Creative Tensions: Overcoming Academic Divisions through Artistic Practice

Increasingly, academics in all sectors are faced with challenges of a rapidly changing world. Driven by imperatives to decolonise, rewild, queer or otherwise challenge the fixed hegemonic nature of traditional educations, many of us, particularly in the humanities are drawn to more imaginative and creative forms of research. However, despite a real need for innovation and cultural shift, this outlook on research is often met with challenges spanning from disproportionate funding cuts to the humanities, to general stigma upon the humanities in the opinion of the wider public. But these challenges also come from within the academic sphere, with researchers having often to balance their prised and unique stance in their work whether through scope, topic, or methodology with more rigorous and traditional expectations of academia. Academics working in or with creative fields, either as their main focus, in cross-disciplinary practices, or in collaboration find their institutions ill equipped to provide training and support necessary to accommodate their (non-traditional) scholarly pursuits or their career development in specific sectors.