This could be happening for four reasons. Firstly, NTRO submissions require considerable work to be approved as such. In addition to sourcing funding, making and showing the work itself, most NTRO creators must then construct a concise research statement, submitted for approval as research by university panels. This is before it gets to the ERA stage, where if selected for submission there, it is subject to yet another round of peer review. This is a lot more ‘justification’ than authors of ‘traditional research outputs’ (TROs) are expected to produce, resulting in staff submitting less NTROs.
Secondly, if an NTRO’s success as a scholarly output is in part tied to external income coming to the university, we should exercise caution around what that income is used for. We should leverage the physical, technical and administrative infrastructure of the university as in-kind support in our grant applications, and ensure arts grants submitted via the University prioritise independent artist wages. Whilst many are keen to do this, they are often hindered by cumbersome university bureaucracy. As a result, they make work outside the university, thus reducing income aligned with artist researchers.
Thirdly, there are few critical review outlets available to cover the performing arts. This means impact is difficult to identify outside repeat performance invitations and audience response surveys, which again falls to the project creators to collate. Whilst many NTRO creators are expected to gather and justify their own data to demonstrate impact, most TRO authors benefit from products universities purchase to track and weigh their citations and impact.
Finally, there has been no revision of the NTRO design by the Australian Research Council since it was introduced to the academy, though one is immanent following the sudden suspension of the 2023 ERA collection. My time on the college of experts (2017-2020) was insightful – it was often iterated that artists’ methods were supported but in reality, they required much more justification than other approaches. It is notable how few performing arts scholars there are on the current college membership. Further, recent data on the number of Discovery project submissions show a steady decline in the performing arts Field of Research (FoR) codes. Recent DECRA and DP rounds show few applications to, and practically no success in, the performing arts FoRs. Yet performing arts appear in the project design of other disciplines.
All this is a dangerous trend – in taking our research practice out of the university, and badging our research outside our field, we are leaving our discipline dangerously underrepresented in the national research agenda. Yet we need to act before our field is reduced to servicing other disciplines, and value of our work becomes invisible in the academy.
Cat Hope is Research Director and Professor of Composition at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance, Monash University. A leading International scholar examining digital notation, gender representation, experimentation and digital archiving for music, Cat is also an expert in practice based methodologies for music. Cat is currently a Chief Investigator on the European Research Council’s “Digi-Score” project (2020-26), and sites on a range of peer review panels for conferences and journals, as well as the the European Science Foundation and Bloomsbury Academic.