Drama, Dance & Performing Arts is one of six research centres that constitute MIRIAD Research – the Manchester Institute for Research & Innoviation. The Department of Contemporary Arts manages the DD&PA Research Capability Fund which helps to support research fellowships, individual research leave, research-led projects, participation in conferences, travel, web and distance-learning development, conference and seminar organisation, longer-term research funding and research training development.
Research in the Department of Contemporary Arts grows out of a distinctive approach to learning and teaching with a cross-disciplinary emphasis. All the taught programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels are based in theory-aware practice. A culture of ‘praxis’ (theory imbricated within practice), established in the Department over twenty-five years, affords the equivalent of an archive in respect of embodied knowledge. To undertake Practice as Research requires an in-built, self-reflective and critical disposition towards making work, as well as awareness of contemporary conceptual frameworks.
An insistence that the more traditional learning and research skills of reading, writing and intellectual debate are located as closely as possible to workshop practices has, over time, blurred the boundary between theory and practice in our approaches and no hard distinction is sustained between thinking and doing. Practice-based Research indicates traditional written outcomes but of research informed by practice or ‘insider knowledge’. Learning and research outcomes are thus seen to be articulable in a range of practices (of which writing is only one).