This is a Call for Papers for a panel session that is being proposed by the MeCCSA Practice Network to the organisers of the MeCCSA 2023 conference Glasgow Caledonian University on 4-6th September 2023. If your paper is selected to be part of the panel by the Practice Network committee, it will then be included in a combined panel proposal that the committee will subsequently submit to the MeCCSA conference organisers.
The MeCCSA Practice Network invites contributions on practice-based research, research for creative practice, practice as research or any other manifestation of practice as a research methodology.
In the light of the 2021 REF exercise this panel asks if there is now an opportunity to reappraise the nature, scope, and range of practice-based research. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UK’s system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. A process of peer review, the results of the assessment exercise not only determine intuitional funding. It also imposes an instrumental framework for reporting and evidencing research quality. Cursory examination of the range of practices submitted to the REF 2021 reveals that the notion of practice as a research methodology is not constrained by subject disciplinary categories, that there is spread, overlap and messiness around the notion of practice as a research methodology. Research value is no longer defined by disciplinary practice and is increasing multi-modal in form and practice. What might have been thought of as an expected set of practices for MeCCSA; journalism, photography, radio, film, video, and television. Now sits alongside and are entangled with; poetry, music, song-writing, fine art, voice coaching, immersive theatre, augmented reality, and other digital methods.
Consequently, this panel invites scholars to propose papers that aim to re-examine, redefine, recontextualise practice-based research for the 2020’s. To ask questions about the way in which we record, document, or communicate multi-modal forms of practice as research, and what is the value of practice as research to the wider community beyond academia.
We are particularly keen to see submissions that address any of the following or related topics listed below though this is merely indicative and is non-exclusive:
- Redefining & broadening the boundaries of creative practice research
- Finding the research in the practice
- Political and social responses to practice based research
- Legitimising creative freedom (and chaos) within academic research
- Defining (and broadening) dissemination practices for wider impact
- Cultural value and creative evaluation approaches
- Resisting the translation of practice into text.
- Finding authenticity in the process of practice as research.
We invite you to submit proposals in the form of a 250 word abstract, contact details, affiliation and short 150 word biography.
Please email your submission to roy.hanney@solent.ac.uk by by 20th January 2023.
The MeCCSA 2023 annual conference will take place at Glasgow Caledonian University on 4-6th September 2023.
https://www.meccsa.org.uk/events/conference/
Photo by Sandro Schuh on Unsplash