university PoLiti Cs and Pra Cti Ce-based researChThe thick manual entitled RAE 2008. Panel criteria and working methods: Panel O
for the arts and cultural spheres that the British Rae (Research assessment exercise)
issued in 2006 is a rigorous, detailed schedule that is impossible to apply, since our
university systems are so dissimilar (Rae 2006). other difficulties are that language
and terminology for quality assessments in the artistic research category are lacking, and
that the university colleges of fine arts, and practitioners themselves, only reluctantly
commit such assessments to paper.
although sweden has quite a rigorous quality control regime in place, it has so far
not covered the evaluation of research in institutions and departments on a regular
basis. it has been up to the swedish Research Council or other national bodies to
assess the quality of research. in the case of externally funded research in the arts this
was done in 2007 when the already mentioned international group of experts were
commissioned with a review of the research projects in the creative and performing arts
which had been funded by the Research Council since 2001.
i have personally had some experience of the debate on the national level in sweden
over the last few years and i may be excused for presenting in some detail the problems
encountered in quality assessment and research funding in this country
The background is to be found in a research policy bill back in the year 2000 when
the swedish government decided to set aside special funds for research in and through
the arts. The money was allocated to the swedish Research Council with a mandate
to distribute the support according to normal procedures for the funding of research
projects. an annual budget of some 20 million swedish crowns (approximately 2
million euros) was allocated. The Council set up a special expert panel to review and
assess the projects submitted from the art schools.
This committee in turn reported to a wider body of researchers from the entire area
of humanities and social sciences. as expected, conflicts arose rapidly with regard to
the quality of the artistic projects. professors and teachers from established academic
disciplines looked with some suspicion at the funding of projects that they had problems
in judging based on their conventional academic experience.
it is easy to understand the tensions that arose between the proponents of artistic
research and the representatives of well- established subject areas. it must be admitted
that some of the projects financed by the special committee for artistic research (and
i was one of the members) were not always scrutinized in a way similar to that which
people in the academic community were used to.
one of the most obvious problems was the question of peer review. Who are the peers
in a research area that is just developing and where outside expertise is difficult to find?
What criteria can be used for assessing projects in subjects as diverse as dance, painting
and architecture? in order to avoid some of the problems the committee decided to
allocate money to clusters of researchers from traditional academic subject areas and art
schools (so- called collegia). The optimistic presumption was that these groupings would
be natural meeting points for the development of methods and research strategies. if
universities are the centres of dialogue and discussions, why wouldn’t the intellectual
discourse between artist and researchers yield exceptional results?
in the subsequent evaluation of this process the evaluators were critical with regard
both to the construction and the outcome of this form of initial funding of the new
research field. They noted that the primary strategy for support for and development of