When I started my college journey in 2019, I had this mental image of the world of research and what it looked like: A bunch of old(er) people in lab coats, attached at the hip to their computers, bent on succeeding in discovery and innovation. In my mind, research was nothing but a rigid rule book of hypotheses and theories with no room for expression. I had no intention of diving into that world. At that point in time I was labeling myself as an artist, and artists had no business masquerading as researchers. As if that weren’t enough, I was someone who was (and proudly still is) laughably terrible at math and science.
Given all of that, I was concerned by a new requirement of my scholarship program: take part in the Undergraduate Research Scholars program (URS). My scholarship centralizes hip hop and urban arts and to me, that did not mix with the mission of URS. But scholarships are scholarships; if they told me I had to run up and down Bascom Hill ten times a day, I would do it in a heartbeat, because they pay for me to be here.
When I get to my first URS Seminar, run by two amazing Fellows, this term “creative practice” is being thrown around next to “research” and I’m thinking “Well hey, I know how to do creative practice.” But I’m hesitant because that still has nothing to do with research, in my mind.
My URS project focused on environmental racism and its relationship with bird conservation, which come off as two very separate topics. But as I work with my mentor I begin to see connections between the two. Do keep in mind that this was the year COVID-19 kept us inside and completely virtual for a school year. Initially, I thought research equated to hands-on lab work. Yet here I was in my apartment, learning about the ways environmental racism has also affected our avian friends. In my meetings with my mentor, he would always end by reminding me the work we were doing was pushing the body of research forward, moving the world. It was hard to feel like I was moving the world, which was at a kind of global standstill, and doing it all from my bedroom. But it was happening, nonetheless.
My mentor encouraged me to translate my research into my creative medium of spoken word poetry. Never in a million years did I think I would enjoy writing poems about literature review. However, the familiarity of my own creative practice cultivated a smooth tandem with the research that had felt intimidating to me. That was when I started to realize that maybe I’ve been looking at research in the wrong way; maybe I’ve been defining it so that I was actually building the constraints of it. Maybe the reason I was opposed to research was that I didn’t have creative practice to fill in the gaps I had created. It was humbling. I’m thinking, well if I can connect these two topics, and call it research in the way that I’m doing it, and I’m not in a lab and I’m not old, maybe this isn’t what I thought it was.
At the URS Symposium, I presented my research along with a poem that was overlaid on top of an artistic video. I’m typically someone comfortable with performance/public speaking, but there was nothing more nerve-wracking than being in this Zoom room, where most of the presentations were about cell processes I couldn’t pronounce, and the superposition of galaxies, and here I am with my poem on birds. But it wasn’t until the end of my presentation, when an audience member complimented me and said they had no idea research and creative practice could be so beautiful, that I finally made the connection as to why it was important for me as an artist to be a URS Scholar.
Research and creative practice need each other. The world does not move forward unless we have both. The work that URS does for its Scholars should not only exist within the space of URS. We do ourselves a disservice as UW-Madison students to let that happen.
If you’ve ever seen the URS homepage, it reads that part of the mission of the program is to both develop and follow your curiosity, such that what you learn in the classroom can become reality. I have the tools to do that. Research is beautiful because it has us.