Art and Knowledge: the languages of Voice4Thought
The V4T project uses the biographical method as its mayor qualitative methodology, and other ethnographic methodologies in an experimental framework.
The project takes biographies of engaged people as its starting point, and the portraits of these people are an entrance point into their lives, their environment and main problematics related to their contexts.
The V4T philosophy is to bring artistic and academic forms together to tell a story about people who try to make a change starting from their contexts. The presentation of their personalities and stories is done in an artistic style, but their stories have an academic value. In doing so, each project contributes to enlarge the field of academic knowledge and enlighten it with art and alternative forms of knowledge production.
Some of the V4T voices are artists themselves, others are activists. Some have a very explicit and on-stage presence, others operate behind the scenes. This is why there is so much freedom in V4T. There is not just one way to be a Voice – each biography is relevant in its own way. It is up to the researcher, in collaboration with the Voice itself, to find the best way to express its potential.
Art can be many things: a presentational form of the academic message in film, web-sites, novels made by academics and knowledge brokers, and the expression of the message as it is done by artists themselves. All of this comes together in this platform.
Our aim is to make results of academic research widely known, but also visible in public debates. Knowledge produced in academic research projects, PhDs, anthropological-historical research is translated into blogs, journalistic articles, and of course academic books and articles. We stimulate the collaboration between journalists and academics. We enable the dialogue between development organizations, NGOs, and academics.
The backbone idea of this project is that knowledge is always a co-production, hence we work closely with the V4Ts who are informants for our research, critical observers of our work and creators of knowledge themselves, to create a final result that combines the different sources of knowledge-making in an original and innovative result.
This is why both art and knowledge are official languages in the universe of V4T!
