Research at SARU
Research Overview
The Social Aesthetics Research Unit (SARU) promotes advanced research in the areas of social aesthetics, creative imagination, and social and aesthetic performance. The Research Unit supports research on:
- The aesthetic aspects of social life and the social aspects of aesthetic production and reception;
- Social performance and aesthetic performance—performance in religion, music and theatre, courts, sports and political events, social action, games and rituals;
- Music—the aesthetics, sociology, cognitive analysis, and performance of music;
- The musicology, ethnomusicology and social history of art music, folk music, jazz and popular music;
- Imagination, creativity and dramaturgy—and their role in society, economy and everyday life;
- Aesthetic communication, aesthetic management and aesthetic play;
- The non-discursive arts—those arts in which form, sound, sight, staging, image, rhythm and kinetics play as important a role as language or text;
- Music and dramaturgy, rhetoric and audiences;
- The visual arts—and the contribution of material aesthetics, visual art, and creative performance to the social imagination;
- Creative economies and knowledge societies.
SARU is multi-disciplinary in nature. It draws on its members’ backgrounds in sociology, communications, anthropology, musicology, performance studies, composition, visual culture, management, media, philosophy, literature, drama, theatre, classics, marketing, and political science.
Research Training
The Unit provides HDR supervision and supervisory expertise, a structured basis for cross-discipline and multi-discipline supervision, premier research forums and events in which staff and HDR students participate, international-focused research outputs, structured HDR publishing and research performance opportunities, postgraduate journal publishing, advice to HDRs on academic press submission, visiting academic staff, and a strong culture of national and international research collaboration.
Research-Based Performance
The Unit organizes research seminars in tandem with performances of theatre, music and other works. These seminars promote intellectual and aesthetic discussion, and research contextualization, of aesthetic works and performances.