The Artist and Academia - Paperback

by Helen Phelan (Editor), Graham F. Welch (Editor)

The Artist and Academia explores the relationship between artistic and academic ways of knowing. Historically, these have often been presented as opposites; the former characterized as passionate and intuitive and the latter portrayed as systematic and rigorous. Recent scholarship presents a more complex picture. Artistic knowledge demands high levels of skill and rigor, while academic research requires creativity and innovative thinking. This edited collection brings together leading artists and scholars (as well as artist-scholars) to offer a variety of philosophical, educational, experiential, reflexive and imaginative perspectives on the artist and academia. The contributions include in-depth, scholarly discussions on the nature of knowledge and creativity, as well as personal artistic statements from musicians, dancers, actors and writers. Additionally, it explores both the mediational and subversive spaces created by the meeting of artistic and academic traditions. While the book addresses global themes by global writers, its core case study is an educational experiment called the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Established in 1994, it set out to reconfigure the place of the artist in the context of contemporary higher education. The material is clustered into three parts. Part One and Part Two explore the artist as mediator, educator and subversive in academia. Grounded in close-to-practice research, Part Three concludes the volume with a set of case studies from the Irish World Academy. Artistic and academic knowledge come together in this unique set of pieces to explore the development of more inclusive and imaginative pedagogical values.

Author Biography

Helen Phelan is Professor of Arts Practice at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is an Irish Research Council recipient for her work on singing and migration. Her book, Singing the Rite to Belong: Music, Ritual and the New Irish, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. She is co-founder of the female vocal ensemble Cantoral, specializing in Irish medieval chant; founder of the Singing and Social Inclusion research group; and IMBAS, a support network for artistic research in Ireland. Her most recent Health Research Institute funded project explores the use of arts-based methods in migrant health research.

Graham F. Welch has held the Established Chair of Music Education at UCL Institute of Education (formerly University of London) since 2001. He is a Past President of the International Society for Music Education (ISME) (2008-2014) and elected Chair of the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE). He holds Visiting Professorships at universities in the United Kingdom and overseas, and is a former member of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Review College for Music (2007-2015).