The intelligence of the senses

Ever since, 26 years ago I was told I couldn't submit a report on a placement at a radio station in the form of a radio programme, I have felt that there are times and topics where we need to be able to let academic discourse out a bit. It sometimes needs to get a life. Instead of reduce everything the the one dimension of written discourse: "Academia often excludes non-linguistic media such as film, photography, or sound on the grounds that they are not recognized academic formats in and of themselves; they do not adhere to strict rules of grammar nor do they necessarily employ the approved tools of study that yield accountable data, such as surveys of customs and kinship systems. But as the significance of embodied knowledge and lived experience increases in the discipline of anthropology and other social sciences, perhaps the academic world can make a little more room for media that best represent this data, encouraging alternative methods of communication to join language with equal credibility."

Of course, all is not bleak; the arts (as in performance, plastic and visual) have been 'doing academic' for a long time. But perhaps it is time to learn from them. I think that there are areas of practical theology which could probably usefully engage with this. And I note that one of the possibilities I wrote into the Engaging Culture course was that the assessment could be done in the form of some other cultural artefact than the essay...

The McGill Daily � The intelligence of the senses