Practice As Research
Practice As Research
In conversation with Prof Haidy Geismar
In this podcast, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Prof Haidy Geismar about Practice As Research.
Prof Haidy Geismar is a social anthropologist with research interests in intellectual and cultural property, indigenous rights and colonial histories and legacies, new forms of cultural representation, the affects and effect of digitisation, the anthropology of art, critical museology and the South Pacific (especially Vanuatu and New Zealand).Current research projects include Finding Photography - a collaboration with collections care researchers to explore the social networks and materials underpinning contemporary digital art photography, and Collecting in Context - a project exploring the applicability of new digital collecting platforms in diverse cultural settings. Prof Geismar is committed to museum practice, with long-term affiliations to a number of different museums, including the Tate and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and she has curated a number of exhibitions, including Port Vila Mi Lavem Yu (Port Vila, I love you) in Honolulu, Hawaii, in May 2011, and part of which then travelled to the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Prof Geismar's work is available on the website https://www.haidygeismar.com/index.html and her two books Impermanence: Exploring continuous change across cultures and Museum object lessons for the digital age are free to download from the UCL Press website.
Nicole Brown: hello, and welcome to this week's in conversation of the practice and as research network, my name is Nicole Brown and I am in conversation today with a very special guest.
Nicole Brown: From ucl University College, London and Professor here to gaze law, who is a professor of anthropology and can I just say welcome, and thank you very much for the time for of yours today with us.
Haidy Geismar: Thanks Nicole it's lovely to be here i'm looking forward to our conversation.
Nicole Brown: Great Thank you so let's start straight away with the first kind of question that i've got prepared for you and, what is your definition of practice as research, seeing that this is for the practice as research network.
Haidy Geismar: Thank you i've been trying to think about my answer to that actually for a little while.
Haidy Geismar: So, as you mentioned i'm an anthropologist and I think we have quite an interesting experience of practice because.
Haidy Geismar: I think we're still one of the few disciplines that requires this kind of middle period in our doctoral research to be dedicated to long term and immersive field work.
Haidy Geismar: And i'm an anthropologist of museums, so all of my work takes place in museums, where I work with curators conservators cultural communities, artists and everyone else attached to those kinds of groups.
Haidy Geismar: So obviously practice is something that I think about a lot in my own work it doesn't always align with the way in which practice is sometimes talked about in academic fields, however.
Haidy Geismar: So for me field work is very much a practice it's about how you situate your academic ideas and thinking in the world.
Haidy Geismar: And it very much not only just in dialogue with other people and people outside the university, but through the things that they are doing, as well as the things that you are doing.
Haidy Geismar: But then, of course, museum practice is a very lively very well defined field that i've been lucky to have lots of opportunity to explore through my research.
Haidy Geismar: And so, in particular i've had a chance to think about practices of things like collecting of curating and, more recently, and collaborations that i've had.
Haidy Geismar: With conservators conserving and managing collections or collections care so Those are all practices that in select my practice my thinking as a researcher.
Haidy Geismar: And I also think of, and I suppose I do think of everything I do in terms of practice, so I think of writing and reading as practices as well, and speaking.
Haidy Geismar: and disseminating work across a wide range of different media actually so one of the things I do at ucl is convene with colleagues digital anthropology.
Haidy Geismar: master's program and research program and so we're very much think about how digital media affords new forms of practice, both for research and within social well.
Nicole Brown: Thank you, I mean one of the things that I find particularly interesting about the practice as research.
Nicole Brown: Is it a weird where do we draw the line So where is it just practice and they're just not in the sense of you know, just as pejorative, just as in only, whereas it purely only practice.
Nicole Brown: And where is it practice and research combined into one and that's the part that i'm particularly interested in trying to kind of explore with.
Nicole Brown: Colleagues, like yourself where i'm trying to kind of identify how do you define or describe your work, is it.
Nicole Brown: Is it practice it practice as research combined and how do you in your own mind in a way split the two into two pieces or can you not I don't know i'm just trying to explore that.
Haidy Geismar: I think that answer that question is really different when you're working inside a university or outside of it actually because.
Haidy Geismar: I think that we're having a lot of really productive conversations in anthropology actually about practice so we now have a PhD by practice in the anthropology department.
Haidy Geismar: And the field in general has been much more open in recent years to taking things like film and photography and even exhibition curation as equivalent to text.
Haidy Geismar: As forms of practice that are very much recognized as research and valued as research and now I think you can even submit exhibitions and.
Haidy Geismar: Films the rest, for example, so there's a very open exploration around practice that's happening in anthropology and I think in the university, particularly our corner of social sciences and humanities research.
Haidy Geismar: But those boundaries are not quite as porous I think outside the university and i've really seen that in the conversations that I have, through my own research with museum practitioners.
Haidy Geismar: who feel I think some of it is about the stakes, and the forms of accountability that you have within your work, who you are accountable and then what and how that accountability is measured.
Haidy Geismar: And it often seems to be that the kind of.
Haidy Geismar: luxury of critical engagement and reflection and experiment with all of the opportunities to fail or reach dead ends or change course that we have in university research.
Haidy Geismar: Are not luxuries that other people feel they have within their working lives and their practice, therefore, is delineated more or suppose strictly around things like professional standards around accountability structures and those kinds of.
Haidy Geismar: places and values that are they are kind of community created, but they can also be very top down.
Haidy Geismar: And they can be experienced I think in constraining ways, but then I think they also from the conversations that I have with practitioners.
Haidy Geismar: are seen as kind of forms of grounded miss that perhaps the hardest to correspond to in this ever open conversation about practice that we have in the university context within our within our practices me searches.
Haidy Geismar: So I think it's quite interesting that there are clear boundaries, often in museums about what's research and what's practice.
Haidy Geismar: And it's fascinating to see, for example, i've just come off last year I was a research fellow at the teeth in a melon funded project, which was exactly asking this question it's in the research department of the collections care division.
Haidy Geismar: run by Lawrence and he's the head of collections care research, and it was very much looking at new practices and theories of collections care and how some of the new thinking about art, that is not conventional so.
Haidy Geismar: ever changing archives of social activity or digital objects, how they can how we can use the search into those areas to inform current museum practice and create best practice in the museum.
Haidy Geismar: And so yeah so they're very interesting and it was very clear that.
Haidy Geismar: One of the objectives I think of that was to give practitioners that people working in conservation and in archives, the opportunity to develop their own research because.
Haidy Geismar: Often, that time is really squeezed in the museum setting for people like conservators who's have to respond to very tight pressures and very tight budgets around caring for objects, for example.
Nicole Brown: Thank you, I mean that's really interesting because i've kind of you know i've had a few of these conversations now and one of the things that has come out to is is that it is so difficult to.
Nicole Brown: identify and categorize what we do and i'm not sure that it's a good thing that we need to categorize it in a way, but in reality, you know, for example.
Nicole Brown: Because you were talking about accountability structures and professional standards, this is bringing me back to the idea of how poets as researchers who, for whom.
Nicole Brown: The poetry is to practice and i'm sitting in kind of in a different field, if you like, because.
Nicole Brown: I mean, who decides on whether you are not you're a poet is almost in your own mind is your own mindset.
Nicole Brown: And there aren't any kind of professional standards, other than Okay, have you been published or not, but you can still consider yourself a poet, even if you haven't been published so it's in you know somebody who's a.
Nicole Brown: Somebody who's doing poetry as research as practice as research elements and is probably going to be struggling to kind of find that accountability stroke structure and the professionals Douglas there you just mentioned and within the museums and and collect conservatoires.
Nicole Brown: So that's that's the kind of thing that's really interesting to kind of hear how actually different disciplines are looking at the same thing from quite a different vantage point, if you like.
Haidy Geismar: But I think for practitioners, people who are just doing things like, not just in a in a lesser way people who are starting from a place of what they're doing, I think, often look.
Haidy Geismar: To try to demystify what the value structures structures of accountability are in research.
Haidy Geismar: And that is actually quite mystifying for many people, and that has it the same kind of structure actually is the one that I was describing in the practitioner context that I was referring to earlier, because we have.
Haidy Geismar: quite clear codes of practice and codes a structures of accountability and of value in research that accountability around things like ethics values around things like research rankings and audit saw.
Haidy Geismar: This peer review processes and so on, so I think both sides, if you want, if we see them as separate.
Haidy Geismar: come from different kinds of worlds, in a way or ways of thinking it's interesting though to perceive that there are really still boundaries that people feel are in place.
Haidy Geismar: That, I think, often practitioners can find it hard to imagine how they can get into research will have what they are doing recognized as research.
Haidy Geismar: yeah and vice versa researchers can struggle to really all can wonder how they can have what they are recognized as doing as a practice.
Haidy Geismar: I think I think it's easier that way around because we have quite well established discourses of teaching as a practice and writing as a practice.
Haidy Geismar: And we are absorbing other forms of factors into the Academy.
Haidy Geismar: Whereas I think it's actually quite challenging for people working outside of research contexts to develop that side of their practice so in a way that's where we need to bring the boundaries are more will be better and sharing our toolkits.
Nicole Brown: I think yeah Thank you, I think I agree, I think what you've just described, is it is very often the case with in teacher education and and to teach practices.
Nicole Brown: In secondary schools or primary schools, for example, there are teachers who are obviously practitioners in the classroom.
Nicole Brown: But they don't actually have access to to journal articles, the way we do at react university level, and therefore.
Nicole Brown: Their research practice will never be quite as in depth as ours, because it's an accessibility issue as well it's not just.
Nicole Brown: That you know that the kind of the value or the recognition is different it's even practicalities are different, so I totally see where you're coming from and can I just ask what What about your own practice.
Nicole Brown: Are you doing practice as research or you're a practitioner a researcher researcher practitioner, how do you define your own work in those terms that we've just talked about.
Haidy Geismar: I wouldn't call myself a research practitioner but i've always thought about what I do is kinds of forms of practice.
Haidy Geismar: At the moment, i'm largely absorbed with developing a new campus that you see at least, and so my research is more writing.
Haidy Geismar: than it is doing kind of primary research, because I haven't had the space for that in the last few months.
Haidy Geismar: But before that I definitely have what I would call a kind of experimental practice that forms the backbone of a lot of my research, which has been.
Haidy Geismar: And, as I refer to museums it's really to explore how museum practices can be generative.
Haidy Geismar: Not just of my research to create research data but generative of social relationships that then also become part of my research, so I have used collecting.
Haidy Geismar: As a practice to then study and research so by having funds for museums, to actually create new collections.
Haidy Geismar: and explore how we can do that in collaborative or co produced ways and using collecting as a vehicle to explore questions of identity or value and so on.
Haidy Geismar: i've looked at curating similar in a similar ways that putting together exhibitions I curated numerous exhibitions and those are very much for me being research practice in terms of using actual process of exhibition making as a form of knowledge generation.
Haidy Geismar: And i've actually.
Haidy Geismar: Translated that into student led projects as well, where, when I was before I came to UCLA taught and.
Haidy Geismar: nyu half in anthropology and half and museum studies and I was frustrated because and why you didn't have a kind of university museum.
Haidy Geismar: In the vein of some of the illustrious universities in both America and the UK.
Haidy Geismar: And so I made a class which was called making a museum and then we had several iterations of the class where we bought museum studies students, together with students and in another department or discipline.
Haidy Geismar: Sometimes once it was history, for example.
Haidy Geismar: And they work together on a shared question and they use the medium or the practice of exhibition making and archiving and collecting to explore that question as a form of research for the class.
Haidy Geismar: And the class ended up to curating an exhibition, and we did that several times to really fantastic effect, putting on weight exhibitions.
Haidy Geismar: So I definitely think of exhibiting and curating as an important form of my practice.
Haidy Geismar: And then, more recently, i've been exploring digital platforms and practices of digital collecting and digital archiving.
Haidy Geismar: and using those as kind of windows into how people construct classifications that are meaningful and valuable and how those vary from place and time across places and out of class time.
Nicole Brown: that's really fascinating, can I just ask out of interest personal interest or mostly as a sidestep here how did you assess.
Nicole Brown: The student work when you were saying that you got them to pureed an exhibit and put together their own museum university.
Nicole Brown: And what what was the the assessment for that particular module is that, then the curation the exhibition, or is it the the critical commentary, or is it a little bit of all of this.
Haidy Geismar: yeah it was a bit of everything, so I think.
Haidy Geismar: You have to when you do those kinds of projects with students, because obviously there's a form of training students in place so it's not quite the same as a curatorial project that you would be running on your own, you have to impose a bit more structure on them, then.
Haidy Geismar: curious as for them as curators you'll still give me being a bit more prescriptive.
Haidy Geismar: So they had certain tasks that they had to undertake across the program which was undertaking research, creating I think so.
Haidy Geismar: i'm just thinking, one of the my favorite example is a course that we did with.
Haidy Geismar: The New York department of sanitation, which was to make visible the Labor of sanitation workers and to pave the ground for a museum of sanitation, because in New York.
Haidy Geismar: there's a police museum a fire department museum there's a transit authority museum and that but there's no visible there's no recognition and that way of sanitation Labor even though it's actually the most dangerous.
Haidy Geismar: work out of all of those services you're much more likely to die on the job if you're a sanitation worker and it's probably the most necessary because one day missing of the garbage collection and you really, really.
Nicole Brown: cove it would have shown as well yeah.
Haidy Geismar: So um and actually what so week, so the students had various things they had to do, which was they had to do an oral history interview with a sanitation worker they had to they each had in small groups.
Haidy Geismar: A panel a text and image panel that they had to create for the exhibitions that they had to select the images and writing the text for that.
Haidy Geismar: And then they had to do some creative writing and some historical research, which was evaluated through an essay and then that will not put together in the final exhibition.
Nicole Brown: Thank you, I mean the reason why I asked is obviously as part of the practice research i'm always asking myself.
Nicole Brown: Two questions to one is where is the difference, or you know between.
Nicole Brown: Pure research pure practice or practice as research that's The one thing that i'm interested in and the other thing is.
Nicole Brown: You know what's the outcome of that practice as research and in some cases, the outcome is quite tangible.
Nicole Brown: And because an artist painter, for example, a painter researcher, obviously, the outcome, Mr painting so i've got something quite tangible to look at.
Nicole Brown: But I can imagine that with with curating unless you've got the actual exhibition, the process of curation as to what have you chosen and what did you not choose.
Nicole Brown: that's again something that's quite intangible and hidden that's not necessarily you can see, the final things that have been chosen, but you can't see.
Nicole Brown: what's not there, in a way, so that's the part that i'm interested in is you know what's the outcome of practice as research and does it require there for the critical commentary in, for example, an essay or in a presentation in order to understand.
Nicole Brown: The outcome that's there.
Haidy Geismar: yeah I mean, I think the great thing when you're doing these sorts of activities to teaching is that that's often the focus of the class so it's often.
Haidy Geismar: Then they're choosing things, but they have been taught to reflect physically on what isn't there so that those things become more visible actually than they would in perhaps in the museum exhibition.
Nicole Brown: on their own.
Haidy Geismar: Part of the training is to make students reflect or.
Haidy Geismar: Do you offer your labels, or what what's the curatorial voice and whose is it or all those sorts of questions so in a way of teaching as a great value to kind of release some of that into the wild.
Haidy Geismar: And and really bring some of that critical thinking out into the kind of visible and tangible outputs that the students are making themselves so.
Nicole Brown: yeah that's really yeah that's really interesting, can I just ask you, in your view, what, what do you think are the challenges of practice research.
Haidy Geismar: I think the assessment is is massive.
Haidy Geismar: I think I.
Haidy Geismar: mean when I say assessment obviously by assessment i'm referring to how you might mark somebody is work or evaluate somebody's work, whether it's a student se or it could be a PhD dissertation, but it could also be an output of an academic he's hoping to.
Haidy Geismar: get it in an audit like rough but I don't just mean assessment in that narrow way, because I think it's about standardized standardizing or value systems, recognizing when practice is successful or works on when it isn't and I think that's a real challenge.
Haidy Geismar: it's you know we started out by talking about how both practice and research are constrained by these kinds of value communities and structures and hierarchies and value.
Haidy Geismar: But actually I think that's the real kind of you know heart of the question, which is about how you recognize whether practices successful or good in some way and work therefore worthwhile.
Haidy Geismar: Because it's quite easy to say, and I think it in the university context, again, which is where i'm talking about mainly.
Haidy Geismar: it's lower risk it's quite easy to say, this is my practice and i've explored it.
Haidy Geismar: But you haven't had you don't have to justify yourself in the same way that you do if you were being exhibited at the teeth, for example, to millions of people at that visit every year.
Haidy Geismar: Because you can frame what you've done as as exploratory as partial as just beginning, you can use it as a platform to say, well, and this shows me what skills, I need and and where and made me think about where I could get them from.
Haidy Geismar: Whereas that's not you can't do that if you, you know you wouldn't be able to submit that film to a film festival and and have it win a prize for example.
Nicole Brown: I know that's that's definitely yeah, it has to be accomplished and polished final piece really isn't it.
Haidy Geismar: yeah so it's the value of practice, you know again inside research activities in the university is quite different.
Haidy Geismar: practice as a kind of object that then is valued in other contexts and and trying to light on kind of consensus around standards and and when things have worked I think it's really challenging.
Haidy Geismar: Because my feeling is as much as that's problematic it's also isn't, it is important, it is necessary to have.
Haidy Geismar: taught at least be aware of the values that we ascribe to practices and when we think when we think things are.
Haidy Geismar: Important and when we think things are skills and when we think things come from a kind of place of consideration and the place of.
Haidy Geismar: Of kind of effort, rather than just the fact that they exist, making them as completely legitimate as anything is missing, something else I sound like i'm being very judgmental and.
Nicole Brown: hierarchy, no, no, no, no, you don't know not that's The big challenge that's the challenge, I mean I think there's.
Haidy Geismar: A need in that because they're in that is is all hierarchy traditions of exclusion, questions of class and gender cast questions of colonialism and history.
Haidy Geismar: You know so it's not straightforward.
Nicole Brown: But what's interesting for me is like you saying in a way within the museum context it's easier to be a research practice, you know somebody who's doing researchers practice or practices research at university level.
Nicole Brown: Because you can kind of make those mistakes and you, it can be half finished still it doesn't quite have to be the Polish piece, that it would have to be if it goes.
Nicole Brown: To a film festival or to the tape, but at the same time isn't it true that when people write about that kind of work they don't actually talk about their failures.
Nicole Brown: That the kind of the weaknesses are glossed over anything that's kind of seen as potentially well actually I didn't quite get there, I didn't quite have the skill to complete this properly.
Nicole Brown: And you kind of I don't know yeah you gloss it over you're not necessarily thinking reflecting on it publicly, it may be something that you're doing in your private space space, but as things get published as an outcome, or as an output in a journal article or in a book or as a film.
Nicole Brown: Those things get glossed over.
Haidy Geismar: yeah I mean, I think the whole role of failure, probably is pervasive across or the hidden role of failure is pervasive across many fields I mean scientific research as well.
Haidy Geismar: Because that's intense pressure to perform to have successful results to.
Haidy Geismar: Whereas we all know that experimentation requires failure to claiming generative so yeah I think there's some a lot of tension that comes in that I suppose.
Haidy Geismar: One of the massive constraints in the area that I work at is also the kind of really peculiar value structures that have emerged in the art world and the weird lines that get drawn about what is good haskell.
Haidy Geismar: There, which are you know really problematic and which often reflect the market more than academic research or which reflects a very complex geopolitics and hierarchies cultural hierarchies and things like that.
Haidy Geismar: So i'll never forget, making a collection in Vanuatu and taking it back to the Cambridge museum of archaeology and anthropology which has given me the funding.
Haidy Geismar: To do that, and one of the curators been really disparaging about the contemporary art that I had collected.
Haidy Geismar: Saying Basically, this is primitive contemporary art and in fan of it as a country is this.
Haidy Geismar: is a country with no art school it's a country where there's no art supply shop in the whole country, so people who are practicing as contemporary artists are you know.
Haidy Geismar: Are they may have had some rudimentary our training at secondary school but they're basically really working hard to participate in the global art world with very limited resources and very limited opportunities.
Haidy Geismar: And a lot of what they're doing is actually reflecting on the place of contemporary art in how they imagine themselves as traditional.
Haidy Geismar: or customary practitioners there's a very interesting internal conversation as well that's going on, through the Museum of contemporary art.
Haidy Geismar: But yes, I mean would it be exhibited at the tapes would it would you know, could it be exhibited at the Tate without it falling into a kind of primitive or folk art or indigenous art slots, I mean, these are all really important questions that come up a lot.
Nicole Brown: that's really interesting that you say that because it, especially within sort of modern art when you look at a potluck, for example, a lot of people are saying.
Nicole Brown: we're actually my five year old, who goes to to nursery or kindergarten or whatever could have done those blocks on the piece of paper.
Nicole Brown: And, and in many ways, I can understand where people are coming from, but then to hear that you saying that somebody else says Well, this is a primitive art and therefore it's no good.
Nicole Brown: And is really interesting because what what makes the one spot on paper and so valuable that it's worth several million pounds and on the other hand, something that's developed is then you know yeah.
Haidy Geismar: yeah I mean I don't put off in a way.
Haidy Geismar: Absolutely, and I think you know the art market and the art world rather be incredibly colonial and yours.
Haidy Geismar: Yes, in general, I mean I say Eurocentric I mean there are other centers there are Asian centers that are looking to Europe.
Haidy Geismar: You know the Chinese art my art worlds, but don't look to Europe as reference points, but they are, they are the way in which cultural hierarchy so inscribed in art world is very powerful still.
Haidy Geismar: yeah absolutely.
Nicole Brown: Thank you so, can I just ask you, I know that you've obviously got huge projects on the go at the moment, especially with us at least and but what are your plans really to developing your own research practice and how would you want this field to kind of progress further.
Haidy Geismar: Well, I mean actually, so I think of UCLA he says that they're having been an amazing opportunity to explore these questions, but at kind of institutional level.
Haidy Geismar: Because really what we have done in our cost of the new campus development is elevate practice and really put practice forward into.
Haidy Geismar: Several of our kind of existing disciplines and areas of interest so and so it's not I don't think it's strictly research, for me, because i'm not writing about it, yet, although maybe I will, but I mean the opportunity to envisage new kinds of spaces for us to work in, for example.
Haidy Geismar: has been really, really exciting, so we have two new spaces, which are going to really I think break down the boundaries between research teaching engagement.
Haidy Geismar: Through this idea of practice and the practices are things like curating collecting and and exhibiting but also.
Haidy Geismar: archiving and collecting working with collections collections based research, the practice of public history, for example.
Haidy Geismar: So it's been really exciting to kind of I mean what what the thing i've been thinking about last last few days, this is the object learning space that we're developing.
Haidy Geismar: Because it's a real opportunity to develop a university collections space that starts in the moment that we're in now, with all of the debates that we're having about.
Haidy Geismar: The validity of historic collections and their legacy in the present day.
Haidy Geismar: Problems and the powers of kind of display for the practices of display that that often are perceived to.
Haidy Geismar: inscribe hierarchies cultural and racial and other kinds of hierarchies we can kind of take that and then think well what would we do if we could start from from now with something new and that's kind of what we are doing so.
Haidy Geismar: i'm really engaged in that at the moment, thinking about that so it's not it might not be strictly research but it's taking all my research power and thinking to be translated into a very crowded building project.
Haidy Geismar: which also is about building new academic programs, so you know championing and new BA and heritage which the Institute of archaeology is going to put on.
Haidy Geismar: Yes, you must, as in public history which the history department is going to be putting on from Sep tember to that for that and.
Nicole Brown: So there's a lot.
Nicole Brown: going on, then yes, well, thank you very much indeed for your time I don't want to keep you any longer, I really appreciate the time with you, it was lovely talking to you is really exciting to hear about all of these different.
Nicole Brown: projects that you've got in mind, but also about your own thoughts on what practices research means from your background as an anthropologist and.
Nicole Brown: Working with museum collections that's really exciting and anyone who's listening in, and I would just like to say, please do check out the website.
Nicole Brown: For more on the podcasts and and also on the YouTube channel from the practices research network seminar series and do get in touch Thank you.