Conceptualising Change, Practising & the Work of Adding Nothing
History
Research statement
Background
This essay (performed as keynote) is a meta-critique of the category of “impact” itself, which is an important performance metric in the university sector, relevant to processes such as ERA, influencing perception & assessment of research work by academic scholars & makers, as well as constituting a psychic framing, of no light “impact” itself, when thinkers, researchers & artists consider their own contributions & how to represent them in a way visible to their field (or to consider making them at all). It intervenes in the debate of questioning “times”, notably hegemonic time in context of Australia’s process of facing its violent colonial past-present.
Contribution
Offers novel approaches to conceptualising “impact”, acknowledging crippling or disengaging effect of this rubric on makers in the humanities, creative arts, theory & so on. Working with alternative vocabularies for what’s offered, read alongside Deleuze’s important challenging of lay notions “common” & “good” sense. (Fixed Identities; only one direction). It proposes that time is always many-fold, & to offset the effects of hegemonic time, hegemonic imaginaries of possibility/making/what is useful, one can keep this many-foldedness in mind. One is both within the academy & its rubric & elsewhere honouring diversities of motivation & emergent logics of worth
Significance
Commissioned as keynote for the Practice Research Symposium (PRS) RMIT 2022. This is esteemed event of post-graduate & career researchers spans several continents & is broadcast widely. I received numerous strong responses from listeners about the talk’s enabling effect on their research, direct correspondence from the Dean of RMIT’s School of Art praising it & an invitation to contribute as speaker to a Creative Victoria funded Novel Writing, Practice Residency, as a result of this essay/talk. The knowledge in this talk extends public discussion on research rubrics in a non-resentful way, making better & (arguably less colonising) work possible, discussable