Cr/ía is an outward-facing and interdisciplinary hub for arts-centred research across and beyond the College of Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities. With a shared commitment to foregrounding the value of the arts – socially, and as a form of knowledge – our work has two inter-linked strands:
Creative Research: Art as knowledge, language and method
This strand centres on how arts-based methods can be used to access forms of knowledge that exceed the written or spoken word and generate – with communities and across disciplinary boundaries – new ways and forms of understanding. Lead: Dr Alice Tilche
Arts-based research methods are increasingly used across disciplines and become especially pertinent as institutions work to decolonize their approaches to knowledge. Research has been dominated by the ‘articulable’ – that which can be said, heard, written and read in the realm of words, but there are languages that involve alternative epistemologies and processes of knowing: those of physicality, of the labouring body, image, sound and rhythm. By centering the body, image and sound, arts-based research methods enable experiences to be released from the primacy of text and speech. Arts-based research, furthermore, has the potential to impact concerns typically linked to social sciences fields, thereby also strengthening an argument for the value of art in research.
Instituting Art: Arts at the conjunction of practice, place, public and policy
This strand centres on / collaborates with the diverse institutional formations that allow art to exist within public realms, and thus shape / be shaped by wider social and cultural dynamics and attitudes. Lead: Dr Isobel Whitelegg
Art does not come to exist socially and gain wider relevance and meaning without the varied institutional forms that enable artforms to be learned, produced, and placed into a public realm. Both historically, and in the present day, attitudes towards art – and the value we place on its existence – are contingent on structures of power and influence that enable a diverse art-institutional ecology to thrive, diverse communities to find expression, and new cultural attitudes to be forged (or contested). By placing arts-centred public institutions at the centre of our research, we foreground who art is for and what it contributes to social life, while enhancing the visibility and value of art-institutional forms that exceed the museum and art gallery model.
Co-Leads: Dr Alice Tilche and Dr Isobel Whitelegg
Core members: Dr Stacy Boldrick, Prof. Corinne Fowler, Dr Rosemary Shirley