research workshops

 

 

GradCAM is a graduate school that is engaged in researcher education, research development and cultural production across the creative arts and media. When GradCAM was established in Spring 2008 the work programme specified for the School was organised in relation to four broadly conceived thematics: 1. Design, 2. Cultural Participation, 3. Critical Pedagogies and Creative Practices, and 4. Visual and Material Culture. Reflecting the start-up nature and developmental agenda of the School, these thematics were framed with a great degree of flexibility and latitude in order to provide a mechanism for the strategic coordination of the vibrant but diffuse research activity already present across the creative arts and media sector. (See Programme page for original specification of themes.)

 

The progress of the GradCAM project has enabled us to translate the broadly conceived thematics into focussed hubs of activity termed "research workshops". We have chosen the term "research workshops" with reference to the practical workshops integral to education across all the art forms, and also based on the analogy with the familiar fabrication spaces and test labs used in design, architecture and fine art.

 

The research workshops are the means by which we group and coordinate our various focussed strands of activity, providing a portfolio of research specialisms that guide our development through the next phase of the GradCAM project. The research workshops allow GradCAM researchers to specialise within the overall programme of the School by bringing together a constellation of seminars, conferences, network projects, and cultural production platforms under a single sub-theme. In Spring 2011 we will implement the first pilot workshop models: the curatorial research workshop; the public culture research workshop; the art research workshop; the culture and philosophy research workshop; and the cultural history research workshop.

 

growing workshops based on research themes

 

There is a developmental logic whereby the broad top level themes that oriented GradCAM's first phase of operation (2008-2011) will now be translated into a series of research workshops from 2011 onward. Each researcher active through GradCAM will be invited to a join a specific research workshop and in this way we seek to foster simultaneously greater articulation and cohesion for individual researchers and research projects with the overall community of research enabled by GradCAM.

 

themes and associated research workshops

 

Currently our pilot programme of research workshops is being drafted as follows:

  1. Design
    • in development (Spring 2011)


  2. Cultural Participation

  3. Critical Pedagogies and Creative Practices

  4. Visual and Material Culture