Drawing Across x Along x Between x University Borders by DRAWinU

CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY OF PORTO. October 16, 17, 18th, 2024 :: Drawing Across :: Along :: Between University Borders considers the epistemological and transformative potential of drawing research to connect divergent areas in the university today. The conference focuses on drawing-based collaborations between art, science and society to tackle artistic, educational and societal challenges. We invite artists, scientists, educators, students, university policymakers and persons interested in inter-transdisciplinary practices across academia, research, and society to contribute and join the discussion in three possible directions: ACROSS - In what ways are drawing practitioners challenging the disciplinary strictures that often constrain thinking and acting across divergent areas in the university? ALONG - How can drawing activities be an ally of STEM education in the university, and how can STEM practices be an ally of drawing education? BETWEEN - How can drawing-based practices and STEM disciplines collaborate to address the urgency of societal challenges?

16, 17 & 18

OCTOBER 2024

University of Porto, Portugal

i2ADS and the DRAWinU group* invite you to a time of drawing and collaborative reflection at a three-day in-person conference in Porto, Portugal, to rethink drawing-based strategies for challenging university borders.

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CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: PAPERS, WORKSHOPS AND PRACTICE SHARING

Drawing Across x Along x Between University Borders considers the epistemological and transformative potential of drawing research to connect divergent areas in the university today. The conference focuses on drawing-based collaborations between art, science and society to tackle artistic, educational and societal challenges. We invite artists, scientists, educators, students, university policymakers and persons interested in inter-transdisciplinary practices across academia, research, and society to contribute and join the discussion in three possible directions:

ACROSS

In what ways are drawing practitioners challenging the disciplinary strictures that often constrain thinking and acting across divergent areas in the university?

ALONG

How can drawing activities be an ally of STEM education in the university, and how can STEM practices be an ally of drawing education?

BETWEEN

How can drawing-based practices and STEM disciplines collaborate to address the urgency of societal challenges?

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WHY DRAWING ACROSS, ALONG, BETWEEN UNIVERSITY BORDERS?

If we step into a STEM workplace today, we find all types of drawings circulating among scientists, technology researchers, engineers, or mathematicians. Computer screens connected to databases, where information is processed into vivid graphic visualisations, coexist with everyday drawing activities: observational sketches, graphs traced with markers in whiteboards, hand-drawn diagrams on found papers, or instructional illustrations. Some of these drawings are representations used as surrogates that stand for already acquired knowledge, while others are models designed to generate insights and produce new knowledge. Regardless of their names, the nature of their media and surfaces, they all stand for formal and informal ways to extend our minds in situations involving visual-spatial reasoning, feedback, or memory retention. In the last two decades, this diversity was mirrored by the growing interest in drawing activities as topics of STEM practices and pedagogy, such as drawing-to-learn or learning-by-drawing.

Hybrid knowing spaces were also opened by art-science collaborative projects, where the objects, methods and epistemology of science meet artistic research. At this intersection, drawing acts as a situated form of inquiry to address and experiment with concepts and processes such as metabolism, movement, perception, pain, human mobility, emotion, matter, entropy, or time, among a diversity of phenomena across divergent areas.

Triggered by the debates surrounding the epistemological impact of drawing activities in science, a shift of focus has also occurred. In the hybrid knowing spaces opened by art-science collaborations, drawing activities are not restricted to visualising, modelling, or understanding. They are a form of agency whose goal is to connect, act and care, a way of staying with the trouble, as Donna Haraway would put it. By addressing drawing as an agency, we consider the links between who is drawing and what is being drawn as part of both the artistic and scientific research process; we focus on how objects and subjects are constituted in their mutual interactions through drawing in order to transform ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and acting in the world.

The three prepositions of the title – across, along and between – are attractors to explore drawing's different movements within university areas. They hint at possible research directions in terms of which the dualisms between embodied and discursive knowledge, image and writing or art and science in the university can be challenged.

SUBMIT

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IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract submission deadline
30 April, 2024

Notification of acceptance
30 May, 2024

Early registration until
15 June, 2024

Program release
15 July, 2024

Registration deadline for presenters
19 July, 2024

Conference dates
16, 17 and 18 October, 2024

Full paper submission
20 December, 2024

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VENUE

Drawing Across x Along x Between University Borders will be held in-person at i3S — Institute for Research and Innovation in Health located at the University of Porto campus of Asprela, in Porto.