Call for applications: 2022 Encounters fellowship programme for creatives

Now in its third year, the programme is designed to create time and space for practitioners from any areas of creative practice to engage with researchers and students at UCL. It seeks to encourage dialogue, collaboration and experimentation between researchers, students and creative practitioners, and provide space for activities that stretch the relationships between research, learning and creative practice in new directions.

During their time at UCL, creative fellows will work towards the development of an original piece of work that draws directly on their interactions with researchers and students.

The Creative Fellowships award

Four grants, two of £10 000 (about $13 400) and two of £5 000, will be offered to successful participants to work on a project titled Mapping the Future of the Creative Arts and Humanities.

The Encounters programme aims to unpack creativity, the creative method, and to explore how creative practice operates as a form of knowing, exploring or discovering, seeking to recognise the value of creative practice as knowledge creation and knowledge disruption. The fellowships aim to allow a creative practitioner to explore, through their own practice, one or more of the following questions:

• What is the value of creative practices as forms of knowing, exploring or discovering, and how do these forms relate to more conventional modes of research?
• How might creative or artistic practices be used to transform or amplify more conventional modes of research in the humanities? How can academic research learn to speak more clearly to the needs of creative practitioners and to the Creative and Cultural Industries?
• How can creative practice map the future? How can it help map the future of research both at UCL and more widely?
• The programme is broadly focused on the fields of performance, creative writing, visual arts or media.

The appointed fellows will be asked to respond creatively to the questions posed above and then to plan and deliver at least two events aimed at staff or students at UCL, and, as appropriate, a wider public. These could be seminars, creative workshops, performance events or any other encounter that allows people to collaborate in exploring creativity.

Requirements

• IAS is looking for creative practitioners from any field who are interested in working within a university context for a period of time, to explore with researchers and students at UCL their shared interests in the value of the ‘creative humanities’.
• IAS is particularly interested in working with practitioners who may not have any prior experience of working with a university and are committed to providing support to help the fellow navigate the university ‘walls’ and engage meaningfully with its communities.

Timeframe

• Completed applications should be submitted before 6 March. Applicants will be informed as to whether their proposal has been shortlisted by 18 March, with short interviews taking place the week commencing 21 March.
• Fellowships will be expected to start on 25 April (or by 3 May at the latest) and must finish (including all payments made) by 31 July.

How to apply

Interested participants should complete and submit an expression of interest form along with a CV to the IAS administrator and executive assistant to the director Catherine Stokes c.stokes@ucl.ac.uk before 6 March.

In addition, applicants may also send a link to their digital portfolio/website.

View the original call here.