One of the most difficult things in research is finding your research territory to plant a flag in and claim it. It can be challenging sometimes to find an original perspective on issues many people have written about and there's no real set formula on how to contend with this. This is why a literature review becomes a friend and a tool to do this!
Literature reviews are the chance to check what's out there, acknowledge who has come before you and work out where your place is in your field. In a literature review you can really get to grips with what has been written and find those academic on your team agreeing with your perspective and those to argue with and feel challenged to disprove. It is a weird ritual we academic go through but by running the gauntlet of a literature review can show that our ideas can stand up against other scholarly work.
It can sometimes be difficult as practitioners to realise the value of engaging with academic literature and what it can add to our work, but what academics often can do is to observe the things that are so habitual to our own practice we hardly we are doing them constantly. Many artistic practices have been observed by researchers and given names to things we have done every day in our performance space. As it is often difficult to step out of our own practice and reflect on it these scholars are a good place to start such an introspective conversation.
Literature can also create frameworks and approaches for us to do research. Scholars have written about how to do good interviews and ask the right kind of questions, others on how to create an unbiased environment of observation and others how to quantify the scale of what we get up to.
This week I've been talk to a lot of students on module two about the literature review exercise and why we do them. So wanted to share these thoughts on how it is a tool to help you begin to reflect on your own practice and to step out of it to find new perspective in what for you is day to day activity.
When you start to pull together a literature review really explore what a source can do for your thinking and self-reflection and use it to feel out a methodology that will allow you to explore ideas situated in your practice.
