Short abstract

In the political economy of the ‘neoliberal’ university, how do we experiment with and perform new forms of scholarship centred on collaboration, creativity and critical enquiry that help to break from the conventions of traditional scholarship that limit possibility in art-science collaborations?

Long abstract

This paper emerges from both my PhD work and a decade of experience facilitating collaborations between artists and academic researchers. It identifies a growing frustration amongst the art-science community of Bristol, that certain conventions of normative scholarship and University bureaucracy are having impacts not only the relationships themselves, but are shaping a very specific form of creativity and artistic practice that succeeds, shutting down other possibilities for epistemic opportunity and collaboration.

It foregrounds literature that points towards the increased level of capitalist practices within universities that orientate academics and artists away from scholarship that engages with collaboration or critial enquiry. The paper proposes that for these collaborations to succeed in building new domains of creativity and epistemology those engaged in the collaboration need to shed their organisation conventions stepping into a liminal domain or boundary space that sits outside discipline or organisation.

The paper articulates five core principles that provide a potential framework of governance for this liminal boundary. Following these principles or ethics would support new forms of scholarship and collaboration to be performed and maintained. These five principles or characteristics – autonomous, creative, open, collective and relational – are elaborated on with reflections from a series of experiments I carried out over my PhD in an attempt to understand the limitations and possibilities of performing new forms of scholarship.