Flight of the “Artademics”: Scholarly Gentrification and Conceptual+Art Discourses

Abstract

As the debate continues about arts-based research as a mode of academic practice, a number of key issues permeate scholarship concerning quality, rigor, and responsibility, resulting in an opportunity to rethink and redefine how we are potentially moving toward greater social, political, and intellectual consciousness through the arts and arts-based research (Slattery, 2003). My deliberation is meant to provoke a conversation about the fluid parameters of this still-emerging discourse, and how the intricate metamorphosis of conceptual+art may warrant deeper consideration and debate among researchers. To open this dialogue, I borrow the concept of gentrification from social geography as a means to examine more critically how academics are framing scholarship through the arts and why the actions of arts researchers may change broader notions of art as research. Much has been written concerning the close ties of artists and higher education in relation to gentrification (for example, Bridge, 2001; Peck, 2005). Suggesting academics may be among “different sorts of gentrifiers,” a group I refer to as artademics, presents an alternate way of thinking about the nature of the arts by interpreting patterns of movement within scholarship (Redfern, 2003). This raises a series of key questions: Do artademics gentrify the discourse of arts-based research? Are artists denied spaces to circulate their works and ideas because artademics are filling those spaces? And, if as Lees (1999) suggests, “academics have become conformist [and] complacent,” is there a potential for artademics to inadvertently instill a culture of sameness in spaces previously noted for uncertainty (pp. 377–378)? Given the rhetoric of self-evolution and social justice in art education, Anita Sinner Concordia University