Summary
What can practice-based research tell us about working with disciplinary cultures that are not our own? This one-day symposium explores how contemporary art practices engage with expert cultures in health and biomedicine, foregrounding questions of method, practice and process in relation to interdisciplinary research.
Materialising Methods: un-black-boxing practice-based research at the interface of art and biomedical science.
Thursday 20 February 2025, Durham University
A one-day symposium hosted by the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, in collaboration with The Cultural Negotiation of Science research group (Northumbria University) and Hannah Star Rogers (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen).
What can practice-based research tell us about working with disciplinary cultures that are not our own? With a focus on how contemporary art practices engage with expert cultures in health and biomedicine, this symposium foregrounds questions of method, practice and process in relation to interdisciplinary enquiry. Critical art practices are knowledge-producing practices that shape interdisciplinary research agendas. Yet within academic institutions, arts-based research has often been reduced to an instrumental or illustrative device. With the aim of sharing new narratives about what ‘counts’ as research in an interdisciplinary environment, and moving beyond a focus on public-facing ‘outputs’, this symposium asks how artists, curators and other scholars might ‘un-black-box’ or make manifest the questions, processes, inter-relations and power dynamics that inform practice-based research at the interface of art and science.
