Is Arts-Based Research Anti-Art?

Donal O'Donoghue

Associate Professor at the University of British Columbi

Lecture Delivered Thursday, February 7, 2013
Pond Inlet

For us to give art a research purpose, which we in the academy have tended to do during the past two decades, are we requiring art to do more than it is capable of doing, while simultaneously not paying enough attention to what art does?

In other words, are we making unrealistic demands on a form that Jacques Rancière says, “refuses to anticipate its own effects”? For that reason, and if we think of research as the pursuit and construction of knowledge, it is important to ask what types of pursuits are possible and what types of phenomena are probable when we approach or do research from the practice of art.

 
DONAL O’DONOGHUE is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada, where he serves as Chair of Art Education. His research interests include art and design education, art research and methodology, curriculum theory, and masculinities. He has published widely in these areas, and received the 2010 Manuel Barkan Memorial Award from the National Art Education Association United States for his scholarly writing. His current Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded research investigates place-cultures and place-making practices in private boys’ schools in Canada. Dr. O’Donoghue serves as Editor of the Canadian Review of Art Education, and is a member of many national and international art and design education associations and editorial boards. As an artist, he has exhibited his work in Europe and North America.