Transdisciplinarity in Practice

This book critically examines how knowledge is produced, experienced, and captured across disciplinary boundaries. It offers a practice-based framework for transdisciplinary research that integrates embodied, performative, empirical, and conceptual methodologies. The book engages with two key traditions—the Nicolescuian and Zürich approaches—before drawing on philosophy, cognitive science, performance, and systems thinking to develop a dynamic practice of knowledging: a way of doing and experiencing knowledge that resists disciplinary closure. Tools such as the active aesthetic and Integrative Performance Practice support this rethinking of how knowledge operates in action.

Structured in two parts and joined by a conceptual intermezzo, the book’s first half maps core transdisciplinary traditions and critiques the historical formation of disciplinarity. A central chapter explores the politics of knowledge—power, value, failure, and collaboration—while surveying existing frameworks. The intermezzo introduces non-linear perspectives, including systems thinking, rhizomes, and the holographic principle. Part II turns to embodied performance practice, establishing select aspects of the creative process as a crucial contribution to serious epistemological practice. It incorporates enactivism to argue that knowledge is enacted through experience. Concepts such as event(ing) and the middle field offer tools for capturing knowledge in motion, supported by exercises and case studies.

Experience Bryon, PhD, is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Performance and a Senior Research Fellow at Norwich University of the Arts. She previously led the MA/MFA Performance Practice as Research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama for over a decade. With a wide-ranging background in the performing arts—including work as a performer, choreographer, director, and artistic director of a transdisciplinary performance company—Bryon’s research advances dynamic exchanges between performance and the sciences, enabling the emergence of new forms of knowledge. She is the pioneer of Integrative Performance Practice, an approach taught internationally that bridges artistic practice and scientific inquiry. Her publications include Performing Interdisciplinarity: Working Across Disciplinary Boundaries Through an Active Aesthetic (Routledge, 2019), Embodied Cognition: Acting and Performance Training (Routledge, 2017), and Integrative Performance: Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer (Routledge, 2014).