Convenor: David Lloyd, Deputy Director, Research, Queensland College of Art
In the latter part of the 20th century post modern theorists (Pink, S (2004), Prosser, J (1997), Banks, M (1993), Harper, D (1993) et al) argued for a broadening of research methodologies seeking to acknowledge the lived experience of both the subject and researcher as critical to the research undertaken and the conclusions drawn. In particular they questioned the dominance of the systematic and argumentative modes of inquiry and the over-reliance on text to disseminate knowledge derived through research.
New emerging research methods developed that acknowledged and incorporated the subjective experiences of both the researcher and the participant. Modes of dissemination were examined and new models emerged within qualitative frames. The challenges forwarded by postmodernism coupled with an emerging focus by contemporary qualitative researchers on the lived experience 'paved the way for the visual to be increasingly accepted in researching the human condition?for it is no more subjective or objective than written texts' (Pink, S 2004). Today, while the epistemologies underpinning fields within visual practice may differ, the methodologies of the contemporary in-field researcher and the visual researcher run parallel. Neither seeks just to explain or describe the phenomenon under investigation, rather they seek `to know? that phenomenon. That is, to have lived, and to allow their audience to have lived, the phenomenon under investigation.
Is it possible to referee the visual? Knowledge embedded within visual research often results from studies of the non-rational elements of human practice. It is these areas that have been largely ignored by the traditional researchers for they do not lend themselves to measurement nor can they be captured and transported easily within traditional modes of communication. For the academic determining how scholarship within the visual may be acknowledged and privileged has become the source of heated debate and urgency.