Every week in the summer The duty takes you on the side roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up like a postcard during the summer season. Second stop: the Campus des liens, in the company of its creator, Véronique Cnockaert, and an accomplice, Nathalie Lacelle.
The theory, by Véronique Cnockaert. In June 2021, I was very interested in the event Le Parlement des liens, which brought together, at the Center Pompidou, in Paris, for three days, some fifty thinkers and actors in society (philosophers, writers, climatologists, artists, biologists, mathematicians, anthropologists, historians, economists, etc.). Everyone was invited, in the form of dialogues, to reflect on the society of tomorrow based on the notion of connection. The successive confinements linked to the COVID-19 pandemic have indeed revealed the interdependence of trades, generations and individuals. I said to myself that, on this model, it would be exciting to have colleagues from different disciplines and backgrounds discuss in a completely free manner, without a pre-established framework.
Thus, with the endorsement of the Center Pompidou, of which UQAM has been a partner since 2017, it occurred to me that a Montreal edition would be the occasion for a gathering between various colleagues and doctoral students from UQAM and elsewhere. (McGill University and University of Montreal) where we wonder how the connection of disciplines, environments, changes our ways of thinking. The Campus des liens is thus a lively and out-of-frame way of highlighting the biodiversity of knowledge, of understanding how the interconnection of beings and the decompartmentalization of disciplines are now modifying our relationship to the world and to the living.
Inside a dozen podcasts uploaded to the radio site CHOQ.ca, academics (two at a time) who do not necessarily know each other converse for 30 minutes without any preparation and dialogue to understand how their respective discipline can become a space for reflection for the other. These free, improvised discussions revealed that science and the arts, philosophy and design, feminism and architecture, for example, have many points in common, and how thinking about them together makes it possible to reflect and invent new ideas. other ways of inhabiting the world.
The Links Campus powerfully emphasizes how links make up our lives and how interdependencies allow us to evolve and grow in a more generous and caring way. The event argues for ways of thinking that are less insular, more curious about methods and points of view. And as academics are accustomed to speaking in particular courses and within specialized colloquia, these unusual encounters have given rise to a mix of genres that is sometimes very astonishing; thus certain subjects are approached as much from specific knowledge as from childhood memories.
At the end of these one-on-one meetings in the privacy of the recording studio, several colleagues expressed the desire to reflect and work together in the near future, others were surprised by the similarity of their backgrounds. , although they work in very distant fields. This is what I was able to see when discussing with my colleague Nathalie Lacelle. Which confirms that we are much closer to each other than we think.
The Campus of links, by its unorthodox device, by the freedom of speech of the speakers, invites to other and more binding ways of thinking.
The practice, by Nathalie Lacelle. In December 2021, I was invited by Véronique Cnockaert to go to the studios of CHOQ radio, at UQAM, to discuss the links that could unite us – links between our disciplines, between our life paths, between our visions for the future of research and training, between our thoughts on tomorrow’s society. After two years of weaving programmed virtual links — a combination of pandemic and sabbatical — I set foot on campus for the first time to talk about what I had been deprived of: the need for individuals to (re)connect in presence, in an intimate and spontaneous atmosphere. The magic worked… The interlacing of our voices allowed the scaffolding of our reflections.
Feverishness
– Wait a few seconds, I’m afraid I have nothing to say.
– It’s the first time for me too. Are we going together?
Big gaps
— I am a literature teacher and I come from the world of dance, drawing and cinema.
— I am a language teaching teacher and I come from the world of music, cinema and literature.
Epistemologies
— I am interested in the ethnocritical approach in literature, and particularly in the place of orality and the body in the text.
— I am interested in multimodal media literacy approaches in education and, more recently, in the role of the reader’s gestures in digital works.
Fascinations
— The body, sensitivity and reading fascinate me: the work can only exist if the reader makes it exist through the body.
— Gesture, affect and literacy fascinate me: the “reader” engages in digital works with gestural modalities that reveal the meaning of the work.
Quests
— How to do exoticism? What if the study of popular culture and rites in literature allowed a reappropriation of one’s own culture?
— How to reduce the aesthetic gap between students and texts? And if the study of subjective reading processes [nous] allowed us to grasp them better in order to teach them better?
Breakups
— In literature, we are not aware of the issues [que porte l’accompagnement des] young people in reading activities. And yet, children are excellent guides for [nous faire] understand the proximity to the texts, they have fewer filters.
— In didactics, we are light years away from theoretical advances in reading approaches. And yet, these sensitive approaches would make it possible to enrich the literary training of young people.
Outlook
— So, how to update the literary training of young people thanks to an ethnocritical approach to texts?
– That’s when you want ! We have every interest in working together.
It’s fascinating, because listeners need to know that none of what happens was planned…
And if the links were made of feverishness, great gaps, epistemologies, fascinations, quests, ruptures and perspectives? While the COVID episode has demonstrated that it is impossible to move forward alone, the experience of the Campus of Links has demonstrated the value of stimulating interdisciplinary dialogues to accelerate progress towards collective well-being. .
Véronique Cnockaert and Nathalie Lacelle are full professors at UQAM, the former in the Department of Literary Studies, the latter in the Department of Language Teaching.