Transversal Imaginaries
Cultivating Cultures of Research & Teaching Across Boundaries
Facilitated by Dr. Teoma Naccarato.
Hosted at Falmouth University by the Centre for Blended Realities and the Centre for Pedagogy Futures.
Project details
Transversal Imaginaries is an evolving platform for rethinking how we learn, research, and create across disciplinary, institutional, and cultural boundaries. It responds to the urgent need for more responsive, relational, and imaginative forms of knowledge-making in the face of global crises—from climate collapse to systemic injustice to the fragmentation of academic life itself.
By transversal, we mean approaches that move diagonally through existing structures—cutting across hierarchies, disciplines, and silos. This term, drawn from philosopher Félix Guattari, signals a refusal to work only within fixed categories or to enforce rigid boundaries between fields. Instead, transversal work creates space for ambiguity, contradiction, and collaboration across difference.
In this spirit, Transversal Imaginaries draws on transversal methodologies (ways of generating knowledge) and transversal pedagogies (ways of teaching and learning) that value tension and translation as productive forces. Rather than imposing a single framework or outcome, the initiative asks: what becomes possible when we move not simply from one discipline to another, but with and through the friction between them?
This strand of work is building toward a long-term, collective reimagining of research culture. Looking ahead to the university of the future—20, 50, even 100 years from now—we seek to cultivate new capacities for working with uncertainty, staying with the trouble, and imagining otherwise. This includes exploring the evolving possibilities of blended realities (environments that combine physical and digital elements) and AI-driven technologies, which are reshaping how knowledge is produced, shared, and valued.
We invite proposals for collaborations, events, and co-authored experiments from researchers, artists, educators, community organisations, and industry partners interested in transversal practice.
Project team
Project lead - Dr Teoma Naccarato
Teoma Naccarato is a choreographer and media artist whose hybrid performance-installations explore the mediation of bodies and identities within techno-cultures. Working across live, livestream, durational, and one-to-one formats, her practice critically engages with surveillance and biomedical technologies to examine how these systems shape cultural perceptions of health, agency, and embodiment.
Read moreOnline Transversal Reading Group
Movement Philosophy — Rethinking Motion and Meaning
The first project under Transversal Imaginaries is an online reading group exploring how movement functions as a mode of knowing across disciplines.
By movement philosophy, we refer to a transdisciplinary field that considers movement not only as a physical act but as a way of sensing, thinking, and relating. Movement is fundamental to how we understand the world—from the cellular and microscopic to planetary and cosmic scales—but aesthetic, technological, and cultural frameworks influence which movements are seen, valued, and made intelligible.
Across diverse contexts—dance, medicine, architecture, computation, and philosophy—practices of movement analysis encode systems of meaning and power. This reading group invites participants from any discipline to explore these dynamics, examining how aesthetic and ethical choices about movement reflect and shape broader social, technological, and scientific imaginaries.
The series follows a transversal structure, adapted from the Dance Computing Studies Reading Group (2020–2022), which Naccarato co-moderated with John MacCallum and Jessica Rajko. In this context, transversal means reading laterally across texts, sharing interpretive responsibility, and holding space for difference without requiring consensus.
Each transversal round involves three dedicated “readers,” each introducing one of three selected texts to the group. Over the next three weeks, the texts rotate among the readers so that each is re-presented three times—each time by a new reader offering a fresh perspective. This process allows us to read through one another’s interpretations, surfacing critical differences and productive tensions in understanding.
The objectives of this structure are to:
- read laterally across materials while attending to their specificity;
- distribute interpretive responsibility rather than relying on designated experts; and
- foster generative tension between perspectives.
Additional opportunities for collaboration
Transversal Imaginaries is building momentum toward a larger programme of research and partnership in the coming years. We’re actively seeking collaborators interested in:
- Transdisciplinary and cross-sector research
- Experimental and equitable pedagogies
- Institutional change in education
- Movement-based knowledge systems
- Practice-based and community-rooted inquiry
- Intersectional approaches to decolonisation, technology, and care
If you’re interested in co-developing an event, contributing to a future roundtable, reading group, or resource, or learning more about the longer-term vision, please reach out: