Knowledge Exchange as a Practice

Knowledge Exchange has been a buzz phrase with the UK Research Councils for several years now. Initially this practice was called Knowledge Transfer until it came to be realized that that description was one-way only and that academia might in fact learn something from industry. After 25 years as a professional cinematographer, in 2007 Terry Flaxton first won an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship that focused on high-resolution imaging and how that might affect the production of art, and then in 2010 Flaxton won an AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship, which completed at the end of November 2012. Flaxton’s first fellowship required a practitioner to turn their creative acts into research – with all the problems and opportunities that entailed – as many involved in practice as research understand. The second fellowship then asked for a distillation of knowledge gained from that research and production of ‘research artefacts’ (cinematic installations and artworks) and the dissemination and exchange of the new knowledge gained with the creative industries of the UK. But just how much of the research council’s initiative was simply a ‘buzz phrase’? Just how much was effective research knowledge exchanged with communities – that themselves were not research oriented – and was there in fact a two-way exchange at all? In this article, Flaxton summarizes his experience and the research area in general and discusses whether ‘practice as research’ is still an active and appropriate form that is ‘fit for purpose’ and whether or not the practice of Knowledge Exchange is itself an appropriate definition of what happens between academia and the commercial sector?