The ‘poietic’ turn: creative arts research in the academy

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with creative arts practices as forms of knowing, and as forms capable of expressing this knowing. Our aim here is to make sense of the factors that have driven creative artists into the university over the last three decades, and to articulate how creative practices function in the present ‘research’ context. We argue that, after three decades of creative arts practice aligning to university notions of ‘research’, something important is happening to both. We think a ‘poietic turn’ is underway within university research that may have profound implications for scholarship and for the sector more broadly. In making this case we consider what, historically, creative arts have brought to the university and why, and we reflect on this thing called ‘research’ and where it is heading. Finally, we suggest that creative arts methods and practices (that constitute this ‘poietic turn’) may offer important tools through which scholars can understand and respond to the forms of personal, communal, and global stewardship required for our contemporary times.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative practice
• poietics
• research
• arts-based research
• creative arts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a discussion of three case studies regarding the ways in which creative arts’ approaches can capture new understandings unable to be secured via traditional research methods, see Mees and Murray (2019).

2. Non-Traditional Research Output (NTRO) is a common term in Australia used to describe all artefacts, exhibitions, performances, digital or visual media, novels, poetry, and creative non-fiction. This is in distinction to ‘traditional research outputs’ such as scholarly journal articles and books. The term NTRO is also used to describe ‘research reports’, however we don’t include them in this discussion.

3. In the results of the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), for example – in Unit of Assessment (UoA) 34 (Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory) – more than a third of research outputs were non-text media, including artefacts, exhibitions, performances, designs, digital or visual media (REF2014 Main Panel D Overview Report, 86–87). While the panel did observe that the traditional text-based research outputs of authored books, edited books, book chapters and journal articles still comprised 57% of the total submission, they also noted that creative arts research was growing. In the Unit of Assessment UOA 35 (Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts), non-text media accounted for 42% of music outputs and 22% of Drama, Dance and Performing Arts outputs (REF2014 Main Panel D Overview Report, 94 & 96). In Australia, from data gathered during the 2015 Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) exercise, in the commensurate Field of Research (FOR) code 19 (Studies in Creative Arts and Writing), Non-Traditional Research Outputs (NTROs – all outputs that are not in ‘traditional’ forms such as academic monographs, edited books, book chapters, journal articles and conference papers) accounted for 52% of research outputs (6738 of 12,940 total). More recently, as captured in the ERA 2018 exercise, NTROs although down slightly, still constituted 49% of all research outputs in the 19 code (5950 of 12,157 total) (Australian Research Council website). It should be noted that we are not comparing like-for-like between the UK and Australia, given that novels, poetry and other text-based arts are counted as NTROs in the Australian ERA count. Anecdotal evidence suggests NTROs are increasing in US universities also.

4. Sadly, there is a significant caveat. While the ‘research’ context may be changing across the sector, the general working conditions and issues of academic workload have not. Post-Covid, Bell’s expressed concerns regarding the potential of high teaching and administration workloads compromising creative practice and research production are even more valid, these conditions impactscholars across the sector.

5. It is unlikely this would have been the case a decade ago in Australia, see Petkovic (2014). However, since 2013 the Australian Research Council has funded a number of projects promising significant creative outputs, including screen-works (ie. Kathryn Millard’s feature-documentary Shock Room (2015), via ARC DP130101108 and Tom Murray'’s feature documentary The Skin of Others (2020) via ARC DE140100878), and major visual arts installations (ie. Lucas Ihlein’s exhibition Sugar vs the Reef, via ARC DE160101136).

6. There is also an extensive literature on creative-practice and higher-degree research (the creative-arts PhD). See, for example Duxbury, Elizabeth, and Waite (2008). Pedagogy, higher-degree research and creative practice is not the subject of this paper.

7. See McNiff (1998, 2013), Eisner (2002), Barone and Eisner (2012), Chilton and Leavy (2014).

8. Research creation is a formal term within the main Canadian funding body (SSHRC). Pioneers of research-creation include Springgay (2008 et al; 20222022), Chapman and Sawchuck (2012), Manning (2016), Loveless (2019). See also Truman et al.(2020).

9. Discussions on ‘practice’ owe a debt to the work of Donald Schön (1983). Some key theorists include Sullivan (2005), Barrett and Bolt (2007, 2014), Smith and Dean (2009), Webb (2012, 2015) and Gibson (2010). From a European perspective: Borgdorff (2006), Kjørup (2010). Kälvemark (2010) has written about ‘practice-based research’ and government policy, and the pioneering role of creative arts scholars from Britain, Australia and Finland (p.6).

10. Brad Haseman (2006) considered the dynamics and significance of practice-led research and argued for it to be understood as a research strategy within an entirely new research paradigm. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, Haseman named the paradigm ‘performative research’ and suggested that it stands as an alternative to traditional qualitative and quantitative paradigms.

11. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021, italics indicate verbatim Frascati Manual definition 2015, 44.

12. The 2015 edition allows for ‘universities or other specialised institutions’ to make assessments on whether ‘artistic practice’ can be determined as research, concluding that ‘research in the humanities and the arts can be included in R&D in so far as their own internal requirements for identifying the “scientific” nature of such research are met’ (Frascati Manual 2015, 64, 65 & 75). Artistic practice is research insofar as institutions establish its resemblance to science. Similarly, the value of ‘traditional [Indigenous] knowledge’ only becomes relevant when scientific methods are applied ‘to study traditional knowledge’, or through the use of a ‘scientific-based approach to establishing the content of traditional knowledge’ (Frascati Manual 2015, 75–6). In other words, science-knowledge must first colonize Indigenous-knowledge before it can become accountable within a domain it describes as ‘research’.

13. In Australia, research outputs (from 1992) were counted towards Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) points, and the accumulation of these points were part of the metrics by which Australian universities received national government funding in a category known as ‘Research Block Grants’.

14. The Bologna process was a series of formalized agreements derived from the Paris (1998), Bologna (1999) and Lisbon Declarations (2000). These agreements were designed to standardize the diverse national systems of higher education across the continent into one competitive and enlarged European ‘educational market’. The logic of the process was to develop a more cost-effective, efficient, consistent, and attractive tertiary system that could compete with English-speaking countries such as the US, UK, Canada, and Australia in the lucrative global student market for course fees (Lorenz 2006, 126–128).

15. See, for example, Stewart-Harawira (2015).

16. At the time, Clifford Geertz cautioned that if anthropology had any chance of continuing as ‘an intellectual force in contemporary culture’, then ethnographers needed to explore the possibilities of ‘imaginative writing about real people in real places at real times’ (1988, 141).

17. See for example Ruth Behar’s(1996) The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that breaks your heart, and Kirin Narayan’s(2019) Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov.

18. For example, Behar notes of writing: ‘a personal voice, if creatively used, can lead the reader, not into miniature bubbles of navel-gazing, but into the enormous sea of serious social issues’ (1996)¹.

1. We, the authors, wish to thank Karen Pearlman for her ongoing engagement with our work, including her insights regarding creative arts research in universities. Thank you to those researchers who provided helpful feedback on our paper (Peter Doyle, Bronwen Neil, and the anonymous peer reviewers), and to Chief Editor of Continuum, Panizza Allmark, for her facilitation and encouragement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [FT190100687,FT210100241].

Notes on contributors

Tom Murray

Tom Murray is a writer/director/producer and Associate Professor in screen media and creative arts at Macquarie University, Australia. His award-winning feature documentaries include: Dhakiyarr vs the King, In My Father’s Country, Love in Our Own Time, and The Skin of Others. This work has won major screen and scholarly awards and been selected in some of the world’s most prestigious festivals. In 2019 he was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship with a screen documentary as a major research output. He is Founding Director of the Creative Documentary Research Centre.

Kate Rossmanith

Kate Rossmanith is a nonfiction writer and an Associate Professor at Macquarie University, Australia. She researches narrative and emotion in legal processes, as well as creative nonfiction forms. In 2021 she was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. She is the author of Small Wrongs: How we really say sorry in love, life and law (nominated for national and international literary awards), and co-editor of the scholarly collection Remorse and Criminal Justice: Multi-disciplinary perspectives. Kate is co-founder and Deputy Director of the Creative Documentary Research Centre, leading the portfolio 'Writing, Language, Narrative’.