Two Drew University professors want to know what happens to grief, intuition and trust when the world insists on reducing human experience to data points.

Merel Visse, director of medical humanities at Drew's Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, and Ryan Woodring, a professor of digital media, have assembled 55 international collaborators for an interdisciplinary research project exploring what they call "apophasis" — a concept of knowing through unknowing. The project's central question: what gets lost when only what can be named, sorted and counted is treated as real? The pair announced the initiative in a Drew University news release.

Two very different backgrounds, one shared question.

Visse brings decades of research into experiences that resist language altogether. Woodring, who earned his MFA from Rutgers, works in post-digital art focused on undiagnosed illness. Together, they've pulled in artists, writers, researchers, chaplains, poets, biologists, hospice nurses, historians and professors from around the world — a genuinely unusual mix for a single research project.

A public course that starts this month.

The first public event is a two-day intensive course at Drew's Madison campus on Aug. 29 and 30, open to both traditional and nontraditional students. Rather than building toward tidy conclusions, the course leans into process over results, using what the professors call apophatic strategies to surface the parts of participants' own research that resist easy answers. One enrolled participant, Gitanjali Chhabra, uses poetic inquiry — built on subtraction, silence and incompleteness — to address what can't be fully said in public commentary on higher education. Guest facilitators include William Franke, Kythe Heller, Béatrice Machet, John F. Simon Jr. and Ruby J. Thelot.

"Insight of this kind doesn't arrive on a schedule," Visse said. "It usually comes sideways. You're doing something else. Then you notice it."

After the two-day course wraps, participants can keep going through optional weekly Zoom calls with mentors.