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Margaret Mahony Stoljar (ed), Redefining Research in the Arts and Humanities

Page history last edited by angaaefonu@... 13 years, 10 months ago

"Creative Investigation: Redefining Research in the Arts and Humanities"

Margaret Mahony Stoljar (ed.)

Papers from the 1995 Symposium of the AAH, The Australian Academy of Humanities (Canberra:1996)

 

 

This book is a collection of papers presented at the 1995 annual symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.  It contains the annual lecture by David Malouf, which is an investigation of the past and how it relates to us, and three sessions. Each session contains many papers that deal with different elements of research and suggests redefining research within the arts forms in order to have a new radical innovative structure.

 

I found the first session is the most interesting one. It has three papers that deal with different art forms, music, choreography and drama, theatre, performance. In the first session while the first two papers focus on research within the art forms, the third one, which is the most interesting one, explores how the relationship between the discipline and research it serves, affects the research and reflects into it.  Gay McAuley puts here a very strong argument. His main idea is that the way we articulate and conceptualise the discipline determines the research paradigm because the nature of research is bound up with the academic discipline it serves, and if we need to change the research structure we should change the discipline itself. This is quite true if we perceive it as how the language and power embodied in each other: 

     “When you dominate the language you dominate the landscape, the power is shifting” (Dean Merlino 2008 Seminar Room PGD in CCD, Centre for Ideas VCA.)

 

That means we need to understand the nature of the diverse character of performing arts and its disciplines in the academia. In a time where the oral character of cultural production is prominent, this understanding will require a new way of examining research practice in the Arts that could be valuable and recognisable in the institutional mechanism.

     “In the overwhelming dominance of the verbal languages through which ideas are generally expressed, the notion that there are other languages which serve different kinds of ideas struggle for credibility.” (Gay McAuley, p34)

 

The book is not about using the art as a definite research method but is about understanding art and the research in the art context and this is in my opinion an important step for using the art as research method.

 

- Majid Shokr 30 April 2010

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