For 15 years ResCen Research Centre, Middlesex University, has privileged the voice of the artist in debates on practice, research and knowledge generation in the performing arts, and in the structures and policies that support research and artists.

In those 15 years, the landscape has changed almost beyond recognition and now a moment has arrived to take stock, to celebrate past and present achievements and to consider the way(s) forward.

Middlesex University’s School of Media and Performing Arts and ResCen Research Centre are hosting Practice and Research at the Crossroads, an international conference designed to consider recent developments in artistic practice and research, and the evolving relationships between the University, the professional arts sector and the wider public.

Confirmed presenters: Graeme Miller, Errollyn Wallen, Ghislaine Boddington, Rosemary Lee, Richard Layzell, Shobana Jeyasingh, Alexander Whitley, Andy Field, and Riccardo Buscarini.

The conference is designed to ask and to address the following question:

Can we envisage and advocate for a diverse, vibrant research culture and environment that encompasses the HE and professional arts sectors, engaging with audiences, communities and the wider public, enhancing knowledge, awareness and quality of life in the UK and internationally?

The conference will include working groups to enable more productive discussion and these will report to plenary sessions to address the question and the issues, implicit and explicit that arise.

To stimulate, inspire, focus or productively disrupt the deliberations presentations are welcomed in the following formats:

  • Provocation/Manifesto: brief and concise statements (5 minutes) which can be shared amongst working group members
  • Presentation: spoken and/or performed which address and reflect (implicitly or explicitly) the challenges and pleasures of undertaking research in the arts (15 minutes)
  • Performance / Installation / Exhibition

We invite submissions of proposals of no more than 350 words. The deadline for submission is 4 July 2014.

Please send the proposal (as attachments in Microsoft Word / PDF) along with a current biography or CV to [email protected]. Successful applicants will be notified by 25 July 2014.

Further topics and questions:

  • How do we work across Higher Education and professional arts contexts to extend and engage our diverse audiences? How do we make ‘making a difference’ possible?
  • How do we support emerging (approaches to) practice, and enable transformative new knowledges to be generated? How does/can research inform developments in our field?
  • How do we create dynamic ecologies supporting and sustaining the work of artists and academics and the hybrid artist/academic? What does a productive and healthy research environment look, sound and feel like?
  • How can practice and/or performance be meaningfully articulated? Is articulation beyond the work needed? What are our responsibilities for articulation beyond our discipline(s) and how is this achieved?

The conference is intended for reflective practitioners and scholars who are interested in future and alternative modes of practice-as-research and policy-shapers who wish to hear the voices of those in the sectors.