Creative practice, research ethics and the doctoral thesis

In the 1990's, reforms in the Australian higher-education sector brought post-secondary training in the creative arts into the context of university education (Baker & Buckley 2009). One consequence of this shift from training institution to research institution was the expectation that artists-as-academics produce research outputs and that the creative arts would develop a tradition of doctoral candidates and research . Reframing creative arts as research meant that art-as-research, like all research in the academy, became answerable to the university ethics processes and procedures. Without a history of their own to negotiate the ethics system, the creative arts, in particular the visual arts, looked to the extensive work on visual ethics in the fields of visual anthropology, geography and sociology.