The Urgency of the Arts

In place of a traditional keynote address, this task was shared amongst a varied group of practitioners made up of members of staff at the Royal College of Art, London. The group included academic staff, administrators and heads of programmes, who were each asked to deliver a response to the concerns of the conference; the urgency of the arts, which would together form the keynote address. Hosted by the Royal College of Art, and with contributions from research students from universities across the UK and the world, the LIVING RESEARCH conference ran six strands of thinking around creative propositions engendered by a single word. The categories; Collaboration, Documents, Entanglement, Environment, Me and Reenactment, bringing together researchers across disciplines, developing creative methods to explore terms that demand urgent enquiry. What does arts and humanities research have to offer in our current socio-political climate? The conference took as its focus the way arts research methods and practices might be put to use in our contemporary moment. Asking, what ‘work’ can a PhD do? The focus was not on how might our research be instrumentalised or applied, but rather on how might it "lead our interactions with, and understanding of, the world." Welcome Address: The Urgency of the Arts was made with contributions from Jordan BASEMAN, Gemma BLACKSHAW, Zowie BROACH, JJ CHAN, Nicky COUTTS, Juan CRUZ, Brian DILLON, Catherine DORMOR, Anne DUFFAU, Chantal FAUST, Rebecca FORTNUM, Johnny GOLDING, Paul HAYWOOD, Jaspar JOSEPH-LESTER, Adam KAASA, Jonathan MILES, Rathna RAMANATHAN, Olivier RICHON, Aura SATZ, Shehnaz SUTERWALLA, Beck TADMAN, Joanne TATHAM, Victoria WALSH, and Hermione WILTSHIR