RAAR2020

Call for Papers

Research in the Arts, the Arts in Research

A SYMPOSIUM

Thursday 14 – Friday 15 May 2020 at the University of Łódź, Poland

Artists study the reality they are surrounded by, people they live among, themselves, their instruments of work and how these areas are interconnected. Their work addresses complex issues, establishing dynamic relationships to a whole variety of other disciplines, from philosophy to new technologies. Their creative activity generates knowledge that could not be gained otherwise. Artistic knowledge is acquired through sensory and emotional perception and is practice-based, practice-driven, ‘felt’, ‘embodied’. It crosses the borders of different countries, languages, cultures, disciplines. Many artistic research projects are genuinely multicultural and interdisciplinary. Yet artists still often have to justify the idea that their practice is research.

 Academic research too has become increasingly inter- and multidisciplinary. Cultural Literacy [CL] is the ability to think in literary ways about any topic or question, using the key concepts of textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and historicity (see http://cleurope.eu/about/key-concepts/). How can the creative arts and CL come together to think about the contemporary world?

This Symposium is designed to generate active discussion, focusing on thinking and talking rather than formal presentations. If your proposal is accepted, it will be included in a ‘book of presentations’ that all participants will be asked to read in advance of the Symposium. The contributions will be grouped together into parallel break-out sessions of 90 minutes during which each presenter will briefly summarise their points and the subsequent discussion will aim to explore the key theme of the panel.

PROPOSALS ON ANY OF THE FOLLOWING – OR ALLIED – TOPICS ARE WELCOME:

• Creative work as a source of cultural, social, psychological and political information;
• Interpreting art works as cultural, political or pedagogical products;
• Rethinking the role of art and the artist in society;
• Art in multicultural and multilingual contexts (the questions of translation, cross-cultural understanding, multicultural conviviality, etc.);
• The subjectivity and reliability of claims in artistic research;
• The relevance of artistic research for developing skills for cultural literacy and the potential of cultural literacy to inform artistic research;
• The relationship between the artistic work, the critical text and the viewer/ reader/experiencer;
• Objects of high culture and popular culture (for example, novels, poetry books, graphic novels, performances, events, films, memes, tweets, blogs, comic strips, tabloids, computer games, advertisements among others) as learning material about reality in which we live.

Researchers & artists who are either more senior or in early-career are welcome to submit a proposal, though preference may be given to the latter. ’Early-career’ includes postgraduates & academics up to 10 years after completion of the PhD, and artists in the first 10 years of their creative activity.

You are invited to submit a proposal in English for a 5-minute presentation. It should consist of your name, affiliation, email address, title, a 300-word statement on any area of the symposium topic and a mini-biography (max. 300 words). Please send this to Naomi Segal (n.segal@bbk.ac.uk) and Joanna Kosmalska (joanna.kosmalska@uni.lodz.pl) by the deadline of Friday 29 November 2019. Proposals that arrive after this date will not be considered.

A number of bursaries for Early-career researchers & postgraduates will be available to support attendance at the 2020 symposium. The competition for these bursaries will be announced in mid-December 2019.

Prior membership of CLE is required; see http://cleurope.eu/membership/

CONFERENCE FEES

Standard                      €150 / PLN 650

Students (+ ID)/ Unwaged        €75 / PLN 330

The registration fee includes coffee breaks, lunch, and all conference documentation.

Booking will open on 16 December 2019 & close on 27 March 2020

For all information: see https://cleurope.eu/

The Symposium Programme Committee

Jernej Habjan, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Joanna Jabłkowska, University of Łódź

Joanna Kosmalska, University of Łódź

Jarosław Płuciennik, University of Łódź

Naomi Segal, Birkbeck University of London

Ricarda Vidal, King’s College London