A few days ago I went to a session organised by Ludic Rooms as part of their Random String professional development (I’ve been a mentor on this year’s programme). Our focus was on applied research – artists working together with academics – but we also repeatedly returned to questions about value and evaluation.
Here are a few extracts from my notes:
How can you be involved in the research process rather than just making someone else’s work more palatable to the public? [As a group, I think we put higher value on being integral to the research rather than illustrators of it.]
The academy questioning the reliability/validity of the research output if people have been playful with the research material.
Teaching academics having different metrics for success compared to research academics (where the focus is often on publishing papers in a selection of highly rated journals and taking risks is, well, riskier).
One academic described the process of trying to get the metrics widely reimagined as being like turning a tanker around.
We also talked about how valuing collaborations (and collaborators) could greatly affect the working process and the experience of being involved – both in terms of working relationships and also in terms of the scaffolding and preparation that’s put into supporting the collaborative process.
Timescales came up a lot, particularly in terms of giving relationships time to form and grow, but also in recognising that many current funding and reporting systems encourage evaluation to be concluded promptly (for example, Grants for the Arts requiring an activity report form before you receive the final 10% of the grant) and that often this makes some of the value invisible.
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I went to a networking session about 18 months ago where I approached one of the speakers afterwards and we began a process of conversation about our respective practices and the overlap between them. This has recently evolved into 2 or 3 months’ worth of funded work, but it won’t show up in any evaluation for the networking session because the programme that organised it has already closed down.
Themes from the day echoed a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about in my research here and also more widely within my practice. I’ve been close enough to people working in academia over the last few years that I have a real sense that the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is seen by many as a system that promotes a particular idea of research and also favours traditional types of outputs, in turn reducing the willingness of academics (or perhaps the departments supporting them) to be more creative in their working processes. Creativity (creating new things) and research (understanding new things) both being two processes that carry a certain amount of risk; otherwise you’re just re-treading old ground…
