Materialising Methods: Un-black-boxing practice-based research at the interface of art and biomedical science

What can practice-based research tell us about working with disciplinary cultures that are not our own? With a focus on how contemporary art practices engage with expert cultures in health and biomedicine, this symposium foregrounds questions of method, practice and process in relation to interdisciplinary enquiry. Critical art practices are knowledge-producing practices that shape interdisciplinary research agendas. Yet within academic institutions, arts-based research has often been reduced to an instrumental or illustrative device. With the aim of sharing new narratives about what ‘counts’ as research in an interdisciplinary environment, and moving beyond a focus on public-facing ‘outputs’, this symposium asks how artists, curators and other scholars might ‘un-black-box’ or make manifest the questions, processes, inter-relations and power dynamics that inform practice-based research at the interface of art and science.

Hybrid keynote: Art, Science, and the Politics of Methods

Rogers explores how the tools of Science and Technology Studies (STS) can provide critical insights into art and science projects, highlighting the practices of these knowledge-making communities as discussed in her book Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022). Rogers challenges the conventional boundaries between art and science, suggesting that these fields may be understood as knowledge communities constructing, maintaining, and manipulating their own boundaries. By demonstrating how STS methodologies are being applied by STS scholars to artistic practices and, conversely, how art can inform STS inquiry, Rogers highlights the emergence of a new subdiscipline—Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS). This framework reimagines the categories of art and science and shows their changing states, with significant implications for understanding their roles in shaping social worlds.

Find out more about the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, The Cultural Negotiation of Science Research Group, and the speakers on the dedicated webpage here.

This event is free to attend.

Zoom details for the hybrid keynote will be circulated closer to the date.