Investigating the ‘productive’ knowledge of practices in the creative economy (at individual and organisational level) is a valid starting point for critical enquiry, although it may require a shift in mind-set about what constitutes ‘knowledge’, where it arises, and how we make sense of it.
This symposium session explored how partnerships between HE and Cultural Sector partners have the potential to transform the ‘tacit’, ‘productive’ knowledge of the creative economy into something more ‘explicit’.
Two-minute case study: Sage Gateshead has been delivering two undergraduate music degrees in partnership with University of Sunderland since 2009. The research focus of this approach has facilitated knowledge development in a number of ways: students’ critical understanding of cultural sector practices; practitioners’ development as practitioner-researchers; articulation of organisational purpose in more critical terms; contribution to academic discourse.
Session hosts: Dr. Dave Camlin, Head of Higher Education & Research and Wendy Smith, Director of Learning and Participation, Sage Gateshead.
The discussion revealed questions to do with how HEI’s can ‘include’ Cultural Organisations more in collaborative research – not just as sites for research, but as sites of research i.e. recognise more fully the practices of the cultural sector in the North as an invaluable element in the development of knowledge.
There was a feeling that Culture Forum North could usefully:
- broker stronger partnerships between HE / Arts & Culture by using the website as a space to signpost Cultural Sector partners to named individuals within HEIs. This might be the person responsible for ‘External Engagement’ and might also be more ‘localised’ information of who, within which faculties and areas of interest, might be the ‘go to’ person for a particular issue, and not just in the same city, but across the North.
- be a platform for sharing research methodologies for working ‘at scale’, especially in relation to using Mixed / Integrative Methodologies. How can we use HE / Cultural Sector partnerships to develop a greater critical understanding of people’s experience of arts and culture?
- be the forum through which we imagine, implement and articulate a comprehensive picture of the value of Arts and Culture across the whole of the North of the UK. Can CFN be the space which catalyses a deeper critical understanding of the particular role and value of Arts and Culture to the North?