to you. But when they did that, when they realized they were able to do that—, (this was in Calgary—), they also had to then step back and redesign everything else, like how EMTs respond. to potential… And so it's kind of a… You start with this…... To my mind, there's another side of design thinking as I understand it, which starts with the solution, and then has to move back.
ANDREW: That’s right. There, right.
LORI ANNE: It’s almost like a reverse plan. So now everything, from what you say to people, if you think they're looking a little woozy, from to how fast... they have, you know, because all of itthis depends on people knowing what to do in a very different way than they used to with a completely other kinds of treatment, which isare, which s pretty good, but not isn't as good. And it's fascinating, and I was I was fascinated by it. And I thought, I have to tell Andy because you and I like talking about medical things....
TBut to my mind that fitsis fitting into what you're talking about. If you just go, “Tthis is the way that we solve this medical issue, and we never noticed that there might be some…This comes out of, as you know, this won't surprise you, you know all these stories of breakthroughs, right? We use this for... something else.” And then suddenly, we realized, right, “Wwhy can't we use this for great, you know, to do this? Why? Why are we just letting that stay there? Why don't we, you know, w... Why don't we get it out?” …
And I think that that's one of the reasons why if, you know, in many ways, the kinds of examples you're using, it's very easy for people to say, well, that's important stuff, right? That's what the world needs. But I do think it's a challenge. And it's a really exciting challenge, at least in my mind, to say, “Tthis is what this what the world needs out of history,” or “Tthis is what the world needs out of English literature,” or “Tthis is what the world needs out of poetry.” You're not making… You know, Ppeople are always like, “Wwell, that's, you know, that just didn't cure cancer, or whatever.” But it's this kind of thinking that makes you realize that that's not the whole goal of being in life.
That’s that's important,. aAnd for people in some uncertain contexts, it’s is the most important thing. But that's not all there is. Right? And tThat's just the outcome. And then you work backwards to figure out how that intersects with other ways of thinking about the world.
ANDREW: Okay, so my rabbit hole that I went into this week wasn't The New York Times, but it was ChatGPT. And you know, what? I haven’t not tried it out. I know I’ll will have to. I haven’t not asked it to come up with algorithms for myself. I'm not that person at all. But in my YouTube feed, for whatever algorithm they have on for me, they keep on adding Marvel Ccomics characters imagined as like, early modern literary characters or something. And then they show them, what they would look like. ..., or they have… So what they're doing…. TAnd to me, this is an integration problem. And I'm like, “Hhow did you find an artificial way to integrate?” Because tThat's really hard. We don't know how to define this very well for howwhen we integrate as humans. What is this?
So of course, now I have to look up— – which is not my specialty at all— – the process of the noise that's added to the artificial intelligence algorithm so that they can de-pixelate and re-pixelate, and de-pixelate and re-pixelate iteratively until they come up with what makes sense given the parameters.
LORI ANNE: You’re such a design thinker: “re-pixelate.”
ANDREW: But it was really cool a. And it’s actually is very much this design process, where you make the program like from whatever the prototype is that you want, go come up with a bunch of noise- filled iterations until it can somehow be de-convoluted to fit this other end—…
LORI ANNE: Andy, we must stop design thinking immediately. We must end it! This is terrifying! This is why you we need the humanities.
ANDREW: But this is also based on the humanities.
LORI ANNE: No!
ANDREW: Not an entirely… I think humanists have a better capacity to understand what's going on than people in almost any other field. ...Because, maybe more conceptually than having to know the exact computational functions that were used, but to understand conceptually what's happening. I don't think it's all that different than what happens of... coming up with an inter- perspective way of looking at the same thing with all the its different iterations and then working backwards to say this might be the end product of what that would look like.
LORI ANNE: Well, did you see that other article in Tthe New York Times? There was one a few days ago, because they were showing some sort of responses, which got kind of edgy and weird. It says, "Wwhy does my chatbot lie and act weird?” And the subtitle was,, “Tthe answer is within yourself.”
ANDREW: “Luke…”
LORI ANNE: No, the fact is human beings have designed it, and human beings lie, and they act weird. So, they're going to actually, in some sense, have their own kind of force inonto this seeming, you know, communicative exchange. I will say that if we can believe Maureen Dowd and the Shakespeare that she was speaking to, then they ain't got there yet. But I think you're right that humanists will be good atfor this, partly because we also can see through, we can see through it. ...
One of the things I you know, when I think with my students, and we've been thinking a lot about…There's been a lot of conversation about this. There haves been a lot of concerns. It's been kind of like another design thinking, in that it’s been around a lot lately. And we read about a lot in the paper, as I can tell from our conversation. One of the things I think is interesting is that I don't see anybody in my school whothat's afraid that someone's going to send in an AI- generated paper and that we wouldn't notice it. Because of small classes, we know everybody's style, we know their tone. We'll know if it's, you know, it turns into something, you know, like flat., right? We've kind of… Even a bad paper, or if I write something bad, it's... still isn't flat. It's me being bad. S
Our students need to know about this partly because in order to think about, A) how they think, but also , if they're teaching, this is going to be an issue sure, in huge classes of 200, where you just , you don't have time to figure out whether that student’s just boring or they just kind of forgot the most important part.
ANDREW: I do see it being very important, in some ways for humanists, because of practical reasons whenif they're teaching. But I also think it's important because I think there needs to be's a a philosophical understanding—. nNot just philosophical, butit's alsojust a a practical understanding of what's happening with this. We kind of need the guidance of people who … yYou don't have to be a humanist per se, like, you don't have to wear the stamp,. bBut who can to help us understand, “Wwhat does this mean? What can itthis mean?”
LORI ANNE: So that we don't just run around in circles and scream and shout. I think that I was really responding to you in a very direct kind of boring way. But I'm thinking that... Ppart of the issue is you got to have people whothat kind of got to step back and go, “Tthere was—, you know, A) This has happened before: all kinds of generated, you know—, –
ANDREW: Temporal thinking.
LORI ANNE: This is what people thought about the printing press, for God's sake— – and literally, for God's sake. And we all know that that's silly, because, in some ways, there's, you know, there's a flourishing. This feels impossible to me right now, I must say. I'm getting to be very old and curmudgeonly. So, I look at it and go, “I do not know if I have time to take this on in my life and worries.”, right? It's snowing in Southern California, It’s the end times! So, we may not have time to do any of that.
But I do think what you're saying is what we always interrogate, century after century after century, as long as we haved been sentient:, is “Wwhy are we thinking what we think? What do we do with that?” IfYou know, and so if, you know, we don't have to have Professor Easton in here to say, “Wwell, you know, what Descartes would say...”… Right? You're thinking that means you are who you are. Every subsequent idea throws that idea into a, that weird kind of doubt. But is that thinking? But Iis it thinking because humans invented it in the first place? We've been worried about robots taking over the world for a while. But that's not as silly as it sounds, because it's our own process of thought that we bring to both what you call the “‘sstanding on the shoulders of giants,”’ and the “‘I am a unique genius in the world of art doing something that no one's ever done before.,”’ right?
Extraordinary—t. The whole time we're also in some sense , critical, you know, self-critical of those thoughts, trying to figure out what theyat means to us. Right? aAnd what it means for us to fulfill themat. Right. TAnd the pressure is awful in both regards, right? So. Tthat's why you need the bridge . bBecause standing on the shoulders of giants , A) It makes you hate the giants. The air is very thin up there. And you might feel like it's weird to go beyond that, to think past that. Right? They were giants, after all, they stomp you.
ANDREW: They must have been right.
LORI ANNE: TheyIt must have been right. And then as you know, as Harold Bloom would say, with the anxiety of influence, whenre you feel like you've got to be absolutely original, which is like the worst way to try to be original in the world . Right? bBecause you’re thinking about originality instead of your outcome., right? You're not thinking instead about getting to this place where you were, you are able to expressing that in whatever way that you're going to discover that in any way you want to. ... It's all about the path that gets you there., which is only originality, which is not really a design, it's just a… It's just an interesting value that has only become important in the modern era. ...
ANDREW: I think, going back to temporal thinking, I'm going to add another dimension to this, given our conversation. So, there's this kind of historical thinking or the understanding of what the past is, and then there's the present and the future. TAnd that's a very linear time course, when you think of things in that way. But I am a chrono biologist and I studied cyclicity and rhythmicity, and how things change over every seven minutes in our brain states, or how they can change over a 24--hour periodperiod,s over weeks, or over seasons, or over months, andor years. And we have cyclicity in time, too.
And I think oOne of the things that you also get out of kind of a historical thinking is seeing the difference between the linear and a cyclical understanding of how things are. Not that time has to go in a cycle, although it certainly can go in a cycle. But things often happen so cyclically. What we might be going through now, when we're talking about ChatGPT, or talking about whatever we're talking about is what is... the human translation ofto this is? “How are we making sense of our lives— – again? How are we making sense of our lives differently than we did 600 years ago?” Oh, it's the same freakin’ thing. What were their solutions to doing it? Is our anxiety around making sense of our individuality, the same kind of anxiety that happened when the Reformation occurred b? Because the movement toward that kind of individuality was a new paradigm that we had to adapt to? And is everything going to be just fine in 50 years? Or is it doom scrolling? Is it, “Yyes, robots are taking over?”
LORI ANNE: Well, you know, one thing I do think is that if you learn nothing else…... I have some issues with thinking cyclically because historians are also always challenging the eras that they produce. that or rather, in some way…... P eople didn't stand around in the Protestant Reformation going, “Gguess what? This is the Protestant Reformation, for God’s sake!”
TAnd that's actually the fertile ground where on which historians live, where you're working with people who that didn't name what they were doing. But we're certainly getting stuff done, you know, whether you liked it or not. ... I think historical thinking or, or thinking about the past, Okay, bBefore we get to the cyclical part, as you know that the biggest the cliché that I hate more than anything else is, like, “‘Aa man who doesn't know the past is condemned to repeat it.”’
IBecause it's not true. But what I do think what people need to remember about the past is that humans have faced this challenge before . aAnd that it's come in a different form that,t to us, now seems absolutely anodyne and possibly outdated of date, or even, you know, like, not even understandable. How can people be a bit afraid of trains?, you know..? I think when the first person thatwas got killed by a train in the 19th century in Britain, the train was going like 15 miles peran hour.
ANDREW: Oh, that's a sad way to go.
LORI ANNE: I know it is. It must have been slow. But what I remember learning that from in one of my classes. What always stuck in my head, was what the manager of the of the train system said to the widow, which was, “‘Llife goes by in such a rush, ma'am.”’ I mean, that was fast but. And so we're not better because that's it’s now considered slow.
We’re are working on new challenges. So, to remember that these have all seemed…... People have been just as daunted. That's, that's the part to me—… tThis may be very old-fashioned thinking,. bBut some, I feel great comfort in the continuity of human nature. Maybe it's because I study religion. There are's a lot of different ways of kind of approaching the numinous. There are And there's a lot of different ways of thinking that you're doing the will of God a. And there are's a lot of ways of trying to think about time, if you’re are religious., right?
WAnd while I, myself, personally, amI'm not a person of particular faith, I believe in believers and the ways that they think about their worlds and the challenges out there. aAnd the way thathow they try to suss out time, which for them can be cyclical, depending on thewhat kind of religious thinking you're thinking about. ... But whichwe always have to add this other dimension, which is what we might call Kairos time, or like a kind of a kind of an overview time, that would be in some religions, the purview of a supreme being or God., right? ThatWhich means that there's this whole other world that's both timeless, and that we've been tumbling around in, right?, bBeing the same humans over and over and over again, with, like, new toys.
One of the things I think historians, especially current historians, are really quite worried about. iIs over- patterning and, over- designing., right?
ANDREW: There's the humility,. wWhich is fine. It's important.
LORI ANNE: But it's also, I'm trying to think like, w... What would be the work of a historian while observing what looks like the same damn pattern? And how would transdisciplinary thinking help them to intervene as opposed to going, “Wwell, here we go again! Oh, I told you there would be a revolution!” Is there a way that we interrupt that pendulum swing? Because we have other tools atto hand besides just observation.?
ANDREW: That's exactly right. I think that the historical and the historian style of thinking is one of these necessary ingredients for a transdisciplinary, a good transdisciplinary approach. The transdisciplinary and that says, “Ookay, we know what happened in a complex system in thisa context, what's going on, now?” Let's look at all the data and then let's predict the different futures. What would be required for each of those? How do we design eachthat future? How do we reverse each one?”
So, all of those things have to work together in some ways for us not just to not just understand the situation, but also to understand how to create the version that we want to have happen moving forward.
Instead of throwing our hands up and saying, “Wwell, there goes the, you know…”
And doomsaying is, it is a defense mechanism. I get it. It's comforting, sometimes. But I feel like there's a role— –
LORI ANNE: A version of control in it. But what you're projecting is,s like, we've got… “How do we design the future?” Yeah, tThat to me is really interesting thinking that, I told you,in which I don't usually indulge in. I don't think of myself as a person who could design a way out of whatever, because what I'm interested in happened so long ago that they did geot out of it. Time itself did that.
And I'm not, you know, as you know, I've spent quite a bit of time in places where religious violence is still a matter of fact, like in Israel, and I never sit there thinking, “Tthe things I know would help me to make you stop doing this.”
ANDREW: Right, right, right, right.
LORI ANNE: So, one of the things I wonder about is, how disruptive human nature is to design thinking.? I think that the one thing about humans is that they never quite do what you think they're going tonna do. No dictator is like another dictator. No revolutionary is like another revolutionary. No artists trying to depict it and, no scientists trying to design or, you know, to explain it is like another., right?
So, there's a slippage, which is actually kind of cool. That means that we… I'm trying to think about how accurate design can be., right? Because I don't think in terms of human accuracy,. I think in terms of human folly, and to me, this is precious and lovely, you know, the human human capacity for self-deception, human capacity for, you know, grandiose thinking, human capacity for love, which blows everything up up as we have known many times. …
And so to my mind, that's an interesting, you know… What does the human – I’m not talking about human-ness or human humanities. What does a human do to design thinking,? What is athe human, due to transdisciplinary systems thinking?
ANDREW: So, I think that one of the respects that transdisciplinary thinking brings into this – and it's a respect – … is that we're complex. We don't oversimplify. And so just as you say the humanist can appreciate the folly, the transdisciplinarian and is like, “Yyeah, I don't know what's going to happen.” Like, you just go in saying, like, I, t"There's so many weird things, something can fall out of the sky, suddenly, and just everything—… tThere could be a virus that's unleashed accidentally from a lab in China.” Those things that Wwe keep learning more of these stories and we’re like, “Twell, that's what happened?”
LORI ANNE: And then you and I have a podcast!
ANDREW: And we keep each other company for two years, without seeing each other.
There's a respect for complexity that I think is inherent in the transdisciplinary approach, that design also gets at. There's a pretty classic paper that's pretty classic that's about housing, and it's called, “DilemmaProblems in a General Theory of Planning.”’ And in the paper, is where the authorsy first introduced the term, ‘wicked problems.’
LORI ANNE: Oh right, you love that expression.
ANDREW: I love that expression. It's what transdisciplinarians use all the time. But it's usually that, you know, tIt’s about the things that we tend to work on that are really like, that aren't oversimplified, they're all symptoms of each other, such aslike access to health care, poverty, education, and food security, like everything is related to each other. You can't just look at one and say that it happens independently of another. That's a construct we have of looking at these problems.
So, when you start to get involved with these problems that are really complex, and that they're socially important, thatey involve human players, one thing that we do a disservice to as scientists andor as people who think that we can analyze this in that “‘standing on the shoulders”’ way, is that when we're done with our research or researching on a topic, we like, withwave our hands and say, “Ookay, I left you the knowledge for someone else to pick up and take on the shoulders.”
And their point in the paper was like, “Nno, you can't do that, because sometimes there is an influence that you leave.” And often there's an influence that you leave when you do this.... So not that you're not bound forever, because you decided to study something interesting,. bBut if you a're going to get involved with a question on poverty, where the outcome is going to affect policy on poverty, then you have work to do.
LORI ANNE: Somebody's got to take up the mantle.
ANDREW: That's right, . and you're responsible for that now. And to carry on with this kind of ethical component, which brings in another sense of what is transdisciplinarity: is that yYou can't take on the ethics of a discipline, you have to take on the ethics of the people affected by your discipline.
LORI ANNE: That's interesting.
ANDREW: And that I think, has a certain amount of resonance with what you're saying with about where design would come in. Similarly, it kind of makes you look at your work as a design in process. Like, yeah, “I did work on that first study that worked on policy— – turns out I was wrong. Prototype one. Okay, let's do that again, and see what happens in prototype two.”
WAnd whereas I think, in some other versions of how we might approach something … I'm not gonna say that design is better or worse than scientific shoulders, or transcendent creative expression, as three different points on this. Everything's integrated, everything requires everything elseall of them. They're all really cool ways of investigating and understanding the world and sharing that.
But one of the things that design does, is it tells you it doesn't have to be perfect. bBecause you're going to do this again, and you're going to do it again, you're going to do itagain and again. TAnd to apply that to a transdisciplinarian's mind:, Tthat's what we do, when we're working with wicked problems or complex problems. Like we're gonna going to do it again and again, and again, so don't get married to just one time you do this.
LORI ANNE: So that, you know, “wWicked “is such a peculiarly human and chaotic term, I think. You were talking about, you know, just sort of, in some sense, this is, you know, … fFor the people that I study, it’sthis is the reason to design theology. Basically, “Wwhy does this keep happening? It's about wickedness.” IYou know, if a 16th- century person would tell you, you know, “I want to actually learn to read the Bible because I don't like wickedness., right? The world's problems are wickedness and that's why we've been condemned by God and we're fallen.”, right? So now wicked is the new, I'm bringing out that word forward to think about problems that we now see are the human problems of humans, right?. But tI mean, that's what humans wereare saying in the 16th century: , “which is wWe're not good enough, right?. We're bad., right? We've been tainted since birth, we you know, we're getting the punishment we deserve, and the best we can do is keep placating and learn what we can learn a, right? And do better.”
ANDREW: Can we teach a course together called Wwickedness and Wwicked Pproblems?
LORI ANNE: I think that'd be really fun. I was going to ask you what kind of course we could do together.r and I've been dying to get back to my you know, the part of me that studies theology, because that itself is a wicked problem. It doesn't I mean, uUnlike philosophy, it has an out, which is that , you know, you can eventually answer the question by saying, “Bbecause God did that.”
But what I really admire about all theologians really, throughout time, is that they don't want to get there too soon. They want that you know, tThey don’t want the trapdoor., right? So, watching them work with the humility to say, “I can't solve this because, in the end, I’m human” is a really kind of, I think, a great kind of universal human value.
ANDREW: You know, you're making me think of – and we've mentioned it a few times, and I haven't jumped on it too much – is … the humility component to this. So, another transdisciplinary thing that we try to communicate— – I've only, I've honestly just limited it to an epistemological humility— – to is that understand like, “Ookay, the way I define the truth, according to what I've learned, might not capture what's going on in front of me. So, maybe I need to bring in a historian to help me with this.” Or maybe I need to bring in… So tThat an epistemic or an epistemological humility, it kind of primes you for collaboration so that your ego doesn't get in the way, the same way.
But there are's also other kinds of humility that I think are important to think about, like an axiological humility of like, “Mmaybe my values are not everybody's values,, right? oOr maybe, maybe my reality is not everybody's reality.” Like, just to understand like, “Mmy reality is constructed in my own wonderfully chaotic brain, and that isn’t not going to match that of, you know, the dean of Arts &and Humanities.”
LORI ANNE: Nothing matches the dean of Arts & Humanities. But you know, I will say that what you're actually speaking to is what we’ve have been very, I think, very simplistically worried about in terms of campus climate, in terms of being able to be in rooms with people that we disagree with. This is actually, I mean, in many ways, Wwhat you're putting your finger on is what kind of humility is required to be able to hear somebody say something you don't agree with, recognize them as a fellow human being, and recognize that they possibly haven’t not been put on earth to just make you mad that day., right?
How do we break down ... – these are different kind of boundaries – but how do we break down tribal boundaries and solve problems together? Because there are perspectives.. It's so, I mean, w... We've learned a lot about how hard this is, and there are perspectives coming from people that we don't want to talk to, that could nonetheless be very useful. HAnd how does one learn the techniques of boundary- crossing there and systems thinking there, to be able to hear each other?
ANDREW: So, we call it, we actually call this the metaphysics of dilemma.
LORI ANNE: Ooh! You have the best words for everything.
ANDREW: I know, like, I hope that we all can create a word search after. …
But this idea of the metaphysics of dilemma is, if you have some kind of thing that looks like it's stuck or intractable between at least two parties, then you've got to start figuring out “Hhow do we share realities, how do we share values, how do we share truths, how do we share the things that are going to..??” … Because if you recognize as tThe comment that you made at the very beginning— – you don't agree with, but you do understand, why somebody was okay with someone being burned at the stake, because they were a witch— – I likewise don't have to agree with you, because when you're, you know, burning down a bunch of trees in your backyard.
LORI ANNE. Right. Like, how can ..? Why do I have such latitude and such perspective on something just because it was in the 16th c? Century? Yeah. But now, if somebody doesn't want to recycle—…
ANDREW: But that is actually the way… And tThis is a movement that's come out of transdisciplinary studies that really involves a bunch of philosophers who are trying almost to like almost instrumentalize philosophy. This has some real uses. and wWe've been kind of getting too esoteric as of late, so what if we turn it back to being a more applied philosophy? What does that look like? So, they bring in a bunch of different disciplines together and are like, “Hhow are we going to get all of you to work together?” And they had to bring these epistemological truths to be aligned with each other they had to bring…
bBecause it's almost like the contract at the beginning of the rules that we're going to live by, together. If this is going tonna work, this is how we're going to have to do it. But you need that kind of facilitation and social compact that’s, it's really hard., Aand for people, the longer that we're in our own spaces, the easier it is to forget that. …
I taught a class with a couple of other faculty here a couple of years ago, it was wonderful. It was half grad students from CGU, and half undergrads from the five undergraduate colleges atin Claremont. IAnd it was a sustainability course. TAnd the graduate students were all from different countries, every single one was from another country that wasn’t not the United States. EAnd every undergraduate student was born and raised in the United States. One of the undergraduate students was talking about the need for education to help people who are essentially burning trees in their backyard. And one of the graduate students who was from I believe, Cameroon, and worked for the United Nations. SAnd she held up a plastic bottle a. And she said, “I used to have very well-meaning Americans, who were working in some kind of environmental organization, come to my house and tell me that I should not be using plastic bottles. But I did not tell them that my family had used this same plastic bottle has been used by my family for 10 years. We have a plastic bottle, and we use it as a tool because we can use it to pour more water, we can use it to, you know, for plants.”, we can use it for, like, just like we ... Nobody ever asked a question. Nobody had ever thought of it that way because they just said, like, “I must know that I'm right because I'm coming from the newest and, the greatest, you know, and you must be wrong,
LORI ANNE: And also, “I come from a place that has seen itself as powerful for a very long time, which means my perspective is the most powerful.”
ANDREW: It was such a nice moment where you're like, “Tthat's why you don't go into a place assuming that, … to go out without that humility.” ILike if you don't come in with epistemological humility, you don't come in with that ontological humility that lets , you 're be like, “Ooh, that actually is something we could learn from.” rather than us telling you what you should be doing that's completely just upended? ...
LORI ANNE: Well, actually, that's one of the things I think from the very beginning, when we started, you know, when we began to explore what it would mean to be a transdisciplinary university, I thought that that was the first time… I didn't have any of the fancy words, and I didn't quite know what it was. But one of the things I knew it meant was I was asking people…
I did two transdisciplinary courses prior to your being here. And one was, I didn't know what to do, because I didn't actually know how to do it.... And I thought, well, let me think of two subjects that for which you could bring people in from every school in the university . Aand they can speak on it, right. So one of them was on the Bible, and I had people from IT, and I had people from every … from from type of business., Wwhat it did was say, “Tthere are people that who have ways of thinking about this, thatwho are powerful and interesting, and they were not trained.” … GIn graduate school is a really great place to do something like that, because we think we come with these kind of veiled blinders on right. And then I did Shakespeare, people came in with extraordinary perspectives on say, Macbeth that I would not—… Tthat you don't learn when you study English literature. or…
So, I believe that that was kind of a necessary time to recognize that barriers had existed that we had often thought were right, that we thought they were good, and that we thought that the point of which was that, we were the experts—, and all that made us extremely siloed. And , you know,... I think now what we're doing is very sophisticated in transdisciplinary studies. I'm so excited about this master's degree. It makes sense to me that now we can step forward that way and say, “Tthis is what we do, and this is why we do it.”
But it started with us just saying, “Ooh, I don't just live in my own little world.” And I think often it was especially important for the School of Aarts &and Hhumanities, because no one ever asked us to solve a problem. They don't say, “Hhere's a pressing world problem, can you come help us?” Right? And then now the obnoxious thing is that people who are trying to talk about the value of the humanities in the arts try to make it into something like… “Tthat's how you make better people.” I don't think so.
ANDREW: It's a kind of tough argument to make.
LORI ANNE: It is. But that's the one that people keep making. on… Or, “Iit's going to make you a better citizen, or it's going to do...”… None of that is going to do those specific things. But people whothat can work together to solve problems are possibly better citizens, are possibly better people than they would be by themselves.
ANDREW: Or to help people understand like, the very first part of what a collaboration is, which is to understand that humility. If you can start at that place, then a collaboration can happen. But if you can't reach that place—…
LORI ANNE: You know you're right already—…
ANDREW: You're done.
LORI ANNE: It's also bad in leadership. I mean, I think that that's, I mean, yYou learn when you're trying to run any kind of, you know, programs, centers, or whatever, that. iIf you think that you've got the right idea, and that no one else has that, and that your job is to slam it down and get it passed or get it agreed to—… tTalk about a way to learn humility. Yeah, it's excellent,. jJust trying to run something.
ANDREW: Yeah, tell me about it.
LORI ANNE: But how much work in religion does the transdisciplinary program do?
ANDREW: You know, it's interesting. So, like the father of transdisciplinary studies is Basarab Nicolescu. He's like the first person who added philosophy to it about 30 years ago now. IAnd in his original treatise, he talks about the importance of religion and, and other realms of knowing as being a part of the transdisciplinary experience. And so, I’ll will tell you that through the history of where the field has gone, there's a definite detour that was taken away from religion, it's kind of gotten lost in the popular version of transdisciplinarity, which is largely about sustainability-related sort of learning outcomes, which isn’t not a bad thing. But it's time to bring it back. And I think that the importance of it, I think, hasn't been illustrated appropriately. And I think that tThere's a fertile ground to be… But to be used.
LORI ANNE: Well, to be at least , you know, sort of discovered, to be explored.
ANDREW: Certainly tTo be certainly explored.
I intend to have more wonderful conversations with you!.
LORI ANNE: That would be fun. Thank you for inviting me to talk with you today!.
ANDREW: I want to thank you for coming, because it's just like, you know, we don't skip a beat.
Oh, thanks so much. This is great!.
LORI ANNE: Thank you, Andy.
ANDREW: Thanks for listening to this episode of PostNormal Times. Thanks to our guests, and thanks to our support from Claremont Graduate University. If you enjoyed boundary crossing with us and want to hear more, make sure you follow us spread the word, and tune into our next episode.