Name: ARC Conversation: The Art of Research - expanding disciplinary horizons
Start: 2026-04-28T16:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-04-28T17:30:00+01:00
Location: Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow

Hear from our panel how creative practice can enrich interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration.
About this Event

The Art of Research: expanding disciplinary horizons

This panel discussion explores the relationship between art and research, considering how creative practice can enrich interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration. Chaired by Dominic Paterson, Professor of History of Art, and featuring Sotiria Grek, Professor of Science, Knowledge and Public Policy, Lisa Bradley, Senior Lecturer in Creative and Interdisciplinary Studies in Education and award-winning artist Rae-Yen Song, the conversation will reflect on how artistic practices and methodologies influence research and policy within the Advanced Research Centre (ARC) and beyond, and the value that art brings to cross-disciplinary dialogue.

The session will reflect on the ARC's own art collection, and mark the launch of the ARC quilt, celebrating the creativity and collaborative spirit of the ARC community.

Agenda:

16:00 -16:30 – Welcome and panel discussion

16:30 -17:00 - Audience discussion and Q&A

17:00 -17:30 - Drinks

About the panel:

Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 is an artist flowing with the immigrant experience of flux and resilience, hungry to ever-evolve and build things. Guided by Daoist ways of worlding, Song considers family as a hybrid organism, radically entwined with all other living things – continuously swirling in multi- space and time. Song masticates their vibrating qi, and grows a big belly to hold all of this entangled ancestry… plop plop plop… warm excretions of other life stories to be sewn, watered and sung.

Sotiria Grek is Professor of Science, Knowledge and Public Policy at Urban Studies and Social Policy, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Sotiria’s work focuses on evidence-making and expertise in global public policy, with a specialisation in the policy arenas of education, culture, and sustainable development. Her research has received funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as well as from the Swedish Research Council. In 2017 she was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, to examine “International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field” (METRO, 2017-2022). Currently, she is working as the principal investigator of an ERC Consolidator Grant, which focuses on ‘Art and Policy in the Global Contemporary: Examining the Role of the Arts in the Production of Public Policy’ (POLART, 2024-2029).

Lisa Bradley, Senior Lecturer in Creative and Interdisciplinary Studies in Education and Interdisciplinary Lead at the Advanced Research Centre, is an anti-disciplinary scholar and methodologist, with experience of working within and across the subject areas of Education, Urban Studies, Philosophy, Public Policy, Criminology and Sociology. Her work across these sites focuses on practices of knowledge production and meaning-making, and seeks to engage within the relationships between dominant knowledge structures, acts and practices, and marginalised ways of knowing and being, including within higher education.

Dominic Paterson is Professor of History of Art and Curator of Contemporary Art at the University of Glasgow. He has written widely on contemporary art and art theory: recent publications include the monograph Neil Clements: Fellow Traveller and essays on Ilana Halperin in Felt Events (2022), on Ulrike Ottinger in Ulrike Ottinger: Film, Art, Ethnography (2024) and on Phil Collins for Feelings / Sensors (European Media Arts Festival, 2024). Recent curated exhibitions include Flesh Arranges Itself Differently (2022, with the Roberts Institute of Art), Elizabeth Price: UNDERFOOT (2022), The Trembling Museum (2023, co-curated with Manthia Diawara and Terri Geis), Cathy Wilkes (2024), and Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, (2024). Prof. Paterson has been awarded grants including the Art Fund Moving Image Fund for Museums, Imperial War Museum 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund Major Commission, and Creative Scotland's Open Fund.