foundationsThe ongoing debate around what would be academic research in areas of creative
practice is a symptom of these being two distinct communities holding different values.
each is dissatisfied when it does not find in research what it thinks is significant.
We have already shown that the academic community conventionalizes its actions
and expectations, and that doing something that is recognized as academic research
means producing something that satisfies those expectations. Rather than being
logically determined, conventions are socially determined. it becomes meaningless for
the practice community to say that the academic community is wrong about what is
significant in academic research. similarly, it is meaningless for academics to say that
the professional community is wrong about what is significant in creative practice.
The individual communities are the ones who are responsible for identifying what is
of value and therefore what will be significant to them. as a consequence of the hasty
academicization of the creative practice community, we have identified dissatisfaction
in both communities. The coherence between values and actions that had satisfied
each community prior to academicization has been broken. With the consequent lack
of coherence between values and actions comes dissatisfaction.
Sources of dissatisfactiondissatisfaction emerges from the lack of meaning of a given action. The same action or
concept may exist in core activities that are undertaken in both the academic and the
creative practice communities; however, they will be meaningful in different ways. For
example, the role of personal or subjective experience in practice is not exclusive to
the creative practice community, as any researcher in any area would also have ‘lived
experiences’. however, the role of subjective experience in creative practice is different
from its role in the sciences, for example. in the latter case, the subjectivity that
accompanies experience is usually seen as an undesired variable that is to be controlled
rather than enhanced. This is owing to the value that the scientific community places
on the ‘objectivity of facts’. all research actions that are performed in response to an
activity that a community undertakes are networked according to what that community
values. however, this network need not be explicit, conscious, systematic, transferable,
etc., which are all properties of how the academic community would interconnect the
concepts that are meaningful to them towards forming an argument.
The differences between the academic community and the practice community
emerge at the fundamental level of values. This difference, when these two communities
are pushed together, leads to each being dissatisfied. There are aspects of the research
model that satisfy the academic community but that do not satisfy the practice
community. The research model described above is composed of the question and
answer, method, knowledge and audience; is coherent with the value of accumulation
but leaves aspects of the creative practice values dissatisfied. on the other hand, the
actions that satisfy the creative practice community because they are coherent with
their values, when seen by the academic community, are meaningless towards the
construction of a significant research activity.
one very apparent point of tension between these two communities is the non-
linguistic output. given that one academic convention is that a written document of
a determined length and in a determined format is expected as a thesis, the practice