‘Researching rural housing: with an artist in residence’.

by Dr. Menelaos Gkartzios, Newcastle University, and Dr. Julie Crawshaw, Northumbria University, UK, Moore Visiting Fellows.

Menelaos Gkartzios and Julie Crawshaw present their interdisciplinary collaboration across artistic research, planning and rural studies. We draw on a collaborative art residence programme between Newcastle University and Berwick Visual Arts, an arts organisation in the North East of England, which invited an artist to respond to a highly contentious topic in rural England: housing development. The ambition for the residency was, firstly, to provide new perspectives on rural housing research, and, secondly, to provide a space for engagement between the local community, planners and academics. Through our research, we explore how the resident artist, Sander Van Raemdonck’s, worked towards these ambitions and we offer original insights on how to develop interdisciplinary research with artists.

Dr Menelaos Gkartzios is Senior Lecturer in Planning & Development at Newcastle University’s Centre for Rural Economy in the UK. He has been educated both in Greece and Ireland, and received his PhD in Planning at University College Dublin. His research has focused on mobilities and social change, rural housing, the relationship between art and development, and international comparative research. He has published articles in the Journal of Rural Studies, Sociologia Ruralis, Regional Studies, Geoforum, Population, Space & Place, World Development and Land Use Policy amongst other journals. He has co-edited the first Routledge Companion to Rural Planning and sits on the editorial board of Sociologia Ruralis. Menelaos has been Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan, where he taught a module on ‘Rural Planning and Development’ and conducted research in relation to art festivals in rural Japan. As part of his engagement practice, he leads a collaborative rural art residency programme with Berwick Visual Arts, and he sits on the board of directors of the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in Northumberland, England. He currently leads a research network between Newcastle and Tokyo Universities on contemporary arts practice and rural development, funded by the UK’s Research Councils (ESRC and AHRC). At Moore Institute he will be working with co-Visiting Research Fellow Dr Julie Crawshaw on artistic research and rural sustainability questions. Together they will present aspects of their collaborative trans disciplinary research on ‘doing art in the country’.

Dr Julie Crawshaw is Senior Lecturer in Material Culture in the Arts Department at Northumbria University. She has an interdisciplinary background spanning fine art and international development with an anthropological PhD in Planning and Landscape from Manchester University. Her ethnographic research explores the potential for art and artistic inquiry with particular focus on its contributions across planning practice, feminist and Deweyan pragmatism, and cultural management. Funded by the Swedish Research Council, she is currently Co Investigator of ‘Stretched: Expanding Notions of Artistic Practice through Artist-led Culture’ which is a curatorial-ethnographic project exploring expanded forms of art production. Her publications include articles in Landscape Research, Journal of Rural Studies and the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, as well as a number of sector research and evaluation reports for arts organisations, arts funding councils and local authority consortia. Before academia she worked in arts management. This professional practice informs her teaching as Programme Leader of MA Creative and Cultural Industries Management which is part of Northumbria’s innovative research and teaching collaboration with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art through BxNU Institute.