Researching the Field: Practice and Power
Full course description
In this course you examine and engage with arts and heritage practices and their relations to power. In doing so, you will be acquainted with the tools to study arts and heritage practices as they take place in organisations and institutions. This course aims to further introduce you to working as an arts and heritage researcher and professional. In groups, as well as individually, you will explore what it is that arts and heritage institutions, organisations, collectives, and individuals do. You will investigate questions like: What drives these actors? How do they try to realise their mission? What holds them back? Thereby, you will learn about the dynamics and processes of the arts and heritage field: you will learn to understand arts and heritage practices as the result of dynamic and often contested cultural processes and power relations. These power relations herald practices or modes of cultural production, shaping issues such as identity, ethics, and aesthetics.
The course combines theories about some of the important nexuses of practice in the arts and heritage field – management, conservation/care, decoloniality/inclusivity, and participation/learning – with a commissioned research project for an arts and heritage organisation in Maastricht. This means that you will engage with ‘real life’ case studies. These will help you to understand how ‘doing arts and heritage’ is cemented in institutions and their management strategies. You will work towards a research paper in which you reflect on your project experiences through one of the four thematic or theoretical lenses abovementioned. Furthermore, by actively participating in lectures, tutorials, and workshops, you learn how established arts and heritage frameworks are challenged, contested, and disrupted by other cultural practices. Subsequently, you will investigate arts and heritage practices as the result of a field of contestations between actors. After completing this course, you will be able to research arts and heritage practices as dynamic processes in which power relations are key. This will also help you to develop your own research trajectory as part of the elective courses and finally, the thesis.
Course objectives
At the end of the course, you are able to:
- demonstrate advanced knowledge of key debates, definitions, theories and methods with regards to management, conservation/care, decoloniality/inclusivity, and learning in the fields of arts & heritage;
- critically analyse and understand the practices of the various actors in professional arts and heritage contexts;
- critically analyse and understand how arts and heritage practices are situated and the result of relations to power;
- understand and employ relevant research methods to research arts & heritage practices, notably ethnography, including observation and interviewing, thus collecting and analysing empirical data;
- perform commissioned research and communicate its results to specialist and non-specialist audiences;
- demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the practice and functioning of a particular organisation (in the field of arts and heritage) through providing strategic recommendations;
- synthesising practice-based insights with academic research by designing and writing a scholarly paper on arts and heritage practices
- D. Petzold