We will post panels here as they are convened.
1. WAYS OF KNOWING
Convened by Drs Louise Hall (UKZN), Jess Draper (UKZN) and Justine Wintjes (KZN Museum & Wits)
The ‘practice turn’ has led to a flurry of interest in examining the visual arts as research, with broad recognition of the arts as belonging within academia, along with acknowledgment of creative processes rooted in ‘doing’ and ‘making’ being central to knowledge production. While the insights that take form within an artwork may be understood tacitly, it remains challenging to articulate these insights clearly in words. John Berger has famously argued that we read images according to a visual language that has developed over time, and continues to shift and change. Images become encoded with mnemonic devices which tap into these tacit understandings. The overlaps, intersections and fissures that exist between visual and verbal, practice and theory open up unsettling spaces. This panel is interested particularly in examples of new thinking that may be taking place in these spaces, where productive tension has the potential to deepen knowledge processes. We wish to explore how artistic work (construed broadly) can reveal new insights, specifically by connecting/working across different ways of knowing or different fields of inquiry. But whereas arts researchers often feel compelled to frame their work in established ‘academic’ terms – for example study designs may be structured as combinations of research methods borrowed from other fields, or as inter-/multi- or transdisciplinary – we are interested in exploring what might cohere beyond (or on the other side of) such formulations, towards a re-centering of art-as-research. We encourage papers that consider novel methods, experiences, collaborative relationships, models, analogies, metaphors or concepts, as well as ontological or epistemological positions, which have arisen from concrete experiences and projects.
