The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

researCh and the seLf

scrivens, Rumney and Kuksa are plainly researching ‘with’. They are ‘developing our
practice working with scientists.’ They say, ‘We work with [the children] to discover
what is of interest to them.’ giddens and Jones are researching ‘as’, unsurprisingly in
what can be seen as autoethnographic research project. They describe their personal
reactions and theoretical journey: ‘i remember being somewhat fearful of working with
technology’; ‘We turned to Brecht’. They invite us, the readers, as they invited the
audience for the performances, to respond with personal reactions and understandings.
gemmell is, in a sense, researching both ‘for’ and ‘as’, since he is interested in what it is
like to be a student in a placement that is homely to them but distant to the tutor. in a
way he can become an advocate for them. But he is also interested in his own response
as a lecturer doing distance placements.
scrivens, Rumney and Kuksa are clearly participants in many ways in their research.
They work collaboratively with others ‘to understand their heads and hearts’. it is likely
that the people they work with are able to express their perceptions in a way that is
different and that is probably more accurate and sincere than if they were outsiders
dropping in only for the purpose of research. similarly, gemmell has ease of access to
the schools where his interviews take place, partly due to long established relationships.
This access would not be available to outsiders. similarly he has a pre- existing
relationship to the students which will, of course, affect what they say, but which will
also enable them to communicate easily to somebody who thoroughly understands
the context. moreover, while he is not the sole arbiter of the meanings of the videos
of landscape, he has a particular knowledge of some of the reasons for his choice of
frame and subject. giddens and Jones are even more closely identified with what they
research. Without their own understanding of the history of the project any assessment
of the project and its meaning would be impoverished.

Bias

i have been arguing that arts- based, practice- based research can be trustworthy and
transferable. But not all such research is good. some of it is biased, something that all
researchers condemn. avoiding bias is best understood in ethical terms as academic
virtue. This concept, which originates with aristotle, has been widely taken up, most
recently as Bridges usefully summarizes it. he presents the following list as examples of
academic virtue which might be widely agreed:

Careful attention to argument and evidence; thoroughness; honesty; humility

with regard to one’s own knowledge and respectfulness with regard to the

knowledge claims of others; responsiveness to criticism; perseverance.

(Bridges 2003)

exercising these virtues counts as academic rigour and guards against bias, and
the audience for the research has a right to expect that a researcher has exercised
academic virtue and guarded against bias. That is, the audience needs the tools
to assess how far to trust that a researcher has not skewed the evidence for self-
interested reasons, and has been thorough in carrying out procedures of collection,
analysis and presentation of the material. Recently, there has been a flurry of work