Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation
March 23, 24, and 25, 2014
This interdisciplinary think-tank builds on recent scholarship in the critical discourse of research-creation to examine the multiple dimensions of artistic research as it is conceptualized in the Canadian university today. In particular, we ask how the critical-discourse of research-creation might benefit from insights in the interdisciplinary humanities, the digital humanities, feminism and post-colonial discourses. We ask not only how research-creation is conceived and actualized by practitioners in these fields, but also how research-creation prompts critical new directions in the academy today.
The questions we place at the centre of this think-tank are:
- How do the politics of research-creation play out in the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences?
- What do research-creation practices look like in these fields?
- How might research-creation unsettle existing relations of power and knowledge? Alternatively, how might some forms of research-creation entrench inherited relations of power and knowledge?
- How might these questions be salient for the future of interdisciplinary research in the 21st century academy?
We are honoured to welcome Dr. Donna Haraway to the University of Alberta for this event. Dr. Haraway will participate as a "distinguished presence" in the think-tank and deliver a public keynote lecture on March 24th.
Haraway's most recent books, The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species Meet (2008), enact her germinal model of “situated knowledges”(1998) and rework it through the perspective of "companion species." Such a perspective is of particular relevance to the critical and emergent discourses of research-creation as they attempt to bridge contemporary pedagogical divides between the arts, sciences and humanities. As she suggests at the beginning of The Companion Species Manifesto: The question of how "people rooted in different knowledge practices 'get on together' [….] can only be put together in emergent practices; i.e., in vulnerable, on-the-ground work that cobbles together non-harmonious agencies […] that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures"(7). The Research-Creation Think-Tank brings together a variety of interdisciplinary scholars to think through the ways that this very question might be crucial to the critical futures of research-creation in Canada.