Credit Points 10

Description This subject investigates conceptual, theoretical and practice-based models used in Creative Arts Research. It introduces students to a variety of important methodologies, including empiricism, experimentation, practice-based research, performativity-as-method, and narrative inquiry. It also focuses on writing as a creative praxis that has an important relationship to all the creative arts. Methodologies will be explored through the analysis of various theoretical and conceptual models that are produced through and applied in creative work. The subject will include the production of a creative work, and a variety of strategies for analysing and documenting this and other creative work, including observation, participation, reflection, contextualisation and representation. The subject also examines the relationships between theory and practice, and it will look at the conditions under which creative arts research is produced, exploring its meanings, effects and affects. The subject is suitable for academic research students who intend to include some non-traditional research outcomes in their work.

School Humanities & Comm Arts

Student Contribution Band HECS Band 2 10cp

Level Postgraduate Coursework Level 6 subject

Assumed Knowledge

Successful completion of undergraduate degree and formal acceptance into the Master of Arts (Creative Arts).

Learning Outcomes

After successful completion of this subject, students will be able to: 

1. Produce a creative work that reflects their creative aesthetic 
2. Identify practice-based, conceptual and theoretical models used in creative arts practice research
3. Evaluate creative arts practice as research
4. Interpret the objects of art in creative arts research
5. Explain the methods used by practitioners, theorists and empiricists in creative arts research
6. Produce a piece of exegetical writing as a draft for elements of the Masters project.

Subject Content

Students will produce a creative work that reflects their identified and chosen medium, choose methodologies and creative aesthetic, and read and discuss topics that include:

• practice-led research and non-traditional research outcomes (NTO)
• experimental aesthetics and speculative ontologies
• creative approaches to ethnography and auto-ethnography
• ficto-criticism
• writing and creative practice
• visual analysis
• critical and ontological design
• empirical musicology and music analysis
• theories of affect, attention and listening
• perspectives in digital arts research
• the roles of the virtual and the actual in the practice and reception of creative work
• performativity-as-method
• Indigenous perspectives in the creative arts