This years symposium will feature two keynote sessions that will be delivered asynchronously in advance of the main event to give delegates time to digest the ideas presented. Our keynotes are intended as triggers for our main panel discussions which will explore the keynotes provocations through discussion and debate.
Agnieszka Piotrowska
Creative Practice Research in the Age of Post Pandemic Confusion
Creative practice research is a new field which needs continuous interrogation around the terminology as well as with what it is that we are actually doing as creative practice researchers and what is our relationship to knowledge and politics. “Practice theory”, “practice-led research” or “practice-based theory”: these terms name a field that has become one of the most hotly debated topics in university education in recent years. In the humanities generally, but especially in the arts and creative industries, such an apparent synthesis of theory and practice recognizes creative work as a legitimate form of research. But, at the same time, it marks a trend to make higher education more vocational and more directly relevant to society, which can often simply mean a way to generate profit within the neoliberal university.
Following Hewlett, Bond and Hinrichs-Krapels’ 2017 publication The Creative Role of Research: Understanding Research in the Creative and Cultural Sector a range of astute observations emerged concerning long-standing issues relating to the role and understanding of creative practice in UK Higher Education, especially it’s social and cultural impact. But one wonders to what extent it replicates the desire to measure and commodify that which in essence is unmeasurable. An attempt to commodify it, and its impact could be not only counterproductive but also simply false, another iteration of fake news. How can we offer resistance to the endless pressures to make practice research less oblique and therefore less, well, creative.
I will suggest some reflections and also share my own experiences and my own practice work recently published in Screenworks. The work which was created in Zimbabwe in collaborative work with artists there. It was chosen by my previous institution as one of their impact cases. I will share my own experiences and challenges in making the work be treated as ‘a contribution to knowledge’ and what made it not just viable in the eyes of the REF managers but somehow desirable.
Biography
Professor Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is the Head of School for Film, Media and performing Arts at the University for the Creative Arts. She an award-winning filmmaker and theorist, best known for her film Married to the Eiffel Tower. She was a successful industry practitioner before doing her PhD under Stephen Frosh and Laura Mulvey (2012). Since then she has been making more experimental work and video essays as well as writing articles and books. She is the editor of Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness (2020), and the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (2014), Black and White: Cinema, Politics and the Arts in Zimbabwe (2017), and The Nasty Woman and the Neo Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema (2019,) the editor of Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis and Cinema (2015) and Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable). She was a finalist in the Times Higher Competition in 2018 in the category of Excellence and Innovation in the Arts. Her feature film Escape (2017) made in a collaborative partnership in Zimbabwe won a number of awards internationally and was banned in Zanzibar for its erotic content. Her new work just published in Screenworks (Repented) deals with intimacy in colonial times.
Desmond Bell
Valuing the research that artists and media makers actually do
What sort of research do practicing artists and media makers actually do? At first glance the majority of research conducted by artists seems predominantly concerned with professional and creative considerations rather than the disinterested pursuit of original knowledge of a propositional character. Indeed, the originality of such research resides in the creative work it facilitates. It is harnessed to the specific demands of what we might call “informed creative production”, rather than being concerned with abstract knowledge outcomes. So I ask, how do we get the academy to valorise such activity – often dismissed as mere “background research”?
Biography
Desmond Bell is a Research Fellow at the National College of Art and Design Dublin, where he was previously Head of Academic Affairs and Research. He has previously held chairs in media and film studies at the University of Ulster, Napier Edinburgh and Queens University, Belfast. He is an active film maker whose work has been shown at a range of international film festivals and broadcast by Irish and British television. His film ‘The Enigma of Frank Ryan’ can be seen (password: festivalsonly) HERE!