Communities, vaLues, Conventions and aCtionscommunity will be at a disadvantage given that their outputs are mainly non- linguistic.
indeed, one of the conventions that the practice community encounters as an obstacle
is that research, and particularly any outcome, is normally expressed linguistically. This
becomes problematic if we infer that expressing outcomes non- linguistically reflects
some fundamental values of the creative practice community.
another point of tension comes from the academic convention that research must
have explicit questions. The reason for this convention is that it is essential that
the researcher come up with an answer or some kind of response in order to make a
contribution to the accumulation of knowledge. ‘Question and answer’ is a pillar of
academic research activities in other disciplines. however, this can present a stumbling
block in areas of creative practice because the creative practice community values ‘the
event’ which promotes the direct encounter with the artefact. The direct encounter,
in turn precipitates a plurality of experiences and, because these experiences are all
different, a single unified answer does not emerge. as a result, where the academic
research model attempts to home in on a single answer to a question, the creative
practice community remains open to the plurality of experiences. The creative practice
community tends to be dissatisfied with having to ask a question and pursue an answer
because these sound somewhat final and relate to the idealized world of facts, of cause
and effect, of mechanical relationships. in areas of creative practice, both questions and
answers, both issues and how they are addressed, are more volatile. They are ‘culturally
determined’: as the culture changes certain issues become pressing and certain other
issues fall away from the field of view or interest.
another stumbling block relates to the role of question and answer in research for
each community. in academic research, knowledge must be transferable and therefore
the questions and answers are presented as being broadly generalizable. This is contrary
to the value that the creative practice community places on the individual event.
events are singular and there is no motivation to connect the experience of one event
to the experience of another. Therefore, we begin to see why this type of question and
answer would be dissatisfying to the creative practice community; for example, that the
answer is not as significant as the journey.
according to the social- psychological theory of knowledge, the nature of questions
and answers are community- dependent. in other words, what a question and an answer
would look like is a result of a community’s understanding of knowledge. Knowledge
can be of different kinds, and depending on the nature that is attributed to it, there are
different expectations as to the contribution that it will make. Knowledge can contribute
in an explicit and/or theoretical way, a practical way that can pertain to skills, an
embodied way as part of personal experience and know- how, and so on. Furthermore,
the understanding of knowledge and the expectation of how and what that knowledge
will contribute is in turn conditioned by the interests of different audiences.
academic research takes place in a context of relevance that is supplied by the
academic audience, i.e. the audience sees meaning in the research actions. For
example, if astronomers were asked ‘What is the moon?’, they might reach for tables
of measurements and satellite photographs in order to answer the question. however,
if creative practitioners were asked, they might reach for some paint and a canvas,
or write a poem. There are different ways of responding to a single question that are
relevant and meaningful to different audiences. as a result, questions, answers and