Oxford-Uppsala Culture & Creativity Research Cluster together in Uppsala - part 2

Since 2023, Uppsala University (through the Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences) and the University of Oxford (through the Humanities Division) have had a partnership aimed at facilitating and developing researchers' initiatives and work in cross- and multidisciplinary fields. From this collaboration, the Oxford-Uppsala Culture & Creativity Research Cluster was established, beginning its work in autumn 2024.

The cluster brings together ten researchers from different Human and Social Sciences disciplines, distributed between the two universities. Its focus is on exploring and developing interdisciplinary projects and finding thematic common ground; both across disciplinary boundaries and between the two institutions. Circus offers a concrete platform where interdisciplinary collaborations can be explored, and ideas exchanged to lead to deeper joint future projects. Innovative interdisciplinary collaborations are seen here as a way to address, explain, and find solutions to current societal problems and issues. These include AI, identity issues, normality/abnormality, interpretation and translation, misconceptions and knowledge building. How can creativity help respond to current societal challenges?

Within the framework of the research network's activities, Circus hosted five researchers from Oxford between 22 and 25 April, who visited Uppsala to continue, with their five counterparts at UU, their reflections on the joint project on creativity within academia, with their five counterparts at Uppsala University. The aim here is to explore and challenge what the concept means in the different disciplines represented in the network, and to seek common areas of collaboration in an interdisciplinary context within the humanities and social sciences.

The collaboration, which began in 2024, culminated in a first workshop in Oxford in November 2024, where the Swedish researchers visited their counterparts in Oxford, and laid the groundwork for further exchanges through participation in brainstorming workshops developed by Circus as part of its activities on interdisciplinary methodologies. The collaboration thus continued with a new exchange in Uppsala in April 2025. These meetings focus on deeper questions about human existence, and what it means to be human in historical and contemporary perspectives, and the researchers explore together themes where they share an interest, which will be transformed into a joint project. The researchers involved in the network come from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, such as literature, musicology, game design, gender studies, history of ideas and other profiles. The aim of the collaboration is to bridge disciplinary barriers and create a platform for new and experimental ways of seeing, exploring and interpreting different problems, and to lay the foundations for innovative interdisciplinary project applications that cover the different research directions that make up the cluster.

During the visit to Uppsala in April, Circus organised seminars and activities in the special collections at Carolina Rediviva, where writings on monsters and imaginary creatures from the archives were viewed with great interest. A lecture in the Anatomical Theater invited conversations about the body, vulnerability and the conditions of production of knowledge.

The TORCH-CIRCUS collaboration will soon result in a first publication, a pamphlet on the theme “Creative Monsters”, expected to be completed in June, with a forthcoming official release in October 2025

Nadia Lovell