Angela A Piccini

An Historiographic Perspective on Practice as Research

Abstract In this paper, PARIPs full-time postdoctoral research associate constructs a contingent historiography of practice as research, including the development of PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance). It is a partial account of the origins of PARIP, and of the politically charged institutional contexts of ‘creative practice’ in UK higher education over the past ten years.

Practice as Research in Performance: from epistemology to evaluation

Abstract Questions about the values of practice as research have steadily risen up the research agenda of the creative arts in British universities since the early 1990s. As American practitioner-scholar Richard Schechner writes: ‘the relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral’ (Schechner 2002:1). Yet, where are the differences between thinking and doing, interpreting and making, conceptualization and creativity located? Are there special conceptual spaces for practice as research per se or do we need rather to consider more broadly the terms ‘writing’ and ‘research’? What kind of academy do we wish to create? This paper focuses on the work of PARIP during the past two years. It introduces the project and contextualizes it with a number of observations on the intellectual directions the project is taking, in consultation and collaboration with the range of artist-scholars in the UK and selected EU institutions. Jointly prepared by PARIP Director Baz Kershaw and postdoctoral Research Associate Angela Piccini this paper is characterized by dialectical interventions that we hope point to the range of thinking both within the project itself and beyond to the various PARIP communities in dance, film, television and drama.

Practice as research in performance: from epistemology to evaluation

Questions about the values of practice as research have steadily risen up the research agenda of the creative arts in British universities since the early 1990s. As American practitioner-scholar Richard Schechner writes: the relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral (Schechner 2002 1). Yet, where are the differences between thinking and doing, interpreting and making, conceptualisation and creativity located? Are there special conceptual spaces for practice as research per se or do we need rather to consider more broadly the terms ‘writing’ and ‘research’? What kind of academy do we wish to create? This paper focuses on the work of PARIP during the past two years. It introduces the project and contextualises it with a number of observations on the intellectual directions the project is taking, in consultation and collaboration with the range of artist-scholars in the UK and selected EU institutions. Jointly prepared by PARIP Director Baz Kershaw and postdoctoral Research Associate Angela Piccini this paper is characterised by dialectical interventions that we hope point to the range of thinking both within the project itself and beyond to the various PARIP communities in dance, film, television and drama.

Materialities, Moving Images and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games

Abstract This paper discusses the circulation of archaeological heritage through moving image practices associated with the Olympic Games. From the Athens Games of 1896 to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Olympic ‘mega-events’ (Roche 2000, 2003) continue to produce media narratives of place grounded in archaeological practices. I discuss the performativity of varied and distributed screen practices that extend and modify the archaeological agency of material culture in conditioning the production of place, space and past-ness. While public discourse may have downplayed the role of the citys heritage in the production of the Olympics, I suggest that archaeology is never far away from Olympic narrative frames.

Learning to think the past: heritage, identity and state education in Wales

Abstract Despite its problematic nature, the term Celtic is often linked with Wales and its history. Commonly regarded as a Celtic nation, the concept has been used to engender a sense of identity and also a sense of difference between Wales and other parts of the British Isles, particularly with England. As the national curriculum has been adapted to the needs of schools in Wales, some of these aims and objectives have been made explicit in many parts of the syllabus. Heritage sites in Wales also relate their history and present archaeology to a Celtic past and a case study of a specific site in Pembrokeshire is used to exemplify this approach. There is evidence that children find these portrayals of their past, as contained in the teaching in schools and site visits, interesting and informative. The dangers lie in the over‐simplification of the contested concept of Celticity and in the shortage of good evaluative assessments of these learning to think approaches.