Introduction

This article opens up the possibilities and tries to foreground certain missing links presented as part of the conference Knowledge Production and Research in Art Practice organized by the Department of Art and Performing Arts at Shiv Nadar University.1 The global conference was an attempt to gather different voices to examine and extend discussions on what artistic research is in the contemporary context. It took place in the context of critical debates about formalizing and rationalizing artistic research, especially in the wake of new models of artistic and curatorial practice, and more sweeping changes regarding the role and functioning of culture in contemporary society. The sessions happened over two days and they were broadly divided into three areas: to map the terrain of artistic research, understand the problems of rationalizing artistic imaginations under specific parameters, and assess the contemporary art research ecosystem. This article neither presents a review of the conference nor its summary; instead, after many months, it reflects on the various approaches, problems, and propositions that arose during the conference, to foreground the author’s vision to make a case for artistic practice as research within the university. It is written in the context of the rise of art practice PhDs in the higher education system or a call for its inception alongside an active debate on whether the artistic practice is research or research, in general, can be considered practice.

Artistic Research: A Vexing Problem

To begin with, there is no one way of conducting artistic research, like there is no one way of doing research in general. Nevertheless, a particular kind of artistic research gets institutionalized and reified within the academic context. This artistic research must be useful. It must be embedded within the more significant global creative industry, aestheticize the academic institution, and submit itself to evaluation through rationalized parameters that are mostly borrowed from other established disciplines. This institutionalization cannot be fully understood as a homogenization of artistic research, as different art departments worldwide have struggled hard to define the particular nature of research suitable for their vision. In this context the fundamental antagonism between art and design escalates, especially when the boundaries between technology, art, and culture collapse. Jan Jagodzinski's detailed historical analysis2 of this tension helps to understand the situation in which we have entangled ourselves, where it has resulted in a conflict of useless art versus useful art. Coined by Jagodizinski, the term ‘designer capitalism’ explains the situation where the global economy makes it compulsory to make art and aesthetics functional. This economy is characterised by the rise of creative industries that converge both creative arts (individual talent) and mass culture industries, along with the advent of a new knowledge economy for the use of the citizen consumer. Hence, for these new artistic research programs to exist and sustain, this utility must be visible at every level, but this will eventually lead to the erasure of art's autonomy and dismantle it as a discipline.

Artistic research has not escaped the administrative pragmatism of the institution’s vision, thus rendering it utilitarian. In this attempt to fulfill both a utopic dream and a functional task akin to design, artistic research embarks on an unclear mission set for itself by stakeholders who have never been part of its intimate domain. Inclusivity of the myriad forms of this research in studios, galleries, alternative institutional spaces, community spaces, the internet, and the public domain is largely undermined. This ignorant omission and forceful rationalization of artistic research overlooks particular significant possibilities to study this unique phenomenon closely and benefit from it, to interrupt and alter existing research frameworks radically. The conference voiced multiple articulations about what artistic research can be, what it has become, and what it could become, included a rigorous analysis of its emergence as an academic subject, the broader context of this induction, and interrogated the rationalization of artistic imagination within the university. Also, the presentations presented the possibility to critically reflect on the colonial and Brahmanical bias of the art history-art practice nexus (as discussed later in this text), the ocularcentric domination of this field, and the marginalization of disabled experiences/bodies from artistic research. These polyphonies of concerns, hopes, anxieties, and utopic desires foreground artistic research as a vexing problem that the academy cannot address. Artistic research in academies is marching ahead, following the logic of contemporary design capitalism, oblivious of its origins and pluralities, unaware of the interruptions it could cause to normative research and the radical shifts it could bring to knowledge production that could counter the rise of creativity as a means to an end in our age.

These are some of the missed opportunities, and these concerns and possibilities will remain impossible to examine if the academy integrates artistic research into the university for a pragmatic function. Artist and pedagogue Indrapramit Roy, involved with various advocacy campaigns to alert the problems of this bureaucratic mismanagement, has been highly critical of the hasty implementation of art practice PhDs in India.3 He pointed our attention toward the infrastructural problems in India at the BFA and MFA level, the pandora’s box it will unleash once new batches of young practitioners continue to do their PhDs without an anchoring in their practice. He considered the discrepancy that will emerge if we do not frame our parameters properly, as textual modes of evaluation and verbal articulations will alienate a large number of students who are unequipped for, or not interested in, such a mode of articulation. The document that accelerated this process, the National Education Policy, will be critically examined in the next section. While analyzing the historical conditions that led to the advent of artistic research in the last few decades, Achia Anzi focuses on the transformations in the domain of art that facilitated the participation of artists in the space of academic scholarship.4 Anzi’s presentation foregrounded the potential of artistic research as a solution to the crisis of art, and as a way out of the crisis of knowledge. The crisis of art is an outcome of the crisis of knowledge, and the crisis presents an opportune moment to dismantle the dominant frameworks of knowledge production. It allows the possibility to create intersectional approaches in research. For example, disability is an essential condition that has stood as the other of the able-bodied, ocularcentric artistic production. Shefalee Jain foregrounds this problem in her research and interrogates the modernist idea of a proper human by examining the idea of the able, self-sufficient, and normative human subject.5 Jain collects, examines, and redeploys images of bodies from a wide range of sources, especially from modern medicine, the history of optical technology and anthropology, Indian advertisements, and children's books to foreground the circulation of the normative body. Furthermore, the ways in which art history is taught in art practice departments is heavily anchored in visuality. It makes the visible legible, but does not address what art history is for the visually challenged and the disabled. The boundaries of visuality and production of proper bodies, legitimised in art departments, have to be dislodged. The boundaries have to be erased through new pedagogic interventions. Also, designer capitalism needs flexible bodies, as an easily replaceable workforce, that can fulfil the requirement of the mass production of useful art. In order to tackle these problems artistic research has to be reconfigured within the academy. For that, we need the logic of questioning, practice, searching, pausing, and conversation as proposed by artist and curator Jeebesh Bagchi. Bagchi asks: “Can we stake research as a heuristic by which this density is conceived, learned, and narrated?”6

A broader horizon of possibilities emerges before us. Therefore, it is essential to pose the critical questions, unmask the creative freedoms bestowed by designer capitalism to attain pragmatic results, and map India's unique context of artistic research. The task is not to get caught up in the binary of artistic practice as research and research as practice, but to foreground the critical question at every juncture, ‘what is art?’ While making a unique case for practice as research, one cannot overlook the dominance of measurable outcomes of research: textual publications such as books, peer-reviewed journals and articles in reputed magazines, and paper presentations in conferences. Only recently have higher education institutions acknowledged that the outcomes of a creative project meet research parameters. These conventional parameters are grounded in originality, creativity, and inquiry. These are aspects that are essential to artistic practice. Whereas the ‘research as practice’ approach has only legitimized the existing textual bias and has not done enough to dispel the dominance of existing academic expectations. Many of us have to justify that art is a site of knowledge production and research. We are even misunderstood as mavericks who want to dismantle art pedagogy's textual inputs and outputs. This article argues that the artistic researcher/maker/practitioner thinks through the process to analyze their research questions. They draw inspiration from both practice and theory. The result presents immense knowledge formulation possibilities that have to be evaluated and legitimized through expanded parameters. The challenge is to assess intuition and desire as essential parts of artistic research. Intuition guides the artists to move ahead without the necessity to explain in language what is desired in practice. As Michael Polanyi has observed in his seminal publication The Tacit Dimension, creative acts are driven by informed guesses, hunches, and imaginations. These creative discoveries involve intuitive understanding that is difficult to articulate in academic publications. Knowledge cannot always be articulated verbally because it is rooted in tacit understanding.7

National Education Policy 2020: Problems of the Policy

It is important to understand the political context of the inception of art practice PhDs, that is closely connected with the revamping of higher education system as part of the National Education Policy 2020 passed by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India. The policy does not critically interrogate the character of research in general in the academies and there is an absence of a discussion on restructuring the BFA and MFA programs to both update the curriculum, and prepare the students for PhD research. Before entering into a detailed discussion about the problems in the vision of this document and the myopic view it has towards art, it is necessary also to draw attention to the explicit connection between the global capitalist knowledge economy, national education policies and higher education. During the last two decades, many private universities have emerged in India. If, in the first half of this period, the private universities focused only on science and engineering and avoided humanities and arts, we have witnessed the rise of private universities that offer humanities and arts education through dedicated departments in recent decades. These universities have started offering PhDs in these subjects, too, with a reasonably good amount of scholarship and fee waivers, which the government universities cannot provide. Also, art education in India is mainly conducted in government colleges and universities. Gradually, fine arts are being introduced to private universities through art departments or as part of interdisciplinary liberal arts. These private universities enjoy better curriculum design and administration autonomy than government institutions. At the same time, lack of funds, faculty appointments, infrastructural upgrading, surveillance and regulation on research topics, and the widespread political unrest on campuses are affecting government universities badly. These broader developments are essential to understanding the implementation of NEP 2020, the ending of MPhil courses as a bridge from Masters to PhD, and making PhDs a compulsory requirement to teach in colleges and universities.

The National Education Policy reaffirms the centralized politics of higher education in India; that is, making PhD a mandatory criterion to teach in a university space, and this is influenced by global political and economic alignments instead of emerging out of a necessity to address the changing panorama of the higher education landscape. The vision is bureaucratically charted out for all of us. It is also heavily influenced by the dominant presence of creative industries in the global capitalist economy and a forceful requirement to use creativity as a means to an end. In this hasty implementation, the government and universities have missed an opportunity to redraw the existing research frameworks, neglected the plurality of research, and mechanically equated artistic research to research in natural sciences and humanities. News reports applaud this document's radicality as it emphasizes blurring the difference between arts, humanities, and sciences.8 The document has firmly declared the necessity of creativity and art integrated pedagogy. However, a closer reading will reveal the regressive nature of their understanding of art and its sectarian bias. The idea of art, heritage, and culture is firmly rooted in the Brahmanical philosophies and selectively omits the non-Hindu traditions such as Christian and Islamic aesthetics, heritage, and philosophy. It is ambiguous about its definition of arts, integrated art approaches in pedagogy, and artistic research.9 This is the critical problem in implementing art practice PhDs in India, because the foundations on which they are built are non-inclusive and glorify a certain idea of monolithic heritage. For a long time, art history has played a role in concretizing the colonial, nationalistic, and Brahmanical hegemony in art education.10 It is only recently that an intersectional approach rooted in feminist-Ambedkarite-queer politics has started to critically question these foundational problems. However, implementing this policy and its idea of art, research and culture is making this task more difficult. The document mentions the importance of Fundamental Duties and maintains a selective silence on Fundamental Rights.11 The idea of freedom of expression and criticality is deeply rooted in the rights, and not duties, of the constitution, so the document forecloses critical imagination at the outset. It frames artistic research as art education, as practice/research that has to be put to use and made meaningful through economy, functionality, and heritage building frameworks. This crucial connection between creativity and designer capitalism becomes more explicit at this stage.

Equivalence has become a vital process to include much-neglected artistic research, instead of reinforcing the importance of art practice as a unique field of knowledge in the academy, and charting a new vision for academic research and knowledge production. Artistic research has been baptized in the parameters of traditional disciplines and forced to find equivalences to fit itself into the higher education system. Art departments worldwide, including in India, are now in a hurry to get legitimacy along with other disciplines by finding such equivalences or appropriating existing parameters. Practice as a research approach or practice-led research is becoming an integral part of higher educational institutions, especially since the global rise of PhDs in art practice. Though this induction of PhDs in art practice (known by various names) is seen as a recognition for artistic research, this has not always been met with applause. First, art's marginal position within the academy as a soft subject has only compounded with this inclusion. In such a situation, artistic research can only be legitimized as research if it follows the parameters and assessments applicable to other disciplines. This ground leveling means artistic research has to either succumb to providing textualized academic outputs for its assessment or exist as a rebel within, charting an expanded set of parameters and radically changing the ways research is conducted and assessed in academies. Second is the rise of an exceptionality claim for art practice that argues for recognition of the long-standing research in art practice that exists outside the university (galleries, museums, studios, community practices). Third, creativity in arts is reconfigured to align with the objectives of the current global economic condition as noted by Jagodzinski. “Creativity has indeed received a ‘new life’ in art education. For a long time, no one was speaking about ‘creativity.’ It seemed to be a forgotten discourse, partly perhaps because art could not claim exclusive rights of its possession. Many other ‘subject’ areas could claim the same territory. Things have changed, mainly due to the new economic realization that creativity is good for business and good for everyone.”12 The rise of a prolific image culture has led to a third culture where we have moved from the symbol to the logo, as everything has become commodified.13 In this context, creative industries are the ones that makes decisions and justifications for the inclusion of creativity in academia as a means toward economic success. The economic determinism of creativity is caught up in the framework of the economy of pragmatism. The uselessness of the creativity in artistic research, that stays out of this commodification, is slowly marginalised. Academies, education policies, and creative industries concur with the necessity of arts and aesthetics being put to use. Their functionality is made visible at every step and eventually art as a critical reflection against design will disappear. We let go of the possibility to conceptualize artistic research and research in general along the lines of Maurice Blanchot’s ‘unworking’ i.e., a withdrawal from power, a retreat or idleness gravitates towards a neutral existence, an existence where no rules exist, a place of perpetual interruption that fails to materialize a future. We have to strictly articulate an expanded notion of artistic research within the academy that does not reinforce normative ideas of what it means to learn but foregrounds its innate ability to imagine what it means to think radically. We have to make a strong plea that artistic research is a specific type of knowledge production and thinking, that is unique to its practice. This will advance the arrival of intersectional decolonial research.  

Academics as a Colony: Liberating Research Through Decolonial and Anti-Caste Strategies

When making a case for art practice as research, one cannot ignore its own precarious position within the academy, and that its recent recognition as research means it is getting measured equally across the existing contexts of research. Nevertheless, we also need to understand that the practice of research has a complicated history, especially in the decolonial context. According to Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “The word itself, research, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up the silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our 'faculties' by filing the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are. It galls us those Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and their own nations.”14 As researchers, art historians and curators, we are trained to believe that research is useful and can materialize much-needed change. According to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, this is the hidden curriculum of social science, “that the researched need change and that social science will compel it. When we see something that needs attention, resources, critique, or intercession, our initial inclination may be to conduct research on it. We generally research to meet an unmet need. However, there are far more instances than are commonly realized in which research is not the most useful or appropriate intervention. So, we need also to acknowledge that there are some forms of knowledge and intervention that the academy doesn’t deserve, and research may not be the intervention that is needed in all situations.”15

Many may find this problematic, but it raises important questions, namely, what is meant by the academy and why the academy is undeserving or unworthy of some stories or forms of knowledge. We need to operate within an expanded and pluralistic idea of what the academy means. It may refer to a space of research and higher education. However, it can also reveal that this space of research and higher education is where the interests of the nation-state, private, and government funders play out. Artist Florian Dombois also highlights the limitations of the research done in the humanities and the natural sciences, and how it always ends up in a written publication. According to Dombois, if the medium of thought influences what we think and what we can think, changing the medium of publication can significantly affect it.16 This strategy also helps to break the written word hierarchy over other mediums. For example, the Fine Arts faculty is always asked to present a parameter equivalent to a published article or a book for their promotions. Now could we consider an exhibition equivalent to a book? Or, instead of asking the fine arts departments to equate their multi-media intellectual contributions with a book, could the sciences and social sciences organize their thoughts around film, images, or sounds? This is also important for us to understand that knowledge cultures were historically not always textual.

So, this article would like to argue that research isn’t the only form of epistemic intervention but in academic institutions, it is the most important one. In the current global designer capitalistic dominance of pragmatic creative industries, few spaces remain dedicated to human curiosity and human inquiry, aside from research. This research component is valuable, and worth sustaining, yet we must simultaneously protect and nurture other, non-research, spaces/approaches for curiosity and inquiry. Calling every epistemic intervention research does not help us to remember that there are multiple opportunities to be curious or make meaning in life. Artistic practices do and always have involved research: material research, field research, anatomical research, technological research, and experimentation. The National Education Policy 2020 does not acknowledge the heterogeneity and complexity of artistic research. There is not one kind of artistic research and furthermore, artistic research is not recent. 

According to Henk Borgdorff much artistic research is conducted not to produce knowledge, but in order to enhance what could be called the artistic universe. As we know, this involves producing new images, narratives, sounds, or experiences, and not primarily the production of formal knowledge or validated insights.17 In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz explores the queer utopian potential offered by failure. More than ten years on from its original publication, in the face of our own stagnant and negative present, the book remains a joyful and provocative read, not just for students of queer cultural history but anyone keen to accept Muñoz's invitation to collectively step out of “this place and time to something fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter.”18

Artistic research’s methodology, if there is any, might be cruising utopia, as Muñoz describes it in his book. Instead of following a predefined path, it cruises through an associative mode of analysis, surprising encounters (which might be pleasant or not), and curiously following a line of desire, instead of the rationality of a work plan. Thus, cruising utopia might recast artistic research as ‘desire-based research,’ provided with the agency to connect and disconnect, and fueled by histories of violence.19 A connection with hope and desire might also replace the use of the so-called pain narratives in artistic research. Cruising utopia can thus also be a valuable tool for refusal of research, similar to the ‘unworking’ of Blanchot.20

Academic knowledge is particular and privileged yet disguises itself as universal and common; it is colonial-national-Brahmanical; it already refuses desire; it sets limits to potentially dangerous other knowledge; it does so through erasure, but notably also through inclusion and appropriation. One way to think about artistic research is to ask how desire can be a framework, a model, and a space for refusal. As a framework, desire is a counter logic to the logic of prescription led research. As a mode of refusal, desire is a ‘no’ and a ‘yes.’ As Tuck and Yang have proposed, the refusal in research leads to other r-words: resistance, reclaiming, recovery, reciprocity, repatriation, and regeneration.21 Cruising Utopia introduces queerness as an aesthetic strategy that refuses to accept normatively set hierarchies. According to Borgdorff, artistic research also seems to deviate from the established prescriptions laid out in the methodology manuals in terms of method, understood as systematic and reliable working procedures. Borgdorff observes, “Artistic research is conducted through unsystematic drifting and searching – of which serendipity, chance inspirations, and clues are an integral part – that takes artists onto new, unbroken ground. They thus do not operate within a well-circumscribed discipline that spells out what may and may not be part of the research strategy. In artistic research, both the research topic and the research questions and methods tend to become clear only bit by bit during the artistic search, which often transcends disciplines as well.”22 The blind acceptance of normative academic norms set by designer capitalism wastes a larger opportunity to bring artistic research into academia as a critical trojan horse, as proposed by Florian Cramer and Nienke Terpsma, to rethink and reconfigure the standards and research culture of all academic disciplines.23 Radical artistic research as a trojan horse can expose not only the colonial roots of pedagogy but also the structural disparities within the academy rooted in caste, gender, class, and sexuality.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this paper would like to propose that artistic research is primarily built on an experiential foundation that cannot be efficiently expressed in verbal or written forms. This problem is further compounded as the existing forms of research have not addressed the limitation of research in understanding tacit knowledge. Artistic research and its forms of knowledge production differ from other disciplinarian research and experiments. The source of this research is embodied in the individual researcher/artist and anchored in their tacit understanding, which is not easily interpretable and translatable to existing textual parameters. I propose we let those parameters emerge over time, through the understanding of everyday creative practices, as artistic expression is manifested through artwork and not only through language. For this, we need to collectively ask what is it that we want to understand from artistic research and what can it tell us? What is the vision of research we want to ossify through artistic research? What can artistic research/thinking do?

Most importantly, artistic research should neither be left alone to undertake this task to develop its methodologies and methods, nor have the frameworks from other disciplines imposed upon it. Other disciplines, universities, and policymakers have to first understand that they are dealing with a unique output and a specific kind of knowledge that requires different cognition and parameters to evaluate it. Artworks reveal thinking, and the task is to understand what this thinking can mean through the practice of art. The integrated approach which is proposed for artistic research creates a hierarchy where art has to seek frameworks from other disciplines. Whereas an interdisciplinary approach has to emerge, which acknowledges the uniqueness of this thinking and interweaves it with the research practices of other disciplines. The predicament of assessing artistic research is that much of the knowledge and experience of making is embedded within the body, waiting to be excavated. However, we do not have the complete set of cognitive-affective mapping tools to evaluate them. In order to preserve an open future, we need to collectively resist the reification of artistic research and accept the coherent chaos of this research.

Biography

Premjish Achari is a curator and art critic based in Delhi. Achari has initiated an in-depth curatorial platform, called Future Collaborations, aimed at theoretically and politically informed curation. He is the co-curator of the Bhubaneswar Art Trail 2018. Achari currently heads the programme and the editorial for the exhibition ‘Lokame Tharavadu’ organised by the Kochi Biennale Foundation and teaches art history and theory at Shiv Nadar University. He is the winner of the Art Writers’ Award 2021 issued by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, along with TAKE on Art. 

Media thumb for this text: Gigi Scaria, 'Someone Left a Horse on the Shore,' 2009. Image courtesy of the artist.

• 1The international conference was held online due to the Covid lockdown, but that did not restrict rigorous interactions with various speakers. The department members held lengthy discussions with each speaker before the conference to make them understand the relevance of the general global and specific Indian context. These preliminary discussions and the presentations at the conference provided a foundation to build a passionate case for the position of artistic research in the universities. I am highly thankful to Prof. Sumantra Sengupta, Prof. Atul Bhalla, and Prof. Vasudha Thozhur from the department for their valuable insights. Also, I am grateful to all the speakers at the conference who taught me to reassert the plurality of artistic research, and to turn my gaze inwards towards the practice to engage in search of profound reflection about this unique thinking.
• 2Jan Jagodizinski, Pedagogical Explorations in a Posthuman Age: Essays on Designer Capitalism, Eco-Aestheticism, and Visual and Popular Culture as West-East Meet, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 184-6, and, Jan Jagodizinski, Visual Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing The Oral Eye, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 50-3.
• 3Indrapramit Roy in Knowledge Production and Research in Art Practice, September 22, 2021.
• 4Achia Anzi, 'Art and Research: Bridging the Gap,' in: Knowledge Production and Research in Art Practice, September 22, 2021.
• 5Shefalee Jain, 'The Phantasmagoria of Normalcy: An elaboration on my practice-based research into the modern visual imagery of self-sufficiency and ability,' in: Knowledge Production and Research in Art Practice, September 23, 2021.
• 6Jeebesh Bagchi, 'Surge of an Image,' in: Knowledge Production and Research in Art Practice, September 23, 2021.
• 7Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 24-5.
• 8Some of the examples from leading media outlets for further reading. The following article has to be noted for its omission of non-Hindu and Buddhist heritage, arts and crafts: Jayaram Poduval, 'NEP and the Role of Our Art Design Institutions,' New Indian Express, 5 August, 2021. [accessed 28 May 2022], Anisha Kumari, 'New Education Policy Paves Way for A New Era of Art-Integrated Learning,' NDTV, 9, August, 2020. [accessed 28 May 2022], Vinod Indurkar, 'Arts will be at par with the other subjects in new education policy: Vinod Indurkar,' Times of India, 20 March, 2022. [accessed 28 May 2022]
• 9The notable omission is visible in this extract from the document that only deals with pre-modern philosophers and institutions, now identified as part of the Hindu religion and civilisation, “The Indian education system produced great scholars such as Charaka, Susruta, Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Bhaskaracharya, Brahmagupta, Chanakya, Chakrapani Datta, Madhava, Panini, Patanjali, Nagarjuna, Gautama, Pingala, Sankardev, Maitreyi, Gargi and Thiruvalluvar, among numerous others, who made seminal contributions to world knowledge in diverse fields such as mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, medical science and surgery, civil engineering, architecture, shipbuilding and navigation, yoga, fine arts, chess, and more.” National Education Policy 2020, page 4.
• 10The Brahmanical hegemony is evident in this statement where the document strongly asserts the role of Sanskrit language in pedagogy and falsely claims that people spoke it from all walks of life. It was a language only accessible to the upper castes. "The importance, relevance, and beauty of India's classical languages and literature also cannot be overlooked. Sanskrit, while also an important modern language mentioned in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, possesses a classical literature that is greater in volume than that of Latin and Greek put together, containing vast treasures of mathematics, philosophy, grammar, music, politics, medicine, architecture, metallurgy, drama, poetry, storytelling, and more (known as ‘Sanskrit Knowledge Systems’), written by people of various religions as well as non-religious people, and by people from all walks of life and a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds over thousands of years. Sanskrit will thus be offered at all levels of school and higher education as an important, enriching option for students, including as an option in the three-language formula. It will be taught in ways that are interesting and experiential as well as contemporarily relevant, including through the use of Sanskrit Knowledge Systems, and in particular through phonetics and pronunciation.” National Education Policy 2020, page 14.
• 11“The Policy envisages that the curriculum and pedagogy of our institutions must develop among the students a deep sense of respect towards the Fundamental Duties and Constitutional values, bonding with one’s country, and a conscious awareness of one’s roles and responsibilities in a changing world.” National Education Policy 2020, page 6.
• 12Jan Jagodzinski, Pedagogical Explorations in a Posthuman Age: Essays on Designer Capitalism, Eco-Aestheticism, and Visual and Popular Culture as West-East Meet, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 183.
• 13Peter Weibel, Beyond art: A third culture, (New York: Springer, 2005).
• 14Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, (London & New York: Zed Books, 2008), 1.
• 15Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-Words: Refusing Research”, in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, eds. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi: Sage Publishing, 2013), 224.
• 16Florian Dombois, ‘Is this the end? Or is it a beginning?’ Interview by Michael Hiltbrunner. OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, Issue 3 (2019), [accessed 28 May 2022]
• 17Henk Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia, (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 80.
• 18José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
• 19Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-Words: Refusing Research”, in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, eds. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi: Sage Publishing, 2013).
• 20Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
• 21Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-Words: Refusing Research," in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, eds. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi: Sage Publishing, 2013), 244.
• 22Henk Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia, (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 80-1.
• 23Florian Cramer and Nienke Terpsma, “What Is Wrong with the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research?”, open!, January 21, 2021. [accessed 28 May 2022]