DDCA
The Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts
The Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts is a representative body for the creative arts in Australian Universities. Our discipline base includes visual arts, design, theatre, dance, music, screen production, digital arts and writing.
The DDCA exists to inform, connect and amplify the voices of people and organisations responsible for scholarly and research leadership of the creative arts in higher education. Our role is to champion the effective leadership of teaching and research in our disciplines, enhancing understanding, promoting diversity, inclusion, excellence, collegiality and sustainability, and contributing to the challenges of our age.
The DDCA publishes NiTRO Creative Matters: perspectives on creative arts in higher education. This is an online platform for the discussion of matters relating to practice, research, teaching, policy and reporting relevant to the creative arts in the university sector.
current issue | AUGUST 2023
Showcasing + Reporting Creative Practice Research Outputs
Edited by Smiljana Glisovic
The work showcased here is impressive! With this edition, apart from an attempt to do particular work around processes, it’s also just such a pleasure to get a sense of the range of work being made within the research context.
With this edition we are continuing the conversation around research reporting and assessment of creative practice research outputs. The first thing to say is that the focus on measurement, accounting, and evaluating is not the only conversation to be having, and that in order to get that part ‘right’ what we need is to seriously engage with the philosophical underpinnings that guide the pragmatics around doing creative practice research in the academy.
For example, are the categories of ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ still apt? Or are these categories built on certain assumptions that we ought to put into question? Is the best way forward to compare the emergence of new ways of doing research with pillars that were instituted in very different times, or should we be reassessing some of these understandings? And perhaps this is the impulse for the Australian Universities Accord and ARC Review. That Creative Practice Research came into the university relatively recently, allows it to be a good kind of ‘disruptor’ in relation to some much larger questions around ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’.