“When is Practice Research?”: An AMPD Grad Research-Creation Salon

“When is Practice Research?”

A public research salon organized by the Graduate Programs of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, the Office of the Associate Dean, Research, and the Performance Studies (Canada) Speaker Series

March 9th, 2017 – Accolade East 209, York University

  • Graduate students across the arts now routinely approach art making as a form of critical research inquiry, actively working to dissolve counterproductive borders between theory and practice. In doing so, they invoke a range of related terms that signal the meeting of research and creative methods: “research-creation,” “practice as research,” “practice-led research,” “performative research,” “arts-based research,” and “auto-ethnography” (among others). Despite the growing legitimization of these practice-centred methodologies within universities, there are relatively few opportunities to collectively reflect on the very different ways that they are being applied within diverse disciplinary contexts, and, indeed, to ask how the very idea of “research” shifts when it is enacted in the research creation projects of artist-scholars.

    This salon will bring together graduate student and postdoctoral researchers to share the methods that they are using in their practice-based research, and, perhaps more urgently, to collectively answer the question: When is Practice Research? Put differently: Is practice “research” when an artist needs to apply for a grant? Is practice “research” when an artwork mimics a scientific laboratory? Is practice “research” when it appears to behave “critically”? Is practice “research” when it is the rehearsal for the practice? Is the form of the practice itself the “research”? In short, the graduate community in AMPD will come together to ask what it means to define art as research, what challenges this brings definitionally and methodologically, and how art making provides an exemplary site for rethinking conventional understandings of research in the academy.

  • Lindsay Eales is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, at the University of Alberta who studies disability, madness, and dance. She is also the Co-Artistic Director of CRIPSiE (the Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton), which enters dance by and for people experiencing disability as well as their artistic and political allies. She has choreographed and performed integrated dance for 10 years. Lindsay’s artistic work has been a part of numerous performance festivals including the Alberta Dance Alliance’s FEATS Festival, Kaleido Festival, Orchesis Dance Motif, Nextfest, The Works Art and Design Festival, Stage Left’s production of Women’s Work, MoMo Mixed Ability Dance Theatre’s Body Language, and the Exposure Queer Arts Festival. Her Masters’ research focused on practices and performances of social justice in integrated dance. Her work has been published in journals such as Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly, Leisure/Loisir: The Journal of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies, and Emotion, Space and Society. For her research-creation work weaving together critical disability studies, Mad studies, and dance, she has been awarded the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC), the Alberta Arts Graduate Scholarship, and the Alberta Award for the Study of Human Rights and Multiculturalism.

    Danielle Peers is a new Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at University of Alberta. Danielle studies the barriers to, dangers of, and opportunities for flourishing through disability movement practices and communities – including parasport, inclusive recreation, and dance. They recently completed a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (SSHRC) at the University of Concordia, focusing on emerging digital and research-creation methods for studying disability movement(s). In their PhD studies, they were awarded both the Vanier-Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC) and the Trudeau Foundation Scholarship. Danielle’s research builds off of their personal experiences as an activist, filmmaker, emerging dancer, former Paralympian, and parasport coach. They translate their research through policy-creation and public speaking, including recent invited talks for the Department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, the Canadian Paralympic Committee, and the United Nations.

  • 10:00 – 11:20 am:  “Maddening Research, Cripping Creation” — Keynote by Danielle Peers and Lindsay Eales, co-organized with the Performance Studies (Canada) Speaker Series

    11:40 am – 1:00 pm: Research-creation roundtable: presentations by graduate and postdoctoral researchers in the School of Arts, Media, Performance, and Design + discussion

    1:00 – 1:40 pm: Catered reception

    1:40 – 2:30 pm: AMPD research-creation speed dating (meet other graduate students and postdocs doing groundbreaking practice-based research!)

     

  • Performance Studies (Canada) Speaker Series; York U’s Graduate Programs in Theatre & Performance Studies, Theatre, Visual Arts, Art History and Visual Culture, Cinema & Media Studies, Film, Music, Dance Studies, Dance, and Design; York U’s Department of Theatre and Department of Visual Art and Art History; Office of the Vice-Provost Academic; Dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design; Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies; Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean; Canada 150 @ York; Disability Law Intensive Program (Osgoode); and Canadian Consortium for Performance and Politics in the Americas.