A new display advertisement from the School of Underlying Conditions presents its core shed as the room where the University's fields meet over the same rock.
The School of Underlying Conditions takes its case for collaboration to the portrait panels
Collaboration across fields is ordinarily arranged by committee. The School of Underlying Conditions has found that it can also be arranged by leaving a tray of drill core on a table, and has said so on the University’s portrait display panels. More Disciplines per Borehole was prepared by Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead of the Basement Relations Group, with Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer.
The panel shows the inside of a core shed, its racks running back on either side, and six people at a trestle. Between them they hold a hand lens, a notebook, a net, a flask, a rolled chart and a pair of calipers. There is one tray.
Nobody was invited. They came for the rock one at a time, each with a perfectly good reason, and by the end of the season there was a queue for the lens. We started writing down who was in it.
— Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead of the Basement Relations Group
The advertisement mobilises that list as an account of the School’s collaborative posture, anchoring a cross-disciplinary capability in a single piece of shared apparatus. Beneath the campaign line it points to three of the School’s publications: on a groundwater amphipod, on relations between neighbouring surveys, and on a clay that takes the colour out of seed oil.
The University takes some encouragement from a school that has widened its company without lengthening its table. Dr Emenike said the tally “is kept on the back of the shed door, where anyone who has been counted is welcome to check it”.
The advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7li1e6.