Creative Practice Research and Ethical Considerations: Consent

This session is the first of a series for supervisors where the focus is on guiding candidates through the ethics application process. Creative practice research requires ethics approval if the research involves the participation of people. This can take a range of different kinds of involvement from observation through to interviews, as well as significant variation in participation and people involved. Session 1 will offer insights from colleagues who have experience in seeking informed consent as part of their creative practice research and from the Human Ethics team who advise on the ‘how’. Followed by an open floor discussion.

For RMIT supervisors wanting to have this session recognised as Professional Development please register in Workday, selecting the HDR Supervision: Research Integrity and Ethics offering on 6th June at 12:20pm.

Presenters

Co-chair, Dr Suzie Attiwill

Dr Suzie Attiwill coordinates & teaches Creative Practice Research (a DSC HDR elective). Suzie participates in the Practice Research Symposiums in Melbourne, Barcelona and Ho Chi Minh City where she supervises PhD candidates across these regions and across disciplines including design, performance, art, education and curation. Suzie is professor of Interior Design, School of Architecture & Design; from 2022-April 2025, she was Chair, Human Research Ethics Committee.

Co-Chair, Dr Nicholas Bastin

Dr Nicholas Bastin, is (Acting) HDR coordinator, School of Art. Nicholas lectures in Gold & Silversmithing, supervises Master Fine Art and Honours Art & Photography students working in jewellery, object, sculptural and drawing practices. He is a contemporary artist working in a multidisciplinary approach with a focus on transitional material artefacts. He investigates the wormhole as a trope in science fiction and how fictious interpretations of these can be translated into a corporeal art-based depictions.

Human Research Ethics Team

Dr Peter Burke

Dr Peter Burke is current secretary to the RMIT University Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC), which is responsible for dealing with human research ethics application that are assessed as higher risk. In his long-term role as secretary, he has viewed many HREC applications involving creative practice and assisted many researchers in navigating. As secretary he has also worked to improve ethical processes for researchers from the art and design disciplines areas, utilising his professional experience at the of School Architecture and Design.

Dr Fotini Toso

Dr Fotino Toso is the coordinator for the Design and Social Context ethics network (CHEAN) at RMIT University, has a PhD in literature and is the founding convenor of the ARMS AI in Research Management SIG. Her current research interests include AI and Ethics from multiple perspectives including law, governance, research management and the humanities as well as the impact of AI on fiction and creative writing.

Practitioners-Researchers

Dr Eugenia Flynn

Dr Eugenia Flynn is Vice Chancellor’s Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT University where her research has a primary focus on Indigenous literature and storytelling, sitting at the intersection between literary studies, creative practice and critical Indigenous studies. Outside of the academy, Eugenia works within her multiple communities (Aboriginal, Asian, Muslim) to create change through literature, art, performance, community organising, and community engagement. Eugenia’s creative work explores narratives of truth, grief, and devastation, interwoven with explorations of race and gender. Her essays, short stories, poems and text have been published and exhibited widely.

Kate Geck

Kate Geck is an artist living on unceded Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung land in Narrm Australia. Her recent work has been exploring a 'textillic' approach to creative practice with machine learning models. This uses textile language and practices to examine how interconnection, materiality and shared agency might become foregrounded in exchanges between human and machine intelligences. She is a lecturer in Interior Design at RMIT University, and prior to this spent many years working in community arts.

Associate Professor Drew Pettifer

Associate Professor Drew Pettifer is International Lead in the School of Art and convenes RMIT's LGBTIQA+ Research Impact Network, leading the Creative Practice research theme. A contemporary artist, writer, curator, and non-practicing lawyer, his research interests include the archive, queer theory, biopower, desire, gender, representation, and contemporary social politics. His creative practice works across photography, video, print, textiles, performance, and installation. More recently his practice has operated at the nexus of creative practice, critical theory, and social justice, aiming to transform our understanding of Australian history by using art to foreground critical queer histories which have been systematically excluded from dominant archives.

Cover image credit:
Drew Pettifer
Untitled (Bram)/Untitled (Journey)/Untitled (Roel), 2020
Exhibited in Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, 2023
(Photograph courtesy of the NGV)