The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

researCh training in the Creative arts and design

the creative professions and creative arts education has multiple dimensions; where
some see the potential to dissolve or at least weaken the boundaries between creative
practice and academic research, others are wary of an ‘academic drift’ that may prevent
some of the most outstanding practitioners’ promotion within the academy (Chapter
1).^9 i think the shape of our field is such that is not desirable for the phd to become a
prerequisite for an academic career; we are not like history or chemistry. But i do not
think it is a question any longer of whether there is a place for research and doctoral
study in the creative arts and design. however, this graduation if you like, serves only
to propel arts- based research into the busy thoroughfare of the research mainstream,
where it will (and indeed should) be expected to hold its own. it is here that we,
as supervisors and active researchers, now find ourselves and here that we and our
students will find challenges and opportunities to which we will need to respond. i
want to mention three: interdisciplinarity; the relationship between visual arts and
design practice and writing; and research ethics.

Interdisciplinarity

The challenges and the opportunities of interdisciplinary engagements loom large over
much of the research going on in our field, and are international in their scope. i am
sure that many in the creative arts and design would regard the visual as being squarely
within their domain. Yet, if you take a look at what is going on in the world of academic
publishing you will find a vast array of books published over the past five to ten years on
visual methods, visual research, visual studies and so on. Very few of these have been
authored by those in the traditionally practice- based disciplines. The majority issue
from new work in anthropology and sociology, which has invested heavily in research
concerned with visual and sensory forms of knowledge and experience. equally inter-
esting i think is the way in which the language of practice- based research has escaped
from the studio. The sociology department at goldsmiths College, london, for exam-
ple, now offers a practice- based phd route,^10 which offers students:

the opportunity to combine written sociological argument with film, sound,

or photographic representation. It will offer new researchers the opportunity

to re- think both the conduct of social research and the forms social research

writing take in the 21st century’.^11

as an aside, the approach to quantifying visual work is refreshingly pragmatic:
a phd involves a video or sound feature of approximately an hour in length, or a
photographic project consisting of no more than 100 images; the figures for mphil are
30 minutes and 60 photographs respectively. Whilst academics in the creative arts
and design expended considerable time and effort debating definitions of research in
their disciplines, others less worried about definitions have been busy getting on with
it. now of course one could argue that there are fundamental differences between how
sociologists think about images, and what they want to do with them, and how visual
arts practitioners think about and use images. But whilst partly true this seems a little
dangerous and short sighted. Visual images are not something that can be kept locked
up in a laboratory or studio, brought out like some precious store of radium only for the