In April, I took a stab at pulling together my thoughts on art and academia for my presentation, “Art-based Practices: Research and Transformation in the Academy” during the 2nd Annual East-West Psychology Symposium held at the Cultural Integration Fellowship, San Francisco. A video recording is here, in case you want to watch it. The presentation abstract:
As we move away from a materialist, objectivist, Cartesian-Kantian world-view to one based on the psycho-physical reality of psyche (human and non-human, collective and cosmic), the academic world must engage with the different ways in which we create and integrate knowledge and, indeed, must reconceptualize what it is to know. In the presentation I propose to explore how art can be practiced as research, and its epistemic potential: what can art inquire into and what kind of knowledge might its practice and creation bring to the practitioner? I build on the existing approaches to art-based methodological practices to examine how these practices are utile in excess of representational or dualistic/disenchanted political/intellectual utilitarianism, and can thereby become a way for us to resacralize and transform our relationship to ourselves and the world.
