Contextsimportant of course, but an exclusive emphasis on writing for a public audience is
rather limiting. it also contributes to the sense that not only is writing a daunting
activity, but also that it should be deferred to the end of the project, writing up.
Thinking of writing as methodology or reflection suggests a more flexible and organic
approach and can situate writing at the heart of the research. This may be especially
important where the researcher is themselves a central methodological tool, as in
action research, observational research or research involving the researcher’s own arts
or design practice. Writing can provide a means of objectifying subjective experience
and rendering it usable as research material, as evidence. in a similar way, writing
as reflection can serve any research project, providing the researcher with a means
of documenting and thinking about the progress of the project, alongside visual or
other forms of documentation. doctoral students who use the written word in this
way are likely to find the more formal writing needed for the thesis less onerous and
daunting. it may be that doctoral students in the creative arts and design are already
discovering this for themselves and moving beyond the writing paradigms more familiar
to their supervisors. The phd research blog is now becoming commonplace, with some
students using the form as a central repository of research information, others as an
ongoing reflective dialogue, and yet others as a methodological tool and means of
communication with a global reach.
Ethicsexplicit consideration of research ethics is relatively new to the creative arts and
design. By this i do not mean that ethical considerations have been absent from
creative arts and design practice; indeed i think one of the issues is how the latter
can be used to constructively inform the former, but rather that research ethics has
generally been considered the province of disciplines like health and social science. But
it would be wrong to think that other disciplines have formulated ethical practices and
procedures that the creative arts and design can simply adopt. ethics is the subject of
considerable debate currently across many subject areas. no doubt this is partly driven
by concerns about institutional accountability, but the debates are more complex and
wide- ranging, and involve issues which should be of interest and concern to arts- based
researchers, for example the way in which digital technologies facilitate the storage
and dissemination of information, particularly visual information. in this context,
rather than claiming some sort of special position, or turning our back on the ethics
debates, arts- based researchers should be active participants in the discussion; we have
something important to contribute. To take one example, i recently participated in a
focus group discussion on visual research ethics.^16 a majority of the participants were
social scientists, though the group also included a university retained legal practitioner.
much of the discussion was given over to issues of anonymity and the protection
of vulnerable research participants. in cases where research participants had used
photography to record aspects of their lives, some researchers had either excluded or
‘anonymized’ images (i.e. by blocking out faces and other identifiers) for subsequent
presentations or publications. seen from a social science perspective this might appear
to be good practice, in line with practice in dealing with textual identifiers. however,
clearly such research projects are engaging young people in creative visual projects, of