About CARPE

The Centre for Arts Research and Practice (CARPE) is an initiative of the School of Film, Music and Theatre at University College Cork. 

CARPE is a centre for excellence in all forms of arts practice and arts research, serving as UCC’s primary interface between the School’s primary disciplinary fields of film, screen media, music, theatre, and dance—and creative arts fields across the university, from visual arts and literature to architecture, arts education, digital arts and humanities, and beyond. 

CARPE leverages the School’s European-leading strengths in the interconnecting areas of arts research, arts practice research, and performance-led research in order to build a World-leading environment for transformative research in the arts.

CARPE is a place for:

                  -Research Clusters and Collaborations

                  -Arts Research and Practice Initiatives

                  -Arts Research Grant Development and Support

                  -Development of Non-Traditional and Creative Outputs

                  -Community-Engaged Research

Join us and see how we might support your excellent arts research and/or practice idea!

UCC’s School of Film, Music & Theatre

The School of Film, Music & Theatre (FMT) at UCC has a thriving, forward-looking, and diverse research culture centred on creative and performing arts.  Rooted in the strong national and international reputations for research excellence of its three constituent departments – Film & Screen Media, Music, and Theatre – the School is a major centre of research and new creative practice in the performing arts and film—especially in the future-oriented realm of academic investigation that leverages the interpenetration of research and/as practice. The School is committed to an innovative interarts research agenda that combines its impressive range of vital contributions to new critical perspectives in the humanities with its cutting-edge work in artistic practices across its three core subject areas and beyond.

The School is widely recognised for its support of creative practitioners in their innovative work through the Film Artist in Residence and Traditional Artist in Residence programmes jointly funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, the Theatre Artist in Residence jointly funded by FMT’s transformative partnership with Cork Opera House, and the new industry-supported UCC/Ritmüller Classical Artist in Residence programme.  A major player in the cultural life of the city, region, and nation, the School has an active impact agenda.  It takes pride in its research excellence, outward-looking knowledge-sharing ethos, and culture of community collaboration in keeping with the critical and creative practices that characterise the disciplines of which it is composed.  Furthermore, it is open to collaborations with the whole range of disciplines that make up the contemporary university—from literature, geography, Celtic studies, and sociology, to computer science, environmental studies, psychology, and neuroscience.  Indeed, these collaborations are already underway. CARPE represents the next step in promoting and further developing these exciting developments in interarts and interdisciplinary research.

The School is motivated by the ambition to deeply influence the artistic research landscape by building on our existing strengths in culture and heritage research and socially-engaged research, while re-imagining the interface between critical thought in the arts and research through practice—from film-making, hardware and software development, and digital arts to costume design, choreography, music composition, and live performance. CARPE houses research clusters and funded projects covering the whole array of arts research methods, from archival and historical approaches to community-engaged research, critical theory, media and cultural studies, performance studies, and other analytical approaches that investigate the realm of human creativity and sociality. Through its interface with UCC’s Future Humanities Institute—the Arts Research Cluster—CARPE extends beyond film, music, theatre, and dance to the realms of visual arts, creative writing, architecture, and beyond.

CARPE’s Mission

Central to its core mission, CARPE drives transformations in three key areas:

1. First, CARPE strengthens and expands UCC’s European-leading research ecology for Critical Archival, Historical, and Ethnographic approaches to the arts and media as key parts of global human creativity, experience and sociality. This pillar of CARPE further supports the school’s strengths in these fields while promoting interdisciplinary work across the wide-ranging fields of film studies, media studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, sound studies, theatre studies, and performance studies.
2. Second, CARPE pioneers Methodological Innovations in Arts Practice Research—the set of interdisciplinary approaches that develops new and revolutionary ways to envision and conduct research and presents research in novel, human, and imaginative ways, helping to transform traditional scholarly outputs into sound recordings, films, and performances that leap off the page and out into the hearts and minds of the community.
3. Third, following from this reimagining and enlivening interface of research methods, CARPE innovates in Socially Transformative Research, bringing an array of community-centred and future-oriented goals to the centre of its research agenda—taking our collective expertise in areas ranging from mental health and inclusive societies to global sustainability and digital life and transforming it into funded research projects that help solve global challenges.

In sum, CARPE leverages our School’s European leadership in arts research and arts research practices, and transform it into a World-Leading Centre for arts research and practice that: builds on our reputation for culture and heritage research, revalues artistic enquiry and experimentation by developing new and revolutionary arts research methods, and uses those dynamic and interdisciplinary methodologies to create novel and transformative human-facing outputs with human-centred solutions.