Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Special edition – performed research
Welcome to this JACE Special Edition on Performed Research. This edition heralds not only a new topic for consideration amongst the JACE readership – the methodological uses of performance within a research framework – but it also marks the transition from one editorial team to another. Since JACE was rst published in 2007, Dr Wesley Imms has been at the helm as Editor. He has successfully nurtured JACE through many editions, thoughtfully crafting the disparate and diverse areas of scholarship that sit under the broad and expanding umbrella of ‘Artistic and Creative Education’, into a series of rich discussions of practice, research and inevitably, praxis. The new editorial team would like to thank Wes and acknowledge his leadership and scholarship as the founding editor of JACE.
This Special Edition on Performed Research comes to you at a time when there is burgeoning interest in this particular eld and growing excitement about its possibilities. In July 2014, researchers and practitioners with an interest in the place of performance as a means of gathering, analysing or presenting research are meeting at the very rst Artistry, Performance and Scholarly Inquiry Symposium hosted here at The University of Melbourne. The Special Edition has been prepared in anticipation of this event, with two-fold intent: as a contribution to the dialogue which will take place at the Symposium, and as a way of drawing attention to this eld of research practice to the wider arts research community who is the readership of JACE. The co-editors of this Special Edition on Performed Research are also the co-convenors of the Symposium. We see this as an exciting opportunity to align a live event with a JACE publication.
Central to the symposium is the recognition that ‘performed research’ challenges singular de nition. The eld now includes an array of methodological practices and discourses including: performance/performed ethnography, ethnodrama, research-based theatre, performance in and as qualitative research/inquiry, as well as autoethnography, verbatim and documentary theatre. In recent times, researchers from a range of traditions of inquiry and artistic practices have brought the aesthetic and performative into their investigations of the social, cultural, and political world; in so doing they highlight the potential for giving voice to the marginalised, the silenced and the personal - those less visible and less heard through more traditional academic research methods.
