PARIP Provocation

1
PARIP Provocation

• What do WE know?
• How do we KNOW?

2
Subject/Object

• For at least a century in Western thought,
  philosophers (of science, mind etc) have
  recognised the imbrication of subjectivity within
  notionally objective projects
• But a shift from positivism to reflexivity has
  made little impact on research, even in
  Performance

3
Arts Research

• Some arts research more or less fits the
  traditional mould, but practice as research and
  practice-based research typically do not.
• My contention is that, if we are serious about
  these modes, we need as a community to promote a
  shift in the academy concerning knowledge

4
New ParadigmsAction Research

• Action Research offers one model for the
  reflective practitioner
• the traditional theory-practice hierarchy is
  subverted
• work begins with the experience of process and
  moves outwards rather than applying a grand
  narrative from without

5
Performance Research

• Recently, performers have drawn upon their own
  processes of making and doing as a mode of
  research
• But, in advocating practice as research, we
  must avoid simply reifying experience, the body
  or subjective consciousness

6
Thinking

• In What is called Thinking?, Heidegger famously
  suggested that thinking is ... something like
  building a cabinet
• It is a thinking of the embodied mind a mind in
  the body and the body in the mind

7
Reflexive Praxis

• Practice as research involves thinking in
  doing as in building a cabinet
• Practice-based research involves reflection
  upon the making-showing-reception processes of
  performance
• The second should not be a meta-commentary on
  the first, but a dialogic subject-object
  interaction

8
PARIP Provocation

• What do WE know?
• How do we KNOW?
• As a community of performance researchers, we
  can make a distinctive contribution to knowledge
  about knowledge ... but
• we still have work to do for it to be
  recognised in the academy