Contextswe agree with newbury (Chapter 21) that frameworks need to be established for the
validation of methods in relation to particular problems, contexts and audiences.
There can be no off- the- shelf methods to be taught to all doctoral students in the field,
because there are no off- the- shelf problems. To make matters worse, creative problems
can be characterized as being not only transgressive but also transdisciplinary, in the
sense used by häberli, requiring individual methodological solutions to never- before-
seen problems.
The core idea of transdisciplinarity is different academic disciplines working
jointly with practitioners to solve a real- world problem. it can be applied in a
great variety of fields.
(häberli et al. 2001: 4)it could be inspiring to broaden our minds by looking at the strategies for developing
a paradigm in other professional disciplines, in this case library and information science.
one problem emanates from what Jan nolin perceives as ‘the old model with disciplines
monopolising professions’ (nolin 2008: 38), where disciplines that were autonomous
and distant from society, establish clear boundaries between each other, for example
law and medicine. ‘normal science was based on an atomistic ideal, solving individual
problems with individual pieces of knowledge’ (nolin 2008: 39). This does not work
any longer, symbolically illustrated by the so- called ‘Ch- Ch’ syndrome (the Chernobyl
nuclear meltdown and the Challenger shuttle crash). These catastrophes made clear
the risk of people with restricted knowledge handling the quality control of very
advanced technologies. nolin argues that the focus should be shifted from describing
and analysing the role of professions to actively contributing to their improvement, and
that a starting point would be to collaborate with the practitioners. he suggests that
quality in a profession can be linked to:
a discipline being open (rather than closed) for several different perspectives
that students need to become comfortable with in their schooling to becoming
professionals.
A profession and a professional association that is open and interlinked
with other related professions. [...]
A profession and professional association that continually strives for high-
quality by a never- ending collaboration with Academy.
(nolin 2008: 47)as a consequence, nolin recommends that professions abandon the traditional way
of explaining and confirming their identity by generalization from individual case studies.
instead he suggests a ‘trilateral concept of truth’ as a point of departure for the theory of
professions by allowing for truth as understanding (the hermeneutical dimension) and
use (the pragmatic dimension) to complete the demand for correspondence between
theory and reality, which is too narrow. his conclusions corroborate our opinion that the
optimal development of an artistic research paradigm would prosper by collaboration
between practitioners and theorists, not by individual art genres or traditional research
disciplines trying to define the borders and agenda unilaterally (nowotny: preface).