A major part of Createquity’s ongoing mission is to spotlight exceptional research in the arts that everyone should know about. As a natural extension of that mission, we’re excited to announce what we believe is the first honor of its kind: the Createquity Arts Research Prize. This inaugural award will go to an outstanding research project published in 2016 that has dramatically expanded our understanding of the arts. The winner will receive $500, follow-up programming opportunities, and the recognition of Createquity’s unique collaborative community, which includes influential arts leaders from around the world.
We have long maintained that research – however rigorous or innovative – has little value if it exists in a vacuum: the sharing of discoveries between researchers is essential to a collective understanding of arts issues and, ultimately, a healthy arts ecosystem. We also support the idea of critical evaluations – and ongoing discussions – between peers about the work that is being generated in the research community. This new prize advances these goals: we encourage our readers to nominate work that they greatly admire and believe truly moves our field forward.
What We’re Looking For
Createquity is seeking research that advances the current scholarly conversation, applies new methods to old inquiries to uncover fresh and important insights, and/or explores new avenues of investigation.
Our definition of arts research is broad, and may include studies published in peer-reviewed journals, reports commissioned by foundations or government agencies, dissertations, self-published work, even in-depth blog posts. We are open to quantitative work, qualitative work, empirical work, and theoretical work. It can be from any country in the world. The only requirement is that the research must be about the arts or be written with an arts audience in mind. Generally speaking, we are interested in research on the arts that employs methods from the social sciences, broadly conceived—economics, psychology, sociology, etc.—as well as neuroscience and medical research; please note are NOT looking for historical, biographical, or aesthetic analysis of a single artist’s or small group of artists’ work, or cultural criticism focusing on specific works of art.
Our evaluation criteria will include:
- Relevance: the work has research goals that either 1) connect directly to Createquity’s interest in “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them,” or 2) facilitate essential knowledge infrastructure that helps make a broad range of research investigations possible.
- Rigor: the work uses methods that match up well with its research goals, and executes them without obvious flaws.
- Added Value: the work either 1) makes a unique contribution to the literature or 2) is designed explicitly to replicate previous work on an important and under-studied topic.
After getting through an initial screening round, candidates for the Arts Research Prize will ultimately be judged and selected by an external panel of distinguished experts. Additional information is available on our Frequently Asked Questions page for the prize.
We Need Your Help!
Createquity systematically gathers and reviews research in the arts and culture sector on an ongoing basis, and we continue to mine the depths of academic journals and our personal networks for studies published in 2016 that we should be looking at. But we need your help to make sure we haven’t missed anything important! Accordingly, we’ve announced an open call for nominations.
The deadline for nominations is April 10, 2017. You can submit up to three nominations total. If you have more than three you’d like to recommend to us, or have any other questions, please email Rebecca Ratzkin at rebecca@createquity.com.
Thank you for participating in this exciting initiative!