Remerciez-le!

Remerciez @Admin pour avoir partagé cet document gratuitement, de la manière la plus simple, en partageant sur les réseaux sociaux.

Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 37 (2012) 5-26 ©2012 Canadian Journal of

Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 37 (2012) 5-26 ©2012 Canadian Journal of Communication Corporation Owen Chapman is Assistant Professor, Sound Scholarship, in the Department of Communication Stud- ies, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, Quebec, H4B 1R6. Email: o_chapma@alcor.concordia.ca. Kim Sawchuk is Professor in the Department of Communication Stud- ies, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Québec, H4B 1R6. Email: kim.saw- chuk@sympatico.ca . Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and “Family Resemblances” Owen Chapman & Kim Sawchuk Concordia University ABSTRACT “Research-creation” is an emergent category within the social sciences and hu- manities that speaks to contemporary media experiences and modes of knowing. Research- creation projects typically integrate a creative process, experimental aesthetic component, or an artistic work as an integral part of a study. The focus of this article is how this practice contributes to the research agenda of the digital humanities and social sciences. We discuss how the term has been articulated in academic policy discourses and examine some promi- nent academic analyses that describe the practice of research-creation. We then unravel, enu- merate, and expand upon the concept of research-creation from the purview of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances” before moving to a discussion of four modes of research-creation: “research-for-creation,” “research-from-creation,” “creative presentations of research,” and ﬁnally “creation-as-research.” KEYWORDS Research-creation; Family resemblances; Intervention RÉSUMÉ La « recherche-création » est un domaine naissant en sciences humaines où l’on s’intéresse aux expériences médiatiques et aux manières de savoir contemporaines. Les projets de recherche-création comportent typiquement un processus créatif, une composante esthétique expérimentale ou une œuvre artistique. Notre article porte sur la manière dont cette pratique contribue à l’agenda de recherche en digital humanities (« humanités numériques ») et en sciences humaines. Nous relevons comment les discours académiques sur les politiques ont traité de la recherche-création et examinons des analyses académiques importantes qui dressent le portrait de celle-ci. Ensuite, nous évaluons et élargissons ce concept en ayant recours à l’idée des « ressemblances de famille » telle que développée par Ludwig Wittgenstein, puis pour terminer nous commentons quatre modes de recherche-création : « la recherche pour la création », « la recherche à partir de la création », « les présentations de recherche créatives » et « la création sous forme de recherche ». MOTS CLÉS Recherche-création; Ressemblances de famille; Intervention Introduction “R esearch-creation” is an emergent category within the social sciences and human- ities in Canada. In Britain and Australia, this is typically framed as “practice as re- search” (see, for example, Barrett and Bolt, 2010), whereas in the U.S., it is called “arts- based research” (see, for example, Leavy, 2009) and/or rolled into discussions regard- ing “creative arts PhDs” (Elkins, 2009). Research-creation “theses” or projects typically integrate a creative process, experimental aesthetic component, or an artistic work as an integral part of the study. Topics are selected and investigated that could not be ad- dressed without engaging in some form of creative practice, such as the production of a video, performance, film, sound work, blog, or multimedia text. While works may be exhibited or performed as “art,” and research-creation is occurring in a wide-range of cultural institutions and disciplines, the focus of this article is how this practice acts as an epistemological intervention into the “regime of truth” of the university (Fou- cault, 1980). Universities and other degree-granting institutions have firmly established protocols and practices for what constitutes valid scholarship that act as normative frameworks for modes of presentation. Research-creation can thus be read as a methodological and epistemological challenge to the argumentative form(s) that have typified much academic scholarship. In research-creation approaches, the theoretical, technical, and creative aspects of a research project are pursued in tandem, and quite often, scholarly form and decorum are broached and breeched in the name of exper- imentation. Research-creation is not so much a “new” method as it is a “newly recognized” academic practice that has gained ground in the past ten years. Walter Benjamin’s (1969) innovative use of the allegory and the structure of the “theses” in writings such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Marshall McLuhan’s (1970) experiment with typography in Counterblast (McLuhan & Parker, 1970), Donna Haraway’s (1991) remix- ing of the manifesto, and Roland Barthes’ (1977) deployment of the alphabet as a tem- plate for an examination of the discourse on love all indicate that academics (in the humanities and social sciences) have long-experimented with writing that challenges the logico-deductive or analytic forms of argumentation or presentation. Versions of the scholarly genre are recognizable: essays must have a thesis-statement, research- question, literature review, theory, method, presentation of findings, discussion and conclusion. Research-creation, as a method of inquiry, questions formulaic represen- tations of the academic genre and the production of knowledge in print cultures. In the present era, research-creation is often associated with new media experimen- tation. Caitlin Fisher’s (2001) hypertextual novels, for instance, exploring girlhood dreams and fantasies are simultaneously research into the novelistic form, research on girlhood sexuality, and research on hypermedia technologies, whose final product is not an essay on the process, but a multimedia work These Waves of Girls. And while the potential of digital distribution and non-linear narrative forms are opening up new opportunities and accelerating this movement, it is not simply a result of the world of digital production, as the examples of Benjamin, McLuhan, Haraway, and Barthes indicate. Despite these examples and this lineage, academics who do production-based work and whose practice is entangled with the idea of research-creation, find them- selves in institutions where scholarly forms of publication have been dominant, and where new bureaucratic exercises, such as the imposition of “metrics” to measure and evaluate academic research across disciplines, threaten to introduce mechanisms that 6 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 37 (1) Chapman & Sawchuk Research-Creation 7 will impose new forms of standardization. These new metrics, at least in our experi- ence, typically model and evaluate academic “outputs” with measures that are rooted in the sciences, and which favour traditional academic publications that are properly “indexed,” as a way to calculate the relative value of research. As such, much time is spent both defining and defending research-creation practices as a valid form of aca- demic inquiry. More recently, academic publishing has had to grapple with the question of what constitutes a peer-review publication for works that contain a “creative” component that is intrinsic to the piece. Vectors, an experimental journal from Los Angeles is pur- suing this possibility with a vengeance in its fostering of academic reflections that can only exist in the online world. Journals, such as Qualitative Inquiry, publishes works that are creative, while others, like the Canadian Journal of Communication, use the online capabilities of academic distribution to allow authors to insert image, text, or sound files into the publication. Like many concepts, the term “research-creation” has had a performative effect—or “enactment,” in the words of Annemarie Mol (2002)— as it has been embraced by its practitioners and institutionalized in universities and funding agencies, who are beginning to legitimate it in the form of acknowledgement and support. Yet, as a term, the idea of research-creation can be oblique, obscuring critical va- lences that might elucidate its permutations and possibilities. Such a “condensing of a host of semiotic possibilities,” under a single umbrella term, is described by feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis as the “trap of representational coherence” (1984, p. 35). It is not our intention to police the meaning of the term research-creation, but rather to open up its potential as an approach, and not simply as a result. To do so, we first dis- cuss how the term has been articulated in academic policy discourses. We follow this with a quick examination of some prominent academic analyses that try to describe the practice of research-creation. We then unravel, enumerate, and expand upon the concept of research-creation from the purview of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (2009) notion of “family resemblance,” before moving to a discussion of four ways that the term “re- search” can be articulated to the idea of “creation.” The point is to understand research- creation as a form of critical intervention that speaks to the media experiences and modes of knowing by students and scholars in this moment. Paying attention to what lies in between the two words that are joined in “re- search-creation,” and using Wittgenstein’s insights, we describe and discuss four dif- ferent types of research-creation: “research-for-creation,” “research-from-creation,” “creative presentations of research,” and finally “creation-as-research.” In each instance, we underscore how research-creation may act as an innovative form of cultural analysis that troubles the book, the written essay, or the thesis, as the only valid means to ex- press ideas, concepts and the results of experiments. We also argue that in a society awash in social media, new modalities for the presentation of research to reach broader audiences may be necessary. These four categories represent differing criteria, practices, and end results, and require separate forms of assessment and reflection for their dis- tinctions to be understood and imaginatively operationalized by students and faculty embarking uploads/Science et Technologie/ sawchuk-chapman-rc-cjc.pdf