I’m happy to announce that we have won a three-year Insight Grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to explore the connections, and build bridges, between practice-based research – a thing primarily based in universities – and all the actual creative practice that happens outside of universities.
Here’s the TMU announcement:
The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) is a leader in developing practice-based research, also known as research-creation, where knowledge is built through hands-on creative experiences. Our unique practice-based PhD program, Media and Design Innovation, will have 43 current students by September, working on creative exploratory projects from an array of creative disciplines from game design and fashion, visual art and digital experiences, to music and AI. The Creative School’s Tier I Canada Research Chair, David Gauntlett, has pioneered a broad and accessible approach to practice-based research. His forthcoming book, Practice-Based Research and Research-Creation, spells out the many ways in which creative and artistic work can be at the heart of meaningful and groundbreaking research.
Gauntlett is the Principal Investigator on a new project – with Co-Investigators Natalie Álvarez of TMU, and Fiona McDonald of University of British Columbia – which has been awarded $191,000 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to explore how this mode of research can be of value beyond academia. The project is called “Practices of Knowing: Research-Creation Beyond Academia”.
We look forward to working with our amazing collaborative partners, Paola Gomez of Muse Arts, Allie Harvey of Artreach, Ashley Jane Lewis my TMU colleague – and one of 2025’s Emerging Artists at the AGO – and Julie Marsh of University of Westminster, UK.
Gauntlett explains: “I really love practice-based research, and all of the things that our practice-based PhD students do. It’s such an exciting way to explore ideas. I also like to talk about it as a research method, and how it has a really valid claim to be a valuable and rigorous way to build knowledge. But those explanations are often about making sense of creative practice within a university, and I thought, that’s weird, because I don’t usually like things that are university-centric and don’t connect with the outside world. So I wanted to do a project which is all about bridging these two spheres – the creative work done by university-based people for university-based reasons, and the creative work done by everybody else”.
“There are university-based people making art and music, design and fashion, games and digital environments, and the process of making these things helps them to build new understandings about identities and technologies, politics and ideas. They call it ‘practice-based research’ or ‘research-creation’. And at the same time, outside of universities, there are people doing all these things too, and for similar reasons. They have questions, they are building ideas, they are passionate – they just might not call it ‘research’. So you have two bodies of people who are very engaged in doing similar stuff, but they’re not really talking to each other. And I thought, wow, there’s an obvious opportunity to build some interactions and conversations here. Maybe we do something over here that they might like to hear about, and they definitely do stuff over there which we would love to engage with”.
The three-year study explores potential connections between research-creation academics and artists and creators in the wider world, focusing on four areas of discovery where research-creation methodologies could offer practical insights to the wider artistic, creative and innovation communities: (1) Discovery from making; (2) Decolonization of knowledge; (3) Impact of AI; and (4) Documented processes of innovation and imagination.
Do contact us if you would like to be involved.
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