The Spider and the Crab: Ways of Being with Practice-as-Research

This text has emerged from a dialogue between two generations of Practice-as-Research (PaR) scholars. Through it, we seek to identify and address some of the motivations with which individual artists might enter into academia, and the tensions that often arise from their misaligned relation to a university's values and processes. Rather than offering an(other) argument for the epistemological validity of the now-established field of PaR, we draw on various anecdotes and experiences to make sense of the sensibilities and attitudes of artist-scholars, particularly in regards to the shifting conditions of UK universities over the past two decades, and with reference to debates within institutional critique, decolonisation and immaterial labour.