The proposed European Forum for Advanced Practices (EFAP) aims to initiate and host a network of
researchers, practitioners, and theorists from across Europe who are actively shaping innovative and
transformative forms of research across and among many artistic and academic fields, industry, the
private sector, and civil society. Their research activities, which are often hybrid in method, are usually consigned to the categories ‘practice-based’ or ‘artistic research.’ While both of these terms can be broadly descriptive, they are too general to keep pace with the inventive experimentalism of practice-oriented research activity. In particular, they fail to capture the extent to which these new and cross-disciplinary collaborative research practices are reshaping the institutions and contexts around them. Rather than adhere to established ‘best practices’ or seek, as ‘advance studies’ do, to advance particular disciplinary or institutional contexts, these research practices aim to reconfigure conventional assumptions and approaches. Their strength lies precisely in their ability to radically reformulate problems outside of conventional frames, and to draw on a wide range of epistemologies, protocols, and practices to propose innovative or even transformative forms of impact. In doing so, they redefine assumptions about who the stakeholders are, how they relate to each other and their fields, and, crucially, what the nature of the stakes can be.

For these reasons, EFAP proposes a new umbrella term, Advanced Practices, to describe this
widespread ‘research turn’ composed of cross-disciplinary practices and hybridized methods across
disparate contexts. EFAP believes that recognizing (1) the fundamentally advanced nature of these
activities, (2) surveying and studying specific examples and programmatic contexts in order to
understand how they can be nurtured at all levels, and (3) developing vocabularies and frameworks as
dynamic and generative as the practices themselves to articulate and assess them are essential steps
in realizing their potential for European society.
This initiative comes in response to widespread need among academic and civic institutions, as well as
the private sector, to clarify the protocols, means, and potentials of practice-oriented research activity.
EFAP sets out to:

• survey the range of emerging practice-driven research modes;
• develop new vocabularies and typologies for describing and assessing the operations and
• methodologies of these emergent research forms;
• develop provisional criteria and flexible procedures for valuing and evaluating them; and
• propose flexible principles, structures, and procedures, for the fostering of new practice-driven
• research for institutions, funding agencies, and the private sector.

EFAP’s aim is to promote both the development of advanced forms of research and advanced ways of
translating their practices and findings into teaching curricula, incentive frameworks, innovation projects, and multi-layered, matrixed responses to complex societal challenges.