What is it that makes research in the arts so different, so appealing?

Johanna Schaffer’s thematic thread investigates the research habits and practices of the project workers involved in Troubling Research. Based on a series of interviews to be edited for publication, it focuses on the collaborators’ ideas concerning their own research practices. It will use the practices and practitioners involved in Troubling Research as exemplary for a charting of different modalities of artistic research and research in the arts, and, secondly, for reflecting upon the conditions of these modalities. They will also be utilized for carving out ideological promises and practical possibilities tied to the current upsurge of ‘research’ as a concept heavily infused with institutional weight. In order to speculate on the historical foundations of a recent development, relations between the collaborators’ own individual works and earlier art and theory practices will be questioned and scrutinized. The leading assumption here is that traditions of socially engaged art practices and those motivated by feminist, queer, anti-racist and anti-capitalist concerns are of enormous historical importance even for the institutional career of research in the arts.