Our Research Territories

Although the research network related to the SSRU represents many different interests, emphases and approaches, we are connected by certain key commitments, understandings and motivations.

These include:

  • an expanded view of ‘capital’ and of art
  • an emphasis on joined up thinking and practice
  • an understanding of the connection between inner and outer work, between imagination and transformation, and the need to explore how we can become ‘agents of change’
  • a perception of crises as opportunities for consciousness
  • an exploration of different forms of ‘knowing’
  • a view that the ecological crisis is not just about the environment out there
  • a recognition of the connection between aesthetics and ethics: between imagination, the experiential and our ability-to-respond
  • the connection between freedom and responsibility
  • the relationship between the individual and new forms of viable community
  • the poetics of imagination and connective aesthetics
  • creative strategies of engagement and practice-based research
  • historical and philosophical studies related to Joseph Beuys, Rudolf Steiner, Goethean methodology and other phenomenological thinkers and approaches
  • ‘internal mobilisation’ and approaches to overcoming denial
  • reflections on activism, new social movements and radical change
  • a focus on experiential knowing and related phenomenological practices
  • social sculpture as an enquiry into the philosophy and practice of freedom
  • a commitment to shaping a humane and ecologically viable world