The research group is concerned with creative practice as a research method, querying what creative practices can do (rather than what they mean) and also what they can set in motion.
Hence, the work of the group is concerned with artistic and creative practices less as an object of study (as in art history) or a form of public engagement, but rather as a research approach and method that shape the whole research process (from conception to output).
Creative practices include, but are not limited to, artistic research, and is understood as approaches that promote ways of seeing, sensing and thinking that in turn creates new conditions for material interventions in, and political sensibilities, of the world.
What these approaches have in common is that they enable open-ended modes of querying the world, ideally suited to a range of research problems, not least those around sensory experience, the imagination, the “messiness” of everyday lives and experiences, and the embrace of the unknown, which are key to research concerned with pressing societal and environmental concerns.
The group brings together researchers from a broad variety of approaches and disciplines within the visual and performing arts, the social sciences and the humanities.
These include, but are not limited to, art in society, visual arts, performance studies, design, culture studies, geography, urban studies, geohumanities, urban humanities, environmental humanities, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, participatory and action-oriented research, sustainability studies and organization studies.
Photo: The National Museum / Vidar Ibenfeldt
Head of research group
Members
More about the research
The research group is affiliated with, and draws inspiration from, the growing, interdisciplinary field of the GeoHumanities.
The field indicates how scholarship on key geographical concerns such as space, place, landscape and environment are advanced across arts and humanities disciplines and approaches.
It responds to recent developments in theory (e.g. the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences), politics (e.g. the increasing urgency of environmental issues, and questions of territory, borders and displacement) and practice (e.g. the importance of artistic- and creative practice-led research for mobilizing knowledge across disciplines and integrate the living knowledge and lay expertise of stakeholders and publics).
While the term “GeoHumanities” is relatively new, its development is very much about an intensification of existing work rather than the evolution of something entirely new.
