The Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA), Australia’s peak body for tertiary creative arts education and research, congratulates the Australian Research Council for the responsive changes proposed to the National Competitive Grants Program (Discussion Paper, February 2025). The implications of the changes for researchers in the creative arts are broadly positive.
Competitive, peer-reviewed research funding in the creative arts has been notoriously hard to achieve, with very few projects funded annually by the Australian Research Council. Any changes to funding schemes should ensure that the design of the criteria should align with all disciplines and research approaches, including practice-based research and the diverse output types it generates.
Creative Arts is vital in agency-building and creative problem solving – core skill-sets that make unique contributions and innovative and long-lasting socio-cultural impact within the national research ecosystem. We hope this ability will be nurtured and supported in the new funding scheme with the greater focus on national benefits that move beyond scientific innovation as outlined in the Discussion Paper.
Whilst we want to see the administration of the grants program improve in ease and efficiency, enabling traction across all fields, we also want to recognise that review and evaluation of creative arts-based research is not aligned or best served by data-driven measures. A careful design of the review and evaluation process is needed to serve both efficient administration as well as appropriateness to all disciplines and their unique needs. This includes research and educational approaches that lead to recognition of creative arts merit-based qualitative peer review markers and in turn, the foresight for
creative arts’ capacity to make ongoing national and global impact. The DDCA recognises that the entire sector is under ‘peer-review stress’ and would welcome the opportunity to work with the ARC and other peak bodies to find solutions to this problem. What we do not want to see is an outsourcing of the problem to data-driven models, which are inappropriate to creative arts disciplines and will undermine the ability for creative arts researchers to participate meaningfully in the national research landscape.
It is heartening to see the ‘increase in risk appetite’ and greater ‘support for exploratory research and making more space for collaborative, interdisciplinary teams’ where the final outcome and impact might be less visible in the early stages of development. This reorientation will serve the creative arts well, where innovation and exploration are key aspects of the working methodology.
With its natural lending to high public visibility and interconnectivity between academia, industry and government partners the creative arts also has the potential to thrive in the more collaboratively-minded and simplified new structure.
We are particularly pleased to see a more thematic approach to funding, from breakthrough to collaboration to leadership. This framing is conducive to creative arts disciplines, and should ensure they are better able to articulate and contextualise the value of what they do, and the national and global impact that creative practice research outputs can generate.
We take this opportunity to encourage a review of how research funding intersects with arts funding. The creative practice researcher typically plays a dual role as artist and researcher and the two funding opportunities do not necessarily align – neither to support the kind of collaborative research the new funding scheme proposes, nor to enable a healthy arts community where artists are competing for funding with artist-researchers.
Fellowships, such as the current DECRA, can be seen as self-serving when framed through a creative arts lens, and indeed many fellowship applications focus on individual, personal-gaining benefits. The proposed fellowship scheme, which embeds a fellowship in a wider research program with a larger team, is a welcome advance to the solo-driven fellowship method. Having these fellowships embedded in larger research contexts should lead to more competitive applications from the creative arts, where methodology and ways of knowing from a creative practice research paradigm can be highlighted as strengths to bring to the wider research program.
Signed,
DDCA Board Members
The Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts