SACE Research Event 

‘Collaboration through Co-Creative Research’ 

TIme: Wednesday, 20 July 9:30am – 1:30pm

Venue: Woolley Common Room, S343, John Woolley Building A20 THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

All SACE academic staff appointed at Levels A-C are invited to attend and participate.

We invite all academics to contribute a 5minute/ 5slide pitch to our cohort of SACE colleagues in this friendly petcha-kutcha-style event. These mini-pitches will be followed by a series of playful, collaborative, generative exercises, designed to generate new potential research opportunities and creative projects for all participants. As well as being an opportunity to learn about what your colleagues are currently up to, this event is also designed to be a fun, catered, social occasion for all.

The disciplines across our School use a range of creative practices and/or strategies in our research. These include techniques and methods for provoking inspiration, finding patterns, framing problems, generating ideas, making ideas tangible and/or creating physical and material responses as part of our research-driven problem framing/solving process. This creative and iterative approach to research could be seen as distinctly characteristic of the disciplines in SACE.

SACE’s ‘Collaboration through Co-Creative Research’ event is intended to be fun and enabling – an opportunity for us to consider new ways of thinking collaboratively, across disciplines and beyond the scope of our independent research, while also enabling us to simply engage in one another’s unique area of research in a fun and collegiate way.

In our workshop-clusters, we will all be invited to bring our methodologies to the table, to brainstorm and think how we might be able to share and blend expertise, creativity and lateral thinking, a sharing of information, to generate ideas together and to evaluate these ideas, in response to a series of think-tank provocations. With the aim of potentially developing something new out of this synthesis, a team’s response to the provocation might take the form of a hypothetical collaborative artwork, site-intervention, podcast, performance, series of interviews or reviews, poetic musings, critical reflections, or a new process or way of thinking about something.

Given that our School straddles Art History & Theory / English / Writing Studies / Media & Communication / Contemporary Art / Theatre & Performance Studies, Digital Cultures and Film Studies, the potential outcomes are substantial.

At the conclusion of this event, we have some funding available to seed projects, for those that wish to take these collaborative seedlings further, into a scalable interdisciplinary project. This could take any shape: a seminar, or an independent publication or zine, an academic paper for publishing, an artwork…

In a broader sense, by enabling the mobilisation of collaborative, interdisciplinary projects through this event, we are hoping to explore and reflect different forms of ‘knowledge production’ that are distinctive to our School. Future FASS has placed a spotlight on research collaboration and emphasis on the importance of strong research themes. This event will help us – as a newly formed School – to co-develop our 5 core research themes that are distinctively “ACE”, as we try to build a unique identity for the school.

Facilitated by Sanné Mestrom (Sanne.mestrom@sydney.edu.au)