When asked what my burning issues were at the Leonardo Day in Prague last week, I tried to described the patterns have witnessed at CEMA and Srishti in particular, and Bangalore and India more generally.
First, I said that Leonardo would become a more robust network by cultivating inputs from the other 2/3 of the world that was not represented in the room. This may require publishing and doing outreach in languages other than English and French, actively engaging partners in non-western countries and to provide publishing opportunities by making manuscript formats appropriate to knowledge production around the world. I was excited to see that Leonardo now has a forum called Transactions which “s a section in the printed journal Leonardo that publishes fully refereed papers in a fast track to disseminating key new results, ideas and developments in practice.” This format may be particularly useful to young scholars, or scholars who are publishing their work outside of their home country for the first time.
Next I made a plea that the network take into account the many ways of knowing the world and create opportunities for critical and rigorous engagement and publication of diverse epistemologies. This may sound like the very mandate of Leonardo, but at times it does not seem to be the case.
I challenged the audience to think about how inter and transdisciplinary work could be valued in emerging economies that tend to value the hard sciences and engineering, and where the humanities and the arts may have even less sway in academia than they do in the West. How can Leonardo hybridize their values with the burgeoning new media, art & science, and art AS research scenes that are forming in the emerging economies?
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