The Devil’s Interval: Grand Challenges and Transdisciplinarity in the Anthropocene

New kinds of transdisciplinary thinking have been promoted as a way of addressing the ‘Grand Challenges’ and ‘perma-crises’ associated with the Anthropocene. Often, however, they (inadvertently) maintain the social sciences and humanities in a subservient position. The ‘elemental turn’ and other forms of planetary thought show renewed interest in, and engagement with, the sciences – but they also reinforce problematic assumptions about the relation between ‘science’ and other practices, and about the traffic and direction of knowledge. In this article, we develop an understanding of the nature of transdisciplinary instruction that does not rely on a global dichotomy between the sciences and humanities. We elaborate two contingent series, one of (Western) science and reason and one of madness and unreason. The series communicates through dissonance rather than consonance across a plane stretched between them, which we call the devil’s interval . This is where novel concepts travel. In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of the devil’s interval for joint transdisciplinary instruction.