CRÍA

Cr/ia [Creative Research / Instituting Art) is an outward-facing, open and interdisciplinary hub for arts-centred research across and beyond the College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. With a shared commitment to foregrounding the value of the arts - socially, and as a form of knowledge - our work has two inter-linked strands.

Creative research: Art as knowledge, language and method

Lead: Dr Alice Tilche

This strand centres on how arts-based methods can be used to access forms of knowledge that exceed the written or spoken word and generate - with communities and across disciplinary boundaries - new ways and forms of understanding. Research has been dominated by the ‘articulable’ - that which can be said, heard, written and read in the realm of words, but there are languages that involve alternative epistemologies and processes of knowing: those of physicality, of the labouring body, image, sound and rhythm. Arts-based research methods are increasingly used across disciplines: as well as having the potential to impact concerns typically linked to social sciences fields, they have become especially pertinent as institutions work to decolonize their approaches to knowledge. By centering the body, image and sound, arts-based research methods enable experiences to be released from the primacy of text and speech.

Instituting art: Arts at the conjunction of practice, place, public and policy

Lead: Dr Isobel Whitelegg

This strand centres on and collaborates with the diverse institutional formations that allow art to exist within public realms, and thus shape / be shaped by wider social and cultural dynamics and attitudes. Art does not come to exist socially and gain wider relevance and meaning without the varied institutional forms that enable artforms to be learned, produced, and placed into a public realm. Both historically, and in the present day, attitudes towards art - and the value we place on its existence – are contingent on structures of power and influence that enable a diverse art-institutional ecology to thrive, diverse communities to find expression, and new cultural attitudes to be forged (or contested). By placing arts-centred public institutions at the centre of our research, we foreground who art is for and what it contributes to social life, while enhancing the visibility and value of art-institutional forms that exceed the museum and art gallery model.

Members

• Stacy Boldrick: (Art Museum and Gallery Studies)
• Corinne Fowler: (Colonialism and Heritage)
• Clara Garavelli: (Latin American Studies)
• Zoe Groves: (Modern Global, Colonial and Postcolonial History)
• Nick Mai: (Criminology)
• Alice Tilche: (Art Museum and Gallery Studies)
• Isobel Whitelegg: (Art Museum and Gallery Studies)