This project has been devised in relationship to recent debates in which practice and its relationship to writing, in whatever form it takes, is being negotiated by artists undertaking research within institutional contexts. While the material available to date e.g. Katie McLeod and Lyn Holdridge's ‘Thinking through Art' offers a number of arts based models the contributions often seem to fall short and what is offered rarely fulfils what has been promised. James Elkins in his essay, ‘On Beyond Research and New Knowledge' questions the validity of the contributions in ‘Thinking through Art' with a healthy dose of criticism while considering the various issues at play within the institution.

The fraught yet potentially dynamic relationship between thinking, making and writing in research and indeed the anxiety that seems to surround it has concerned us for some time particularly when working with our own research students. This was, for us, further highlighted at the ELIA event in Gothenburg in November 2008. The research strand of this event was accompanied by an exhibition of work by arts based researchers that raised a number of issues with regard to the status of the art object in this research context and the troublesome role of the curator and the curatorial decision making that, in that particular instance, seemed to problematise (perhaps even compromise) the integrity of the research and the artwork., or indeed the art-research-work. Furthermore, the conceptualization of the ‘research art-object' (whatever a research art-object may be) and the accompanying question of ‘quality' have generated much debate, and it is with this in mind that we are interested in opening up new lines of practical and theoretical enquiry and experimentation within the genres of art and art historical and cultural contexts. As is our want or rather in a Deleuzian line of flight that may well be a flight of fancy this has led us very nicely to the intersections of queer.

The working title: Queertexturealities not only locates the project within the realm of desire and the sheerness of our desiring but also hopefully gives some indication of the complexity and subtlety we think may be at play within queer discourse or indeed the productivity of queering in discourse. While this project seeks to explore the potential of what has been claimed as, and what might constitute, queer methodologies it is also concerned with what we will define here as emergent queer strategies and queer strategies of emergence, in the site of art in research as a means of forging new relations in which the movement or motion of thinking-making-writing-making-thinking-writing shifts time and again within the relations of art. The aim of the project is to contribute a critically reflective collection of essays, projects and artworks that will address the nexus of the artwork and the processes of production in and as research that allows us to generatively redefine it. It seems to us that this has become a pressing issue for many artists as well as academics and institutions. We feel that queer scholars, artists and cultural producers have a contribution to make to this debate.

With this in mind we invite contributions from across the full range of arts based research. We invite contributions from established researchers concerned with these issues or who may wish to address them and we are also interested in publishing work by researchers within the field who have recently completed their doctorates or are in the process of completing them. We are interested in receiving contributions from: artists, activists, art historians, critical theorists and so on.

Please submit a 500 word abstract outlining your proposed contribution by email to Henry Rogers: henry.rogers@bcu.ac.uk

Deadline for abstracts/ proposals 1st July 2010.