Art, media and design research and practice: views of educators in a ‘new’ Australian university

Abstract

During the late 1980s and early 1990s further and higher education in the UK and Australia underwent restructuring, bringing institutional mergers and the transformation of institutes of technology and colleges of education into ‘new’ universities. Vocational fields, including the creative arts and industries of design and film, came into the higher education sector and had to now adjust their vocational creative focus to include research. The development of a research culture was pursued through a range of strategies, including the ‘doctoring’ of staff, the development of ‘creative’ practice-based alternatives to traditional PhDs and research outputs, and the recruitment of research-qualified academics from other fields. This qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews conducted over 2006–2007 examined research views and aspirations of 53 full-time and part-time lecturers in design, media and arts fields in an Australian university of technology. Drawing on concepts from Gee’s D/discourse analysis, this paper explores how visual arts (design and media) educators’ positions regarding research are informed by their identities in communities of practice. Employing a constructivist grounded theory approach; interview analysis suggests that conflicting discourses around practice, profession, industry, and research in practitioner and academic communities of practice present significant challenges to identities in these fields.

Keywords:

• design research
• profession
• practice-based
• industry
• educators
• Australia