1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

Edited By Michael Biggs, Henrik Karlsson Copyright 2011
    488 Pages
    by Routledge

    488 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts is a major collection of new writings on research in the creative and performing arts by leading authorities from around the world. It provides theoretical and practical approaches to identifying, structuring and resolving some of the key issues in the debate about the nature of research in the arts which have surfaced during the establishment of this subject over the last decade.

    Contributions are located in the contemporary intellectual environment of research in the arts, and more widely in the universities, in the strategic and political environment of national research funding, and in the international environment of trans-national cooperation and communication. The book is divided into three principal sections – Foundations, Voices and Contexts – each with an introduction from the editors highlighting the main issues, agreements and debates in each section.

    The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts addresses a wide variety of concepts and issues, including:

    • the diversity of views on what constitutes arts-based research and scholarship, what it should be, and its potential contribution
    • the trans-national communication difficulties arising from terminological and ontological differences in arts-based research
    • traditional and non-traditional concepts of knowledge, their relationship to professional practice, and their outcomes and audiences
    • a consideration of the role of written, spoken and artefact-based languages in the formation and communication of understandings.

    This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of arts-based research by setting down a framework for addressing these, and other, topical issues. It will be essential reading for research managers and policy-makers in research councils and universities, as well as individual researchers, research supervisors and doctoral candidates.

    List of Figures Notes on Contributors Permissions Preface Forewords Helga Nowotny and Hans-Peter Schwarz Part I: Foundations Chapter 1: University Politics and Practice-based Research Torsten Kälvemark Chapter 2: Pleading for Plurality: artistic and other kinds of research Søren Kjørup Chapter 3: The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research Henk Borgdorff Chapter 4: Some Notes on Mode 1 and Mode 2: adversaries or dialogue partners? Halina Dunin-Woyseth Chapter 5: Communities, Values, Conventions and Actions Michael Biggs and Daniela Büchler Chapter 6: Artistic Cognition and Creativity Graeme Sullivan Chapter 7: The Role of the Artefact and Frameworks for Practice-based Research Linda Candy and Ernest Edmonds Chapter 8: Embodied Knowing Through Art Mark Johnson Part II: Voices Chapter 9: Rhetoric: Writing, Reading and Producing the Visual Joan Mullin Chapter 10: Research and the Self Morwenna Griffiths Chapter 11: Addressing the ‘Ancient Quarrel’: creative writing as research Jen Webb and Donna Lee Brien Chapter 12: The Virtual and the Physical: a phenomenological approach to performance research Susan Kozel Chapter 13: Navigating in Heterogeneity: architectural thinking and art based research Catharina Dyrssen Chapter 14: Insight and Rigour: a Freudo-Lacanian approach Malcolm Quinn Chapter 15: Transformational Practice: on the place of material novelty in artistic change Stephen Scrivener Chapter 16: Time and Interaction: research through non-visual arts and media Henrik Frisk and Henrik Karlsson Chapter 17: Thinking About Art after the Media: research as practised culture of experiment Siegfried Zielinski Part III: Contexts Chapter 18: Characteristics of Visual and Performing Arts Annette Arlander Chapter 19: Differential Iconography Henk Slager Chapter 20: Writing and the PhD in Fine Art Katy Macleod & Lin Holdridge Chapter 21: Research Training in the Creative Arts and Design Darren Newbury Chapter 22: No Copyright and No Cultural Conglomerates: new opportunities for artists Joost Smiers Chapter 23: Evaluating Quality in Artistic Research Michael Biggs & Henrik Karlsson References Index

    Biography

    Michael Biggs is Professor of Aesthetics and former Associate Dean Research at the University of Hertfordshire, UK and Visiting Professor in Arts-based Research in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden. He coordinates a network of excellence in the field, and has published widely on research theory in the creative and performing arts.

    Henrik Karlsson is Assistant Professor in musicology, former research secretary at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and consultant to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. He headed the assessment of the Swedish Research Council’s grants to artistic research (Context-Quality-Continuity, 2007) and has edited a great number of anthologies in music and cultural sciences.

    "The practice-led PhD, which began in the U.K., is now ubiquitous in several parts of the world. As the doctorate becomes more settled in university life, it becomes increasingly important to reach a balanced understanding of its basic concepts, methods, and outcomes. What is artistic research? How does art create new knowledge? How can a PhD-level art exhibition be assessed for quality? This book is the first comprehensive look at concepts such as research, knowledge, creativity, the visual, experiment, quality, and assessment, as they are used in practice-based programmes influenced by the U.K. and E.U. models of higher education. Now that art is being taught in universities at the doctoral level, it may spur a fundamental rethinking of the university’s basic concepts of professionalism, community, and purpose. For that reason this book is also an irreplaceable resource for those interested in the coherence and idea of the university as a whole." James Elkins, The Art Institute of Chicago

    "[T]his is truly not a book for the faint of heart. Given the still ill-defined - and even controversial - moment in this embryonic field, this book serves as somewhat of a manifesto for the needfulness of the discipline... It certainly deserves a place on the shelf of any art library." - Margaretta S. Frederick, Art Libraries Journal