A long, intense and fulfilling day. It was the first session of the Introduction to Practice as Research unit.
I chose this module because since I graduated from my Masters (Documentary Photography & Photojournalism) in 2017 I have been trying to understand and formulate my own research process. I am never quite sure if it is ‘correct’ and I am always curious about how other artists, particularly photographers gather their information. Interestingly when working with students and their projects this is not an issue and it feels easy and right to suggest that they cast their own research net wide.
Looking at my own bookshelves, web browser and hard drives, especially at material I have collected over the last five years, it is clear that I have been trying to create a formula or a structure which would enable me to extract maximum information from my research.
In anticipation of the module I had reserved some books from the university library. A couple were from the reading list and some were sourced by browsing the digital shelves. Of the latter group one of the titles that I found was Doing Your Research Project, (Bell and Waters, 1987).
The opening pages around approaches to research have already given me cause reconsider my own practice. Whilst my work is not specifically about seeking solutions it does involve other people and the gathering of qualitative data which will stimulate conversations around specific topics.
“Because the activity of action research almost inevitable affects others, it is important to have clear idea of when where the action research necessarily steps out the bounds of collecting information which is purely personal and relating to the practitioners alone. Where it does so, the usual standard of ethics much be observed: permissions obtained, confidentiality maintain, identities protected.” (Denscombe 2010a: 132)
For this session we were asked to read an extract from How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation (Loveless, 2019) and note one idea that we took from her idea of research-creation. The extract was two short but powerful paragraphs. Both of which resonated with me.
“the next logical, research-creational, pedagogical, step is this: to open the university up not only to different writerly vocalities, as decades of feminist, literary, Indigenous, critical race, deconstructive, and performance studies (the list goes on) scholars have done, but also to different tangible forms (for example, a song, beadwork, a performance, or a video installation) as valid modes of rendering research public.“
This first suggestion of opening up the university struck a chord as that morning I had been listening to the podcast Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast (6 Jan 2021) about the Bauhaus school and the interviewee Nicolas Fox Weber (founder of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation) stated that Anni Albers saw no distinction between craft and art. I think he was alluding to the boundaries sometimes created by academic or the art market establishment.
“It is with this in mind that I proposed to my students the following – slightly opaque – provocation as central to research-creation in its strong form: the crafting of a research question is the crafting of a story that is also the crafting of an ethics. Following this, in a room full of students who self-identified as art historians and artists (along with a few sociologists and performance studies students), I, perhaps even more provocatively, proposed research-creation as a methodology that, therefore, necessarily sidesteps disciplinary allegiance.“
This second paragraph where she proposes to her students ‘research-creation as a methodology’ as a way of stepping outside of the boundaries of their major creative discipline, made me think about a conversation and a question that arose in one of our earlier seminars.
- are subject based departments the best way to organise research teaching?
I was recalling my own experience on my Masters where I was given the option to attend one module from another course (Photography Arts). It was still related to my core discipline of photography but the module content Photography & Aesthetics was very much inline with my interests and the direction I felt my practise was going toward regarding issues of identity, belonging and values.
It was a rich period of learning that expanded my personal network and led to the realisation that the lines between documentary and photographic art are becoming blurred. This of course brings into question where the boundaries of ethics lie.
The title of this post is a quote from John O’Reilly the co-leader of this unit. I will elaborate in another post why this has stuck in my mind.