Merging the critical and the creative

Research-creation: merging the critical and the creative

This course invites students to rethink normative ways of thinking, knowing, and doing within academia.

Research-creation is an approach to research that engages artistic expression, scholarly investigation, curiosity, and experimentation. In research-creation, the process of creation is integral to the research process. This means that research topics are selected and explored through a creation process, such as the production of a film or video, performance or installation, sound-work (e.g. podcast, soundwalking), zine, or multimedia arts/texts.

Research-creation is important in a variety of fields, cultural institutions, and disciplines. In recent years, universities have used it to boost their public profiles and promote community-engaged collaborations. That being said, the increasing institutionalisation of research-creation must be approached critically, and situated within a broader context of power relations within academia, education, and research. For this reason, in this course, research-creation will be framed as an intervention and invitation for scholars to push disciplinary boundaries, challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about what academic work entails, and consider ways to make their work more sustainable, accessible, and responsive to issues concerning social justice.

Special attention will be given to research-creation projects that critically address the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, age, religion, dis/ability and other intersecting categories of difference shape our experiences of the world. The course will pair reading-based discussions with examples of research-creation in practice, and engage with broader discussions concerning methodology, engaged scholarship, and ethics. To this end, this course will include presentations by scholars and practitioners from inside and outside of academia.

By foregrounding lived experiences with research-creation in practice, this course aims to highlight the possibilities, as well as the pitfalls, of research-creation.

Learning objectives:

At the end of this online course, participants will:

• Gain a deeper understanding of the possibilities and pitfalls of research-creation.
• Gain a broader perspective on research methods and ways to “go public” with/share research findings.|
• Challenge normalised assumptions about how to “do” research.
• Cultivate a critical perspective of academia, academic research, and collaboration.
• Consider the ethical implications of research-creation and how to go about the research-creation process with care and intention.
• Feel inspired to pursue research-creation within their scholarship.
• Be prepared to write either a research-creation proposal or undertake a research-creation project.

Course schedule:

Monday 10 January to Friday 14 January:

13:00-15:00 online lecturers
15:00-16:00 break
16:00-18:00 online lecturers

^{Times are scheduled CET (time Amsterdam, The Netherlands)}

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Alexandra Greene (she/her) has an interdisciplinary background informed by research-creation, intersectional feminist practices, and a humanities education. Since 2019, she is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research is embedded within the NWO-VICI project Engaged Scholarship and Narratives of Change, led by professor dr. Halleh Ghorashi. Her research explores the practice of solidarity across difference in the context of the migrant justice movement in California.

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Diana Al-Halabi

Born in Lebanon; 1990, Diana Al-Halabi is now a Rotterdam-based Artist. She pursues an interdisciplinary practice, with a focus on moving image, text, and painting. Her autoethnographic research-based projects are at the core of her practice. Find out more!
Emilia Thorin

Emilia Thorin has a background in gender studies and is currently active as practitioner, curator and organiser across dance, performance and social work. Find out more!
Fabian Holle

Fabian Holle (they/he) graduated as an actor/theatremaker at the HKU (University of the Arts Utrecht, Netherlands) in 2004. Currently, Fabian is a PhD candidate within the VICI project: Engaged Scholarship and Narratives of Change led by prof. dr. Halleh Ghorashi. Find out more!
Gustavo Valdivia

For almost a decade anthropologist Gustavo Valdivia has been ethnographically exploring the worlds that are emerging in the high Andes of Peru as the Anthropocene unfolds. His work is principally based in the Quelccaya, the largest tropical glacier on the planet, and articulates an eclectic body of theory, methods, and practices to provide an ethnographically grounded account of those significative moments in which Nature challenges human comprehension and control. Find out more!
James Parnell

James Parnell is a curator, zinester, educator, and dancer based in the Hague, NL. He does community building through workshop facilitation and event programming. His past projects have focused many topics, including anti-racist organizing, radical imagination, queer and trans knowledge distribution, healing justice, and embodied pleasure. Find out more!
Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki

Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex. Prior to that, she was a post-doctoral research fellow on the GlobalGRACE project housed at the African Gender Institute (AGI) and the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies (CTDPS) – University of Cape Town as well as the NGO – Sex Workers Advocacy and Educational Task Force (SWEAT). Find out more!
Vinicius Marquet

Vinicius Marquet is a designer, artist and researcher. Currently, Vinicius is a PhD student in Arts at KU Leuven in the Luca School of the Arts (Belgium) where he researches the remediation of collaborative storytelling workshops into the network and programmable media. Find out more!