The Office of Arts Research Policies is responsible for managing the processes of calling for applications, selection, monitoring, and dissemination of the results of research groups, seedbeds, programs, and projects in the artistic-cultural field, developed in an integral manner within the institution, within the framework of national regulations of the Higher Education System; to develop and provide follow-up on the policies and research lines approved by the Higher Collegiate Body under the guidelines of the Office of Graduate Studies and Arts Research.
Experimental Artistic Practices
The Office of Arts Research Policies is responsible for managing the processes of calling for applications, selection, follow-up, and dissemination of the results of research programs and projects in the artistic-cultural field, developed in an integral manner within the institution, within the framework of the Higher Education System regulations; for the development, and follow-up of the research policies and lines approved by the University Council and under the guidelines of the Office of Graduate Studies and Arts Research.
Arts, Digital Media, and Technological Languages
This research line is oriented toward studying the relationship between art, science, technology, and subjectivity at all levels of training. It begins from the recognition that technologies modify bodies, social relations, and everyday spaces of use. It addresses transversal topics such as digital humanities in relation to the common, syncretic realities and the soundscape, closed circuits and cybernetics, noise and electronics—so as to construct and understand artistic processes from the mediation enabled by the technological field.
Critical and Creative Pedagogies in the Arts
This research line is a space to reflect on and generate alternative proposals regarding the relationship between the arts and teaching-learning processes. It focuses on the critique and construction of pedagogies that incorporate the principles of interculturality, decoloniality, and inter- and transdisciplinarity from the arts. It addresses the development of pedagogical processes in the artistic field that foster creativity and promote, through and within it, critical thinking. Its scope concerns the faculty member as a critical researcher regarding the relationships between teaching art, artistic practice, and community engagement. This line is expressed both in training programs and in degree and graduate titling and research projects.
Rereading Modernities and Decoloniality through the Arts
This research line approaches modernity as a plural, complex, and heterogeneous experience. It examines utopian and revolutionary projects that reveal the tensions between politics, culture, and art through their symbolic, social, and institutional expressions in the cultural history of Latin America. From this perspective, scientific or artistic research projects critically engage with the foundational elements of aesthetic modernity and address various theoretical and historical issues related to tradition, heritage, transformation, and the avant-garde.
Art, Representation, Memory, and Heritage
This research line aims at the search, recovery, and critical analysis of artistic-cultural contents that challenge official histories and uncover the policies and agendas of symbolic and discursive representation of hegemonic and subaltern subjects. It focuses on the development of artistic or scientific-theoretical research that reviews canons through a crisis-setting of traditional representation policies. Fundamental areas in the study of representation work include memory and cultural heritage as reflected, for example, in archives, museums, or photography.
Discourses and Artistic Practices of Interculturality
This research line encompasses the debate on the discourse of interculturality and the analysis of collective social groups’ artistic symbolic production as it develops in relation to national society and in interaction with one another. These collectives include not only Indigenous nationalities, the Afro-Ecuadorian, Montubio, and Huancavilca peoples, but also popular cultures and urban cultures and subcultures in their relationships with the arts. Intercultural artistic practice points to proposals for aesthetic production and creation through different languages and narratives within the framework of diverse worldviews.
Art, Economy, Circuits, and Communities
This research line unfolds in the field of the economy of culture and the arts. It addresses how artistic and creative practices, in general, set this economy in motion through the workings of circuits that bring together different actors and cultural managers. It focuses on the study of these dynamics and on the design of creative projects that activate existing circuits and place them in dialogue with communities.
Cultural Policies, Creativity, and Arts Management
This research line focuses on public policies and management regarding artistic practices—especially with respect to the dissemination, promotion, and circulation of the arts, creativities, and cultural products. It emphasizes the study of institutional infrastructure for contemporary art and artistic work in general, as well as the analysis of operating scopes, reach, or impact of cultural policies and arts and creativity management, in the deployment of principles or criteria of interculturality and interdisciplinarity.
Art, Citizenship, and Public Space
This research line explores the complex relationship between art and public space within the framework of building and exercising citizenship. This exploration is proposed not only from theoretical reflection but also from artistic practice and creative processes that challenge traditional hegemonic forms of representation and the relationship between the artwork and the use of public space as a space for the exercise of citizens’ rights.
Arts and Ecological Perspectives
Esta línea de investigación pretende reflejar un conjunto de trayectorias artísticas críticas, teóricas y metodológicas, protagonistas del debate académico regional e internacional en torno a la ecología política como marco transdisciplinario imprescindible para los retos de la contemporaneidad. La pluralidad constitutiva e intrínseca de las ecologías –ambientales, sociales, mentales, estéticas, tecnológicas, de los saberes– ha demostrado ser una respuesta crítica viable a las varias formas de extractivismos sobre los cuales se fundamenta la economía política vigente. En este sentido, en el siglo XXI, los discursos ecológicos no pueden agotarse en la crítica del extractivismo minero y de los recursos del medioambiente, sino que son llamados a extender el análisis a los extractivismos de los datos (data mining), de la dopamina (dopa mining), de la atención cognitiva y de los saberes locales, concibiéndolos como agentes principales de las reducciones de la biodiversidad, sociodiversidad, psicodiversidad, así como de la diversidad epistémica.
Art, Gender, Feminism, and Sexual-Gender Diversity
This research line includes artistic and theoretical approaches to gender as a socio-cultural construction, as well as the power, subordination, and discrimination devices that unfold around it, and the ways in which these are represented in different symbolic artifacts. It includes both the study and approach, from the arts and culture field, to feminism as a social movement and theoretical proposal, and artistic research on subjectivities and practices that question the CIS-heterosexual norm, LGBTQ+ communities, the movement and queer theory, and other sex-gender dissidences.
History, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of the Arts
This research line addresses different genealogical processes and reflective components regarding the arts, through a critical approach to art history, as a key discipline for guiding and projecting any artistic practice. Art history highlights the epistemic character of the arts as expressions of a culture, and links with other disciplines such as aesthetics and philosophy, from which the sensible is theorized as a field of knowledge—demonstrating that artistic practices are ways of thinking through diverse sensitive materials.