Lehrende: Johanna Schaffer

12.11. 2020, 18.15 – 19.00 (Preliminary Meeting / Vorbesprechung)

10.12. 2020, 16.30 – 19.00

14.01.2021, 16.30 – 19.00

This two-part workshop is designed for the Graduiertenschule Bewegtbild [GBB], i.e. advanced level, but also open to 6 more participants of the KhK. The workshop can be held in German or in English, or in both languages. Participants will have to do some preparatory reading. We will either all meet online, or at least have a streaming option in case we meet in analogue space.

 [Please register until November 5, 2020 with johanna.schafferATuni-kassel.de]

1) On the Institutional Framings of ‚Research’ at Art Schools: ‚Research’ is something you cannot not want at an art school today, as it promises access to symbolic and economic resources. ‚Research’, however, is institutionally framed by the neoliberal university, and this implies that art and design practices and discourses need to repeat or at least echo scholarly / scientific protocols and vocabularies. However, as Arjun Appadurai reminds us, research also is a right – a “generalised capacity to make disciplined inquiries into those things we need to know, but do not know yet“.

2) Methods: “The spirit of science”, writes Theodor Adorno, “is the spirit of method”. ‚Method’, as a „a particular way of doing something“ [Cambridge dictionary] is thus a foundational dimension of academic/scientific work procedures, forms of knowledge production, truth claims. Or, as Weissberg and Baker write in 1990, “The method describes and justifies the steps that you followed in conducting your study and the materials you used in each step… It should show your reader that your research has been carried out appropriately and, therefore, that the results can be believed.” In what way is ‘method’ as protocol/discourse useful within a context of design, art and moving image based research? And what happens if ‘method’ is shortcircuited with explicitly critical agendas, such as in Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Opressed?

Foto: Saskia Kaffenberger