practice/research: debates and dialogues

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Practice/Research Debates and Dialogues

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Introductory presentation for MashingUp:Practice+Research symposium at CCA Glasgow, 19th May 2010. Part of a series of public events from the University of the West of Scotland's School of Creative and Cultural Industries. For more info visit http://uwspracticeresearch.blogspot.com

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Page 1: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

Practice/Research

Debates and Dialogues

Page 2: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

The social construction of ‘research’

• Many different traditions of enquiry• Dominated in the West by a particular version of

‘scientific rationality’• Social science attempts to bring a disciplined approach

to the study of society• But postmodernism critiques objectivity, rationality and

‘high’ culture as profoundly ideological – as constructs• For example: researching in/through popular music or

media studies, or participatory arts, is a complex hybrid making use of multiple perspectives

• Disciplinary boundaries under challenge; but a need to justify/defend the approaches/methods used

Page 3: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues
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MashingUp: research/practice• Conversational forms of learning

• Working between universities and other research/practice communities

• Network spaces: spaces which enable interchange

• Reflective practice: practitioners/professionals analysing and reflecting on their own situations/dilemmas

• co-construction of knowledge – we have technologies which enable more individualised learning interests

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…Using Youtube as piano tutor

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Distributed, networked forms of learning and researching?

Tech etc Blogs, web etc

More individualised, self-managed learning environments? Communication tools?

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What we’re doing at UWS

• Key relationships:• CCA, FACT Liverpool, Film City Glasgow, BBC, STV plus other

universities and colleges• We have multiple campuses, multiple programmes, multiple

interests so have to find ways of working together• Initiatives: Scottish Production Archive, Scottish Centre for

Island Studies, Glasgow Creative Enterprise Cluster, Scottish Centre for Enabling Technologies etc

• Trying to be a productive part of the cultural ecology of the West of Scotland and beyond

• Research in and through arts practice as well as publishing in more traditional journals and media

Page 8: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

High stakes research

• Who gets to produce knowledge?• What forms of knowledge are recognised, valued…

….and funded (Lyotard: mercantilization)• In universities, push towards instrumentalism and

performativity – justification in terms of ‘impact’ and economic applicability

• At same time, multiplying fields of study/methods/approaches/radical interdisciplinarity

• This has impact on professional identities• The entrepreneurial subject – professional identities in

education/business/commerce/the arts: policy/practice discourses construct subjectivities

Page 9: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

Practice/Research

• Practice-as-research (the mode of enquiry is also the form – i.e. dancer enquiring into the world physically, through choreography/artist as image-making

• Practice-led research (in which the research includes/is driven by practical enquiry)

• Practice-based research – research into or through practice

• Is it sometimes better to do “parallel” research rather than go into the hall of mirrors of self-reflection on practice? I.e. research analogous fields, not just a kind of narcissistic view of self – research should be enriching, not narrowing

Page 10: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

Researching art…

• Art as a form of knowledge (knowledge in and through art-making)

• Knowledge about art

(borrowed from Phil Tagg www.tagg.org, who in turn borrowed it from Herbert Read: knowledge about art, knowledge in/through art, knowledge for art)

Page 11: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

Ways of ‘knowing’

• Academic discourse privileges language• But artistic communication encompasses more

than language – music, art, dance, performance, image-making etc. Otherwise why wouldn’t we just write it?

• Writing, speaking and acting are different – academia often privileges writing and more ‘fixed’, apparently less fluid ways of knowing

• Academic research requires argumentation and ‘proof’ – can practice provide this?

Page 12: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

‘Theory’ and ‘practice’

• Theory – theorein (Greek) – to see – contemplate - essentially to think about

• Practica – to do, practice (complex word)• Praxis – the interplay between theory and practice –

reflection in action

Underpinning every practice there are sets of theories – an implied ways of seeing the world – worldviews, standpoints, set of values and learned behaviours – research unpacks this.

Raymond Williams: from medium to social practice: making work in the arts and media, (we can reify the products as ‘objects’ AND think about them as a social practice).

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praxis…?

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Interweaving theory and practice

• Practice is embodied, intuitive, discursive, improvisatory – but isn’t theory too?

• Highly skilled disciplinary knowledge requires ‘soft’ intuition as well as teleological thinking

• Chance and accident can play a useful role Narrative and autobiography as a starting point for

thinking about evolution of practice

• Sophisticated research cultures blend the formal and informal in reflective communities of practice

Page 15: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

different approaches?A methodological menu

• Reflective practice –(Schon)• Action research• Embodied practice – e.g. knowledge about/learned skills in performance,

communication in dance/acting/music etc• Participatory methods – documenting, storytelling, narrating, mapping, gathering

information, • Collaborative research – with artists and arts organisations beyond the university• Applied, critical theory – mobilising theory to illuminate, analyse and understand

practice• Is design research a useful analogy? Practical and applied problem solving – the

designer as the new hero of the performative academy, because the work is ‘useful’?

• Researching practice – learning and showing how to do things better, more skilfully - in applied ways

• Reflexivity (Bourdieu) –– research is itself a form of practice with its own internal logics – “objectification of the process of objectification”

Page 16: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

Overview of symposium

Perspectives on practitioner-research: Creativities: • individual/artistic• Participatory• Products/outputAcknowledging that artistic/academic/researcher identities are

complexMultiple perspectivesFocus on active, engaged approaches Raising some questions…

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KnowledgeIn traditional research/schooling – “acquiring knowledge is largely separated

from the situations in which, through knowing in action, knowledge is constructed and used” (Gordon Wells)

(Friere – ‘banking’ theory of education)

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…and knowing (in action)We mobilise knowledge through practice.

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Implications…

• So how do universities enable this? More reflexive? Dialogical? Multiple spaces and relationships? Resources needed for this?

• What is the role of the practitioner-academic in this knowledge ecology?

• How should we work differently?

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Open knowledge ecologies?

Lyotard: Postmodern Science as the Search for Instabilities

Publishing – new ecologies, new economies, but also old rivalries and status games

Ownership vs free culture/open source…IP issues etc

Page 21: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

Contradictions, glitches, fissures, not just seamless network culture: power struggles; institutions are difficult

Page 22: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

Universities don’t have a monopoly on innovation or research…far from it…!

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Creativity and ‘research’

The point is to generate the new

• Research processes – discovery, invention, synthesis, analysis

• Arriving at a method in and through the process – not just grounded theory

• More creative cultures in institutions require more creative approaches to time, space and resources..and the will to make collaborations work properly

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“If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

(Albert Einstein)

Page 27: Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

Contacts/web

generalpraxis.blogspot.com

Graham.Jeffery [at] uws.ac.uk

uwspracticeresearch.blogspot.com

uwscreative.blogspot.com

twitter.com/grahamjefferytwitter.com/UWScreative