Arts Research: An Explainer
Integrating the Arts in Higher Education, Reports and Publications
Often, on-campus as well as popular understandings of “research” default to research in
the STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine) disciplines, and the concept of “arts research” is unfamiliar to many people.
This guide is designed for those faculty, administrators, and leaders who need to explain what arts research is, and who would like to promote it on their campuses.
The guide has two sections:
- Explaining arts research. Where arts research is poorly understood, faculty have difficulty defending their work in hiring, promotion, and tenure processes, and an entire segment of the institutional research enterprise is neglected. However, when arts research is legible as research, it “counts” professionally for the faculty who do it, and it is properly represented at the institutional level in, for example, funding schema and interdisciplinary collaboration opportunities.
- Supporting arts research in your university. Here we suggest concrete action steps that promote a culture supportive of both arts research and arts-integrated research (collaborative research including arts and other disciplines).
Read the Arts Research Explainer
For an in-depth analysis of arts research, be sure to check out a2ru’s publication What Is Arts Research?
a2ru member institutions recognize and support arts research!
- The Collaborative Arts Research Initiative (CARI) at The University of Alabama maximizes the impact of faculty arts research by facilitating collaboration across disciplines.
- The University of Michigan offers Arts Research: Incubation and Acceleration (ARIA) funding among its supports for faculty arts researchers, and spotlights first-person accounts of creative practice as research.
- The University of Wisconsin-Madison encourages new arts researchers.
How does your institution support arts research?
Let us know in an email to a2ruconnect@umich.edu.