Re-imagining Tomorrow through Arts & Sciences

This RASL minor enables students to adopt a transdisciplinary art-science approach for engaging with societal issues.

Welcome to the RASL minor! This program, developed by a team of artists, scholars, and educators at the Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab (RASL), offers a unique opportunity to collaboratively engage with pressing societal issues. By exploring and experimenting with education and research approaches that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, this minor provides a platform for imagining alternative tomorrows.

Our current predicament, the ‘clusterfuck of world-historical proportions’, underlines the necessity of imagining alternative tomorrows. We need to come together in diverse ensembles to rethink how we can live and work in better, more just ways. The minor invites you to create and mobilize such ensembles.

Re-imagining tomorrow requires recognizing that traditional disciplinary ways of knowing and doing are inherently imaginative as they create and reinforce specific ways of experiencing and knowing the world. This program, bringing together students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, offers an ideal space to interrogate the world-building capacities of our current practices and explore how they might be transformed. Together, we will experiment with new approaches and modes of collaboration to work toward more socially and ecologically just futures.

Students in the minor come from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from audiovisual design, composition, and jazz vocals to political science, psychology, industrial design engineering, history, philosophy, and more. Together, you will embark on a research project to study a situated societal concern and explore diverse methods of addressing it.

During classes, you will participate in a range of different activities such as practice-led workshops, field research, close-listening exercises, screenings, and close-reading sessions. The minor is particularly suited for engaged and critical students who feel an urgency to work beyond disciplinary boundaries and are keen to partake in shaping and reflecting on their learning process.

1. You are able to formulate a relevant societal concern and engage with it in a collaborative, more-than-disciplinary manner
2. You are able to collaboratively develop a more-than-disciplinary research approach for your project;
3. You are able to situate your research project in relation to existing academic, artistic, and/or societal practices;
4. You are able to reflect on how you engage with and position yourself in relation to your fellow students, the research topic, the relevant audiences, and the context in which you work;
5. You are able to justify and take responsibility for the choices you make throughout the learning and research process

The minor takes place at the RASL spaces at Hillevliet 90 in Rotterdam. The location is accessible by public transport.

The minor is divided into two parts (15 EC + 15 EC). Students can either participate in Part I or in both parts. It is not possible to only participate in Part II.

Attendance, active participation, and preparation are expected for all mandatory sessions. A session is considered missed not only if a student is physically absent but also if they fail to demonstrate an adequate level of engagement or preparation. The expectations concerning Professional Conduct will be introduced and discussed in class to ensure clarity and understanding.

Teaching methods
The composition of the minor generally revolves around (a) thematic sessions, (b) skills workshops, and (c) tutor meetings. In previous editions, these different sessions have taken the form of workshops, (guest) lectures, feedback sessions, (student-led) presentations or activities, and field trips. The student teams are guided in developing their modality of working together that suits their research project.

Teaching materials:
The teaching materials cover a wide range of disciplines, genres and forms: ranging from academic and artistic texts, works of art, case studies/best practices from any related field, and so on. Because the specific topic of the collaborative project is selected by the students, many of the materials are decided upon throughout the process, and recommended by tutors, guest lecturers and students alike.

Method of examination
Assessment in this program is divided into three key components: a project presentation, a team publication, and an individual portfolio. The method of examinations used in this minor adhere to the definition of “large or small assignments” as described in article 4.1.2 of the EUC Assessment Policy 2023-2025.

Composition of final grade
The grade for both parts of the program is determined by two smaller assignments, each contributing 20%, a large academic assignment worth 50%, and professional conduct, which accounts for 10% (see ARR, article 4.6.2). This grading structure is referred to as “Assessment Format B” (EUC, ARR, article 4.4.1).