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We have questions about the role of disciplines in structuring the contemporary colonial University.

Critical thoughts about the disciplinary structure are starting to appear in a few other liminal spaces of academia (see e.g. Diatta 2023, Khan 2022). But the idea is yet to achieve a central place in the discourse about what it is we are doing as academics.

One of the earliest texts—perhaps the earliest surviving text—that recognizably belongs to a tradition of Western philosophical thought running continuously through to the present day is a poem composed in the 5th Century BCE by the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea, commonly referred to as On Nature. Parmenides’s poem appears to describe the path of a young initiate into a secret mystical knowledge tradition, guided by a goddess at the “halls of Night,” who explains that being is ἓν (one) and πᾶν (whole). The Western philosophical tradition that descends from this text is now the dominant strand in contemporary Anglophone academic philosophy. However, the actual metaphysical views espoused by Parmenides are rarely defended within that tradition.

In local Indigenous worldviews, by contrast, principles of unity and interconnection are core teachings. Along with disciplinary divisions, the contemporary Canadian University is premised on what Brian Burkhart (2019) theorizes as delocality: floating free from the land. This is manifest in the very idea of a colonial university setting itself up and pursuing a collection of pre-structured disciplines in the European tradition on Indigenous lands, as if the discontinuity of place made little or no difference to the work being done. It is vital that the team’s work on this project be informed by appreciation of the unceded Musqueam land on which UBC’s Vancouver campus is located, with close attention to such teachings as néća?mat ct, which means “we are all one” in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language of the Musqueam people.

Many similar teachings from the local area are also noteworthy, such as namwayut (“we are all one” in Kwak’wala, the language of the Kwakwakaʼwakw). In Haida thought, a central tenet is gina 'waadluxan gud ad kwaagid (“everything depends on everything else”), and the Nuu-chah-nulth worldview is centred on the principle that hišukiš c̓awaak (“everything is one”).

We do not begin this project with the assumption that Western and Indigenous traditions of knowledge and enquiry constitute an oppositional binary, both because this flattens each to a stereotype, and because it flattens the issue itself: there are many more than two positions to explore, and many ways in which approaches drawn from different traditions may intersect and resonate. To mention just one intriguing example, in the work of 17th Century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, “God” and “nature” are words for the same entity, which is all that exists (see Spinoza 1677). And in Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview, E. Richard Atleo / Umeek lays out an understanding of all reality as one (tsawalk), explaining that this reality has both material and spiritual aspects (Atleo 2005). While there are of course various important differences between the contexts in which these two metaphysical views are embedded, there is clearly a more complex and interesting relationship here than binary opposition.

Be that as it may, Spinoza is an outlier in the Western history of ideas. Systemic neglect of interconnection is both cause and effect of the colonial University’s having organized itself into its system of divisions or ‘disciplines’ which promote (often extreme) specialization at the expense of dialogue, interconnection, and the bigger picture.

The proposed project rests on the premise that knowledge and enquiry are, in fact, inextricably connected to their time and place.

This necessitates a process of institutional critique of the colonial University’s foundations, and stands at odds with a deeply-rooted European ideal of enquiry as aiming at universality and objectivity (which are in turn aligned with reason and science, and male-coded) and positions those things in opposition to specificity and partiality (which are aligned with emotion and art, and female-coded). As per the existentialist feminist tradition set in motion by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), we understand the “other” as localized, specific, and partial; only the view from the dominant position—the view of the white straight cis non-disabled European male—is considered universal and objective. Burkhart (2019) traces this idea through the Western philosophical canon, arguing for example that in René Descartes’ Meditations (1641) the “zero-point of subjectivity that manifests itself through universality into the domain of truth hides Eurocentrism through the universalizing of localized history, religion, and experiences of European people” (p. 13).

The history of ideas in the Western tradition has cleaved to the idea of a binary opposition between maleness and femaleness, mapped to one between rationality and emotion, with philosophy—as I argue in Jenkins 2021—positioned firmly on the former side of both divides, literary arts on the other. Jenkins critiques this attitude in her 2017 book What Love Is And What It Could Be, making a case for the integration of rationality with our emotional lives, and even going so far as to suggest that wisdom consists in having one’s heart and mind pull one together, rather than apart. The “uninviting” of women’s—and many other—voices from Plato’s Symposium (and the subsequent millennia of philosophical conversation in its lineage) also became the inspiration behind Jenkins’s philosophical poetry in Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato (Jenkins and Nappi 2020), co-authored with Pittsburgh historian Carla Nappi. While Symposium excludes the voices of women, its central theory of love is ultimately attributed to a woman (the possibly fictional Diotima, teacher of Socrates). It is not a coincidence that, amongst all of Plato’s topics, a woman is considered an expert in a text about love, which has been considered “women’s business” for thousands of years. Jan Zwicky’s essay “Why is Diotima a Woman?” (Zwicky 2015) defends the hypothesis that the gender of Diotima is evidence that Plato was influenced by Parmenides of Elea: that “both Plato and Parmenides understand philosophy to have deep, live roots in the mythworld … [and] view philosophy as a practice whose culminating visions springfrom a fundamentally feminine province of that mythworld” (p. 236).

This requires us to consider that Plato had “a conception of what philosophy is that is very different” from that of the dominant Western academic tradition of which it is the ancestor. Zwicky also argues for the pursuit of what she calls “lyric philosophy” as being more fit for purpose than the kind of academic writing that values rational argument to the (aspirational) exclusion of metaphor and emotion.

The project of dividing academic enquiry into disciplines has crucially involved separating it not only from art, emotion, locality, and partiality, but also from mysticism. The excision of the mystical from enquiry has proceeded in tandem with the move away from holistic thinking. The phrase ἓν τὸ πᾶν (“all is one”) appears at the centre of an ouroboros—a serpent eating its own tail—in a manuscript from the 3rd or 4th century CE attributed to a philosopher known as Cleopatra the Alchemist. The text, like much in the Hermetic alchemical tradition to which Cleopatra belongs, appears to be both scientific and mystical in nature: her illustrations include a diagram of an alembic (a device used for distillation) alongside mystical texts the full meaning of which is difficult to interpret, but which certainly suggests a monistic view akin to that of Parmenides. Such work predates the idea that mystical insight is entirely separate from (and inimical to) rational thought and the scientific method. The schism between the two occurred notwithstanding the contributions to Hermetic alchemy of Isaac Newton (whose theory of universal gravitation is surely better understood in the context of his willingness to entertain the possibility of unseen forces at work in the universe). John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1942, accurately captures the modern sense of science and mysticism as mutually exclusive when he says of Newton’s alchemical research: “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.” Historically, the rupture between reason and magic is explicable in the context of a patriarchal society where mysticism sometimes offered a way for women’s voices to be heard in conversations to which they would otherwise be uninvited: the Oracle at Delphi and the female Christian mystics of Medieval Europe (see e.g. Petroff 1994) are examples. Like witchcraft and other ways of knowing that were open to women and to practitioners from the lower strata of society, over time mystical insight was excised from the Western ideal of rational enquiry, including the (strongly male-dominated) analytic tradition in Anglophone philosophy.

Again, there are exceptions to be found: Iris Murdoch was influenced by mysticism and its intersection with ethical thought in the work of Simone Weil. Murdoch eventually turned from academic prose to the novel as her primary mode of engagement with these ideas, offering intriguing meta-level thoughts about her reasons for this turn in various interviews and essays.

Understanding the reasons for these divisions and excisions is in large part a backward-looking project, but the reasons for doing so (and doing so now) are also forward-looking. We urgently need to (re-)focus attention on interconnection because, lacking a proper understanding, we make ourselves progressively more and more vulnerable to learning the hard way about another Haida teaching, namely that the world is as sharp as the edge of a knife. There is a fragility to our situation: we belong to a system in delicate balance that requires constant care and attention. A recent movie,SGaawaay K’uuna, the first feature film to be produced entirely in the Haida language, dramatizes and explores this teaching.

One kind of dramatic failure to respect the implications of interconnectedness manifests in our becoming, in the words of Kwakwaka’wakw artist and hereditary chief Beau Dick, “devoured by consumerism” (see Fazakas, Cussans, and Hopkins 2019). Unsustainable consumptive and extractive practices have led us to climate emergency, and to multiple failures of what philosopher Kyle Whyte calls kinship, using this term to refer to a much broader and deeper notion than that of biological family relationship (see Whyte 2022), one that includes our kinship with land and ecosystems, and centrally implicates considerations of time and the co-ordination of activity. As Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2022 essay “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance” explains, this problem is not a necessity of life, but a contingent feature of colonialism and capitalism: economics does not have to mean capitalist economics, or a scarcity-driven system. The gift economies practiced by many Indigenous communities offer an alternative.

Areas of philosophy that demand attention to interconnectedness—politicized discourses such as the philosophy of race, disability, and gender, or environmental ethics, to name just a few examples—have tended to find themselves relegated to a secondary status within the discipline, as “applied” (vs. “pure”) areas of research, and as “optional” (vs. “core”) subjects in University curricula. This project also aims to call attention to and reverse this trend.

It is not part of the proposed project’s aim to denigrate or undermine the need for, and value of, specialist work—the goal is, rather, to undermine the currently dominant assumption that only work that conforms to the current disciplinary system is of value. In order properly to understand and address crises like the current ecological emergency, we need to consider radical conceptual challenges to the dominant paradigm of enquiry and knowledge gathering. We also stand in desperate need of new and better conceptual tools to properly understand the consequences of social disconnectedness, which have reached the status of a public health emergency: in 2023, the US Surgeon General released an advisory explaining that social disconnection increases mortality risk as much as or more than well-known risks like smoking, alcohol, physical inactivity, high blood pressure, cholesterol, or air pollution. In Jenkins’s recent publications, especially her 2022 book Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning, she argues that the individualistic “pursuit of happiness” is—like the idea of enquiry being divided into disciplines—a central aspect of colonial North American ideology. Taking inspiration from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, she contends that a good life centres meaningfulness rather than happiness, where meaningfulness is a matter of collaboration, creativity, and connection.

Finally, it is among the aims of this project to advance an understanding of settler colonialism itself as involving a series of failures to understand and respect interconnectedness. The idea of replacing Indigenous ways of living, knowing, and sharing knowledge with those of European settlers evinces a thorough disregard for the specificities of place, and of the connections between an act of enquiry and the place where it is undertaken. Colonialism severs connections to culture, family, identity, and traditional territory, in ways that are often impossible to address through traditional research methods but may be approachable through the application of research-creation methodologies. In this area we are inspired by Nisga’a poet-scholar Jordan Abel, whose recent books Nishga and Empty Spaces (Abel 2021 and 2023) offer beautiful models of what can be achieved through the application of creative scholarship to such otherwise intractable—perhaps otherwise unthinkable—topics.

The Undisciplined Project will break new ground in bringing Western philosophical traditions into creative dialogue with art practices and Indigenous worldviews. It will of necessity be methodologically inventive. It requires a willingness and ability to conduct research in ways that move beyond the “traditional” scholarly article and monograph. I use scare quotes for “traditional” here because in most wisdom-seeking traditions, storytelling, poetry, visual art, and other creative forms are normal modes of engagement. The emulation of scientific journals by the discipline of academic philosophy is a contingent, recent, and localized phenomenon. The project looks towards the integration of intellectual and artistic practices, aiming to explore what knowledge and creativity can be when guided by principles of connection and wholeness rather than separation.

In some respects, this theoretical approach is continuous with traditions of analytic philosophy which place a high value on clarity and attention to detail in the investigation of complex, often abstract, subject matters. There is an important intersection here with the Haida art style, which similarly emphasizes precision and rigour in the application of its structural principles and visual language to subjects that are likewise often complex and abstract (see e.g. Yahgulaanaas 2015). As Cordova 2004 explains, it is a mistake—an over-generalization from European art history—to assume that being an artist automatically means being a self-expressive rebel for whom anything goes.

However, in other respects the project will be explicitly pushing back on aspects of the analytic tradition of philosophy, where extremely insular and inaccessible practices have become normalized, and intellectual gatekeeping constrains the possibilities for growth and new insights (see e.g. Sanchez-Perez 2024). Like a growing number of contemporary philosophers, I believe that the inclusion of a much broader range of voices in our conversations is not an optional extra or a curiosity, but an urgently needed upgrade.

Intensive discussion and interaction are core methodological principles of the project. The project will benefit from collaborative input from scholars working within a huge range of current disciplines: Biochemistry, Critical Care Medicine, Educational Studies, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Land and Food Systems, Law, Neuroscience, and Public Policy and Global Affairs. Working on the unceded territory of the Musqueam people at UBC’s Vancouver campus provides opportunities for learning from the Musqueam nation, from the nearby Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish nations, and from a thriving and diverse local arts scene, as well as from the scholarly community of UBC.

It is also salient that as the project begins, UBC is in the process of revising its Strategic Plan, opening a perfect opportunity for the project to contribute to a process of reimagining its own host University in a meaningful and actionable way. Our goals include raising the possibility of undisciplined work to salience in order to effect change, in particular by:

(i) improving the legibility of undisciplined work within a system that currently lacks literacy with respect to such work, and relatedly,

(ii) increasing respect for the distinctive value of undisciplined work.

It is crucial that these changes have an impact where the rubber hits the road: that is to say in such academic processes as hiring, promotion, tenure, and merit reviews. Unless it genuinely influences these things, it is in danger of being mere lip service. To maximize the likelihood of genuine impact, the project team will work to ensure that our research and research-creation outputs reach the offices and officers, within our own institution and others, that are responsible for these key processes and/or for providing guidelines as to how they should proceed.

Our project has three phases:

Phase 1 (2025-2026): Where are we now?

• What are disciplines? How are they understood, both within and beyond the academy?

• How is the current structure of disciplines related to the University’s colonial past and present?

• Where are there already pockets of undisciplined activity?

  Phase 2 (2026-2029): How can we intervene?

• How can we promote critical discourse around the presumption of disciplinary division?

• What are the costs and benefits—intellectual, ecological, political, ethical, and more—of this structure?

• How do we locate this work within the broader project of de/anti-colonization?

• How can we promote deeper understanding of and respect for interconnectedness?

  Phase 3 (2029-30): What is possible in the future?

• What can a University be, without (or beyond) the current structure of disciplines?

• How can we continue to promote and enhance these conversations beyond the life of this SSHRC-funded period?