All research projects are a journey, POLART is no different. But POLART is also a destination, the culmination of many years of thinking about how knowledge is produced, valued and mobilised in public policy, and about the role that art and aesthetics play in shaping those processes.
POLART is a European Research Council-funded project that explores the interactions between art and policy as ways of producing knowledge otherwise. At its core, the project asks how artistic, aesthetic, embodied and narrative forms of knowing shape collective values and how these values, in turn, become materialised in public policy, often through numbers, indicators and forms of expertise.
The project will build on long-standing debates about evidence, expertise and governance, while responding to contemporary challenges; the rise of quantification across public life, the limits of metric cultures, growing calls for more democratic and decolonial forms of knowledge, and increasing recognition that what ‘counts’ in policy is never neutral. POLART examines how qualification and quantification are deeply entangled and how qualities such as meaning, value, imagination and affect are transformed into numbers, metrics and authoritative forms of evidence.
Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, POLART works across the social science, humanities and the arts. The team will engage with artists, policy actors and researchers to investigate how aesthetic practices create the conditions for new ways of knowing and governing. Rather than positioning art as an ‘add-on’ to policy, POLART aims to place it at the centre of knowledge production.
“Like with the work of policy makers and artists, research necessitates storytelling: the story of my research journey, with POLART as its destination, was often a search for jobs, a new home, a disciplinary base – but it was also a search for an understanding of how knowledge produces social change and the ways that the making of knowledge, through its multiple forms, requires creativity and imagination, optimism and camaraderie. It is these values that we carry with us as we begin the POLART journey; we would love you to come onboard!”
As the project progresses, the team looks forward to sharing research findings, collaborations and reflections that aim to challenge conventional understandings of evidence and expertise.
We invite you to join us on our journey as we imagine how knowledge might be made otherwise, through creativity, collaboration and aesthetics – re-articulating knowledge for policy.