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Visual and Material Arts and Culture research group
Visual and Material Arts and Culture Research Group
The Visual and Material Arts and Culture research group investigates the nature of the constructed and depicted world through notions of visual literacy and its relationship to cultural and social capital. The researchers are interdisciplinary and have a wide range of experiences within the field of art and design. Central to the group's outlook is the empowering role of the organic intellectual and the nature of praxis. This position informs a wide range of research themes that take on the assumption that the University has the potential to create a physical and discursive space in which the paradigms of the cultural industries can be dispassionately and critically examined.
Research interest areas
Practice led research, research into practice, and practice as research
How can the paradigms of practice be altered and how may they be understood? How does the act of creation move from making and looking, to effecting social and emotional change in the users of objects and the readers of visual texts? Research into this area starts with a group of practitioners who are engaged in theorising their practice, examining the material basis of the act of creation, and applying their findings to the processes of teaching and critical evaluating creativity.
Visuality and its role in communicative action
The relationship between Jurgen Habermas' notion of communicative action and reflexivity is easily established. More complex is the jump from this particular view of social practice into the realm of visual communication. Group research in this area investigates the relationship that visual literacy has to social capital and its potential for promoting cultural change.
History and critical theory
Henry Ford summed up the modern rupture from traditional practices with his apocryphal remark that history is bunk. In what Ulrich Beck has characterised as 'Second Modernity' and Zygmunt Bauman as 'Liquid Modernity' the need for cosmopolitan societies to engage with traditional practices and reconcile the legacy of traditional ways of seeing and understanding with industrially structured visual culture is paramount. Group research into this area examines traditional practices as alternate ways of seeing, as a site of resistance and examines the potential of traditional cultural practices for disrupting industrialised norms.