Practicing interdisciplinarity

Practice-led research is inherently interdisciplinary, with practitioners engaging with a range of knowledges and methods through processes of selection, integration and synthesis. Claims are made for the unique qualities of both the creative arts artefacts produced through this practice, and for the research approaches used by creative researchers. However, a substantial amount of ‘genre blurring’ (Geertz 1980) is occurring within the humanities and social sciences, with researchers outside of the creative arts utilizing creative practices and incorporating creative products in their research. Further, the history of interdisciplinary research reaches back to as early as the 1920s (Klein 1996) and is not subsequent to the rise of practice-led research in academe. Seen in this context, what can practice-led research claim as its own, and is there a benefit to conceptualising it as part of the ‘interdisciplinary turn’ (Geertz 1980)?