{"id":2698,"date":"2014-06-04T07:30:58","date_gmt":"2014-06-04T11:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/?p=2698"},"modified":"2014-06-03T19:55:51","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T23:55:51","slug":"moving-through-the-world-with-intent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/moving-through-the-world-with-intent.php","title":{"rendered":"Moving through the world with intent"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was honored to be part of a symposium this week co-hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts<\/a> and the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project<\/a>. The event drew an extraordinary group<\/a> of researchers and practitioners, including many who had written defining works for my own learning journey in this field. Our task was to explore whether and how our research on arts participation should evolve, especially given the dramatic evolution of arts engagement and the shifting landscape of resources that support such research.<\/p>\n

\"Nervous<\/a>

cc Flickr Sue Clark<\/p><\/div>\n

The event caused me to reflect on why we do ANY kind of research in any context. And my conclusion (at least for myself) was that we observe and evaluate things because we want to move through the world with intent. To do so, we need many ways of seeing, feeling, pushing, prodding, and testing that world and our relationships within it.<\/p>\n

Our body does this through its sensory systems, including the brain that processes the information the sensors provide. These systems are highly complex and interrelated. But in 1906, Sir Charles Sherrington<\/a> offered a rather useful clustering of these systems into three types.<\/p>\n