ASPERA as an organisation has come a long way, and being part of the DDCA community helps to further refine the conversations around Creative Practice Research within the creative disciplines and how excellence in these disciplines can be assessed and appreciated.
The development of university cultures through peak disciplinary bodies is the main way that Creative Practice Research has been socialised and can continue to be better understood by those inside and outside of our creative disciplines.
ASPERA has contributed to this work to better understand the value and contributions of Creative Practice Research in Screen Production through generating publications for CPR like ‘Screen Production Research – Creative Practice as a Mode of Enquiry’ which provides examples of the range of Creative Practice Research forms occurring in screen production. ASPERA also created a place for formal conversations on these topics through the ASPERA Research-Sub Committee, formed in 2014 and led by Professor Craig Batty. The ASPERA Research-Sub Committee continues to be a place where assessment of films, filmmaking and screen plays as CPR occurs. This is achieved through the publication of Sightlines Journal and Conference, as it provides an ongoing forum to continue this discourse around filmmaking research in the academy, that includes interdisciplinary research and industry focused research.
Journals like Sightlines present one opportunity for CPR assessors and practitioners to start to share ideas around assessment across universities and to assess the quality of creative research and how new knowledge contributions exist within the creative artefact or through a theoretical or methodological contribution, framed by the research question. Achieving parity on high quality CPR Research outputs requires creative practice researchers and assessors to be skilled at articulating the value of research and the assessment of it too. In 2016 there was a project called the ‘Filmmaking Research Network’, funded by the AHRC, it allowed UK and Australian filmmaking academics to host these conversations and to create resources aimed at showcasing examples of Filmmaking Research across both countries. There was a focus on the UK’s REF and Australia’s next ERA round. Sadly, the next ERA round never eventuated, and the resources have been underutilised by Australian screen production researchers.
Some of the points discussed through the FRN include guidelines on framing an impact submission for filmmaking, guidance to develop a research statement as well as filmmaking case studies from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF).
These FRN resources, now available on the ASPERA website, have held their value and could make a useful contribution to the DDCA’s current discussion around CPR and developing these understandings within university cultures.
As raised at DDCA’s online forum parity across universities is imperative as ERA has stalled. What follows is a personal reflection, rather than a comment on the good work that ASPERA has done over the years to help build research literacy for CPR Screen Production and Filmmaking.
Over the last decade each university developed their own internal panels to assess ‘Non-Traditional Research Outputs’, primarily as a feeder into ERA. This work resulted in each university panel creating their own rigorous criteria and assessments of the institution’s NTRO submissions. I have submitted to these panels and been an assessor on these panels.
Much like traditional peer-review processes for written work, I have found wildly different outcomes of the same work, done as cross-institutional research projects, that was favourably received by some panels and outrightly rejected by others.
Perhaps this is not unusual as these panels are built on peer-review practices, which can be flawed and rigorous in equal measure.
What is curious is that the internal guidelines that make up the NTRO panels and assessments are generally not publicly available on a university website.
How can parity be achieved if we are not sharing our processes with each other?
It’s concerning that much of the good work done on these panels to assess internal submissions is invisible, primarily because ERA has stalled and that means no national assessment of research excellence, including CPR can be conducted. Why is this a problem – well how can we interrogate ‘world standard’ assessments of quality, without a national assessment process? How is it possible for anyone to argue the value and cultural contributions from a locally produced CPR output without a national assessment process? So, in returning to the DDCA’s point – should we develop an archive or a ‘data resource’ where high quality CPR Australian case studies can be seen – for me the answer is ‘yes’! We need this ‘data set’ for ourselves as a touch stone and to showcase the important research outcomes and the new knowledge that can be achieved through Creative Practice Research.
Susan Kerrigan is Professor of Film and Television at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. She is a Vice-President of ASPERA and was an active member of ASPERA Research sub-committee. She is a creative practice and qualitative researcher in filmmaking. Susan was a Partner Investigator on the Filmmaking Research Network and has edited and written extensively on Creative Practice Research in Screen Production and Filmmaking