School for Interdisciplinary Arts

IA applies Hampshire's interdisciplinary approach to the arts and the process of art making. The school offers students and faculty opportunities to work across, as well as within, the boundaries of such art forms as theatre, sculpture, writing, drawing, design, and computer animation. Exploration of the relationship between artistic production and social action is also central to our curriculum.

For further information on Hampshire's undergraduate program in Interdisciplinary Arts, contact the Admissions Office, 413.559.5471, or email mailto:admissions@hampshire.edu Admissions.

Mission Statement
The School for Interdisciplinary Arts (IA) is a non-hierarchical, democratic and diverse association of students, staff, and faculty who believe that freedom of the imagination is fundamental to a just and dynamic society. Designers, writers, social critics, arts educators, performers, directors, sculptors, visual artists and entrepreneurs, we share an interest in collapsing and transcending traditional boundaries between disciplines to engender new processes and modes of artistic and intellectual expression. We work in many contexts: the Lemelson Center for Design, the Arts and Technology Program, writing of all kinds, Gender Studies, the Sculpture Program, African-American and other Literatures, the Arts and Social Justice Program, and Theatre, including critical interventionist drama and arts education. We know that artists across media have much to learn from each other, and that joint consideration of common conceptual concerns yields transformative solutions. Many of us in our own work combine several modes of making and take inspiration from unexpected forms and fields.

Members of the school are also united in the belief that if artists are to be valuable not only to each other but to broader communities and to society itself, the focused study of particular modes of making must be paired with serious study in other disciplines. If artists wish to make art that speaks to and of ‘the world,’ they must pursue reflexive knowledge of it through as many avenues as are available to them. IA faculty members have experience in the study of political history, literature, engineering, design and technology, critical pedagogy, public health, entrepreneurship, art history, anthropology, multiple cultural and global settings, gender and sexuality, and philosophy, and they know the value of these fields to their own work. Likewise, students in IA typically seek challenges, inspiration, and information in all of the college’s schools, bringing what they learn back to their art work and implementing ways of making that reflect concerns and questions that originate outside of themselves. Ultimately, we seek to equip students with generous, synergistic ways of learning, reflecting, and problem-solving that will ensure their success in any future context. We encourage students and faculty alike to set their own terms for success and to pursue their goals—scholarly, community-based, artistic, political, personal, however unorthodox—wholeheartedly and without fear.

We believe that art changes the lives not only of those who make it but of those who see, hear, touch, read, and engage responsively with it. We encourage students to take seriously the communities in which they live, work, learn, and travel, and to develop facility with forms, language, and bodies of knowledge that include rather than exclude, that nurture imagination in order to encourage empathy, and that challenge, rather than confirm, boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality. We believe that artists and creative entrepreneurs, independently or in inclusive, thoughtful collaboration, can help us all to envision a just society as an achievable goal, in particular effecting social change by building bridges that connect the academy with the larger world.

In keeping with these beliefs, the Arts and Social Action Program is a vital aspect of IA, frequently hosting visitors who bear urgent news, and promoting creative intervention in students’ lives on campus, the lives of our neighbors in the Pioneer Valley, and in communities (and often countries) outside the Five-College realm. We know that the involvement of innovative makers in their communities is key to social transformation. The School encourages and supports students’ creation of enterprises that address social and environmental problems with economic, sustainable and humanitarian solutions. We also believe that encouraging freedom of thought and creativity in youth is essential to securing an inclusive, democratic future; the Theatre for Young Audiences program, and our interest in Arts Education in primary and secondary schools bring our students together with young people and teachers all over Massachusetts. Our understanding of social action is broad—inclusive of students who work with firm individual vision in single or mixed media as well as students who work in groups, making art in, with, or for, our own constituencies and others.

The open, egalitarian character of IA is reflected in our teaching. United in the belief that active, reflective making—the practice of art—is key to any meaningful understanding of creativity, IA faculty seek to balance excellence in and long-term study of single media with energetic cross-media experimentation and collaboration. Responsive to these changing times, IA faculty take students’ goals seriously, creating structured fora for the exploration of emergent multidisciplinary forms; the Arts and Technology Program, in particular, actively integrates art, design, and technology. At the same time, workshops in elementary and advanced skills and seminars designed to address issues particular to one medium are equally important and regularly taught.

With a shared commitment to critical, participatory, libratory education in which instructors are also learning and students are often teaching, IA faculty organize their courses in a number of modes. Co-teaching across media, an important source of innovation and collaboration, is frequent. Courses in which the syllabus is determined by student concerns or to some extent designed by students themselves are common.

Our practices of governance, too, reflect our hopeful vision of energetic, collaborative, reflexive educational practices. Taking for granted that our behavior as teachers, students, makers, and members of an educational institution has political dimensions, and in keeping with our fundamental commitment to democratic principles, the School for Interdisciplinary Arts maintains non-hierarchical, open and inclusive practices of school governance. Student, staff and faculty engaged in collaborative education have the duty to shape their institution in a larger sense: taking a critical approach to the corrosive effects of unchecked authority and absolute power, we believe that all perspectives on any issue that affects our students, staff, faculty, school, and the college matter and must be taken seriously and substantively into account. Truly transformative, socially radical collaboration cannot exist unless all members participate as equals in decision-making processes. We therefore support the ability of Hampshire students and faculty to significantly shape college practices and policies. In all of our programs and projects, we seek practical, political, and philosophical connection: between our own actions and the condition of the worlds we inhabit, between social justice and freedom of expression—between art and life.

Lemelson Assistive Technology Development Center
The Lemelson Assistive Technology Development Center (LATDC) provides students with an experiential education in applied design, invention, and entrepreneurship through the lens of assistive and universal design (products or built environments to be used by the widest range of ability levels possible).

Applied design is a broad-based holistic approach to the design of functional objects. Applied design draws on the basic principles of industrial and mechanical design, adaptive and appropriate technology, and sculpture. It utilizes prototype development and craft-making practices while considering the aesthetic aspects of design. This academic program, now a part of Hampshire’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts, grew out of the original Lemelson National Program, which provides the framework for nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit and penchant for innovation that exists at Hampshire College.

Students of many disciplines have benefited from the design courses offered through LATDC. Courses cover areas such as soft goods design and construction, mechanical design and construction, prototype creation, assistive technology and universal design. Issues covered include the principles of applied design, anatomy and ergonomics, problem-solving and need-finding, market influence on design, prototype building and testing, consumer research, establishing design parameters, intellectual property protection, and the impact of our society’s aging on design. Courses are experiential and include student participation in actual prototype construction, with some of this student-created equipment placed into the hands of the public for real-world use.

In addition to academic courses, the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for Design offers workshops, called Trainings, in a wide variety of design and fabrication skills. The Trainings, which include both introductory and advanced sessions, are intended to give students the skills necessary to design and fabricate assistive technology and universal design prototypes as well as other innovative applied design projects.

The Center for Design facility offers a unique laboratory for the exploration of design and fabrication. It is open to all Hampshire College students, and includes a shop equipped for work with metals and plastics and a Design Lab for manual and computer-aided design. Students may use the facility for both academic and personal projects. There are no prerequisites to use the facility and all skill levels are welcome.

The social sciences traditionally have been associated with analysis, and the arts with creativity. What if we refused the authority of those old categories? What if we used the arts to challenge and expand social theory? And used social theory to recognize creativity as a means for social actions? For example:


 * Intervention in children's early development through the arts
 * Art as a product of social class and social history
 * The arts and AIDS prevention
 * Creation of community through arts in public spaces
 * The body as a means of exploring the dynamics of race, gender and sexuality

Art heightens people's consciousness. It enables subtle shifts. It opens small margins of important change. It disrupts preconceived attitudes, letting people become more aware, more humane, and less extreme.

The arts can help us break through the invisibility, the felt unknown of exclusion, and the shaping power of racism in American life. They can dislodge arrogance, certainty, conformity, and normality. Arts enable us to be surprised and moved, opening up the center, collapsing it, imploding it, and ultimately allowing us to recognize the creativity of and from the margins -- where it's not supposed to be.

Art doesn't legislate change. It imagines change. Hampshire's Art and Social Action Program began as a collaborative effort between the School for Interdisciplinary Arts and the School of Social Science. A network of faculty across the five schools is now available to Division Two and Division Three students. If you are thinking about combining the arts with an agenda for social action, read on.

Relevant Courses:


 * Arts and Social Change
 * Blacks and Russia
 * Creative Interventions: Visions of Art
 * Expressions of Urban Culture: From Graffiti to Hip Hop
 * Feminist Fictions
 * How to Build a Whirlwind Wheelchair
 * Latino Theatre
 * Living for Tomorrow: Cultural Contestations, Gender Politics and the AIDS Epidemic
 * Look Ma No Hands
 * Music and Politics of Latin America
 * Playwriting with Social Context in Mind
 * Performance and Ethnography
 * Prison Literature
 * Urban Design, Redevelopment and the Arts
 * Working Across the Arts
 * Young People in their Environment

Resource Guides for Interdisciplinary Arts Students

 * Resources for Dancers and Choreographers
 * Resources for Creative Writers
 * Resources for Anthropology
 * Resources for Computer Musicians
 * Resources for Education and Licensure
 * Resources for Film Concentrators
 * Resources for Journalism Concentrators
 * Resources for Museum Studies
 * Resources for Theatre Concentrators