The emergence of practice-based research in and through the arts is closely connected with politics of higher education and research, nationally and internationally. This connection is twofold. On the one hand the discussion around practice-based research as a special concept has in some countries been prompted or encouraged by politically motivated structural changes in the university landscape. On the other hand the development of practice-based research has led – and will certainly in the future lead to – significant changes in national research policies and institutional patterns.
The aim of this chapter is to describe and analyse this process. The perspective will partly be historical. The historical prism is due to my own academic background (although I have been a university administrator for most of my life) and the reason is simple: it is impossible to understand the present state of discussion without looking back at a process which has been going on for the last decades in the international academic world.
Writing from a Swedish perspective I may be excused for taking some of my examples from my own country. The reason is that I have been rather heavily involved in the national debate here. I have also to some extent taken part in the decision-making process, in particular with regard to funding artistic research. Since Sweden has a rather coherent system of higher education and research it is also easy to see the institutional structure and its relevance for the subject.
The second perspective is European. Although I will pay some attention to the debate in Australia, I will leave other continents aside. The first reason for this is of course a lack of knowledge. The second reason, however, is a feeling that the specific organizational pattern of higher education and research in a country like the United States gives the subject of ‘university politics’ quite a different meaning than in Europe. Despite the fact that European higher education and research is more and more deregulated it can still be perceived in terms of national systems where general policies for the sector of tertiary education affect art schools and their programmes for teaching and research.
Art schools and structural reforms of higher education systems
In many countries the issues related to research in the performing and fine arts have been prompted by changes in national policies in the higher education area. This was certainly the case for Sweden when, back in 1977, the whole tertiary education sector was subject to wide-ranging reforms.
One part of the structural changes was the integration of art schools into the wider national system of higher education. Some colleges of arts and music were integrated into universities. Others were left with an independent status but still subject to rules and regulations designed to fit mainstream universities or other research-based institutions.
In this context a natural question was raised. If research in the classical sense is the basis for teaching and training in universities, what then is the equivalence for the teaching and training in art schools? The answer was the creation of a new concept: ‘artistic development’. A policy document written at the time defined this concept as a means of developing ‘experiment with artistic forms of expression, as well as research’. It went on to say that some of these experiments could be regarded as research, even if the line of demarcation could not be clearly described.
Art schools were given additional funds for this new activity but there was great confusion about the content and validity of the new concept. The funds were happily received but it is obvious from the discussions going on in the 1980s that art schools were really not aware of what the government was expecting of them in terms of renewal, development or research. A review made in the early 1990s showed that the concept of research was emerging in the art schools, although it was obvious that many teachers in the schools were reluctant to describe anything in their field of activity as related to research.
In broad terms the situation could be described as a government intervention in the life of the art schools. They were encouraged to define their activities in terms of the historical and general academic distinction between teaching and research. Once this problem was put on their agenda the discussion about the foundations of the teaching led to an ‘academic drift’ in the search for a research equivalent. Further on in this chapter I will try to discuss the implications of this in a longer perspective.
A similar development could be seen in relation to a structural reform in the tertiary education sector that was initiated in Australia in 1987 (The Unified National System). Again a number of art schools were integrated into the classical university structure and again the question was raised about the basis for academic teaching in this field. Added to that was the desire from the art schools to get access to the general funding streams for research (The Research Quantum) or the extra project funding from the Australian Research Council. The problem was described by Dennis Strand from the Canberra School of Art in a report to the Australian federal government in 1998:
The question of what is research in the creative arts is one that has special significance in Australian universities today but little significance elsewhere. Its importance lies in the fact that there are scarce dollars attached to the definitions of research. This has led to the need to define research in the creative arts in ways that will give the creative arts in universities a foothold in the competition for research dollars. Attempts to force mainstream creative arts activities into the mould of scientific research has led to semantic arguments that often have not been particularly helpful. However, with only two funded categories – teaching and research – the opportunities for alternative arguments have been limited.
(Strand 1998)
In his report he also wrote that a literature search on the topic of research in the creative arts yielded very little result: ‘it is not the subject of popular or widespread discussion among researchers or artists, either in journals or other forms of publishing, the extent of the literature being quite limited’.
It is a bit surprising to note that this statement was made only a decade ago. One reason for the lack of results in his search was of course that the internet had not yet been the prime source of information and discussion. But the most important reason is obviously that the concept of artistic research was only the subject of public discourse in a limited number of countries.
The fact that national university policies and the structure of the higher education and research systems triggered a special kind of debate was also underlined by Malcolm Gillies, professor of music at the University of Queensland. In 1997 he noted:
Our problematic role within this research environment is made more difficult by the very definition of ‘research’. While in the United States the move during the 1980s and 1990s has been more for establishment of ‘research equivalent’ categories of professional work in the arts – largely driven by the university staff in the Arts for career progressions and recognition equal to those in other disciplines – the tendency within Australia has been more to agitate for the broadening of the definition of ‘research’. The reason for this is simple: with only two funded categories, ‘teaching’ and ‘research’, the opportunities for ‘research equivalent’ arguments have been limited.
(Strand 1998)
In 2000 I made a review commissioned by the National Swedish Board of Universities and Colleges with regard to the international debate on artistic and practice-based research (Kälvemark 2000). At the time it was obvious that three countries stood out as examples of a lively national debate on these issues. Australia was of course one of them. The other two were Finland and the United Kingdom.
Compared to the situation in Australia and Sweden, it was difficult to find external factors for the emergence of a vibrant research community in the art schools in Finland. No major national reform could be mentioned as an explanation. Compared to the situation in Sweden it was easy to see a contrast between the uniform and strictly regulated Swedish scene on the one hand, and a more traditional university autonomy in Finland on the other. In combination with a historically strong position for the art schools in Finland this had apparently led to the call for artistic research from within the schools themselves.
As far as the United Kingdom was concerned it was easier to point to a number of commissions and reform strategies that had triggered debates about teaching and research in universities and colleges during the 1980s and 1990s. Looked at from the outside developments in Britain seemed exemplary. The Arts and Humanities Research Board had produced a booklet where basic problems seemed to have been sorted out. The guidelines with regard to the PhD process were eagerly studied in many other countries and provided a much...
