Foreword Henk Borgdorff in book "Artists in the University-Positioning Artistic Research in Higher Education"
In 2017 the book Artists in the University-Positioning Artistic Research in Higher Education by Jenny Wilson was published by Springer. Prof.dr. Henk Borgdorff wrote the foreword, which includes part of his inaugural lecture.
On February 10 2017 prof.dr. Henk Borgdorff gave his inaugural lecture Reasoning through Art. Research in the arts is often compared to other forms of scientific research. Borgdorff believes that's unfortunate. 'Artistic research is absolutely one of the front lines of academia.'
‘People often claim that research in the arts is equivalent to other forms of scientific research. For me, that's an unfortunate assumption. By stressing this equivalence, you are claiming in the same breath that they are not the same. Even more so, it suggests an implicit hierarchy between serious and second-class research - and that while art research belongs to academia, and is even one of the front lines of research.'
Artists in the University-Positioning Artistic Research in Higher Education focuses on the relationship between the university and a particular cohort of academic staff in Australia: those in visual and performing arts disciplines who joined the university sector in the 1990s. It explores how artistic researchers have been accommodated in the Australian university management framework and the impact that this has had on their careers, identities, approaches to their practice and the final works that they produce.