Engaging in the domains of fine art, graphic arts, media and cultural studies, fashion and textile design, marketing, branding, management and contemporary arts and curatorship, the School focuses upon the following areas of research:
Archaeologies of Media and Technology – a research group that approaches technology and media writ large through their links to science, art, visual culture and critical theory with a strong emphasis on artistic practices.
Critical Infrastructure and Image Politics (CIIP) – is a research group dedicated to investigating the politics of contemporary digital and visual cultures at the intersection of media art and critical theory. They foreground transdisciplinary and practice-based methodologies of artistic and activist-led research in media and technocultures with specific interests in material infrastructures, critical posthumanities, algorithmic visual cultures, feminist and decolonial technocultures, and media ecologies.
Critical Practices – encompasses several research strands concerned with critical practices in art production, history, theory and criticism. Our staff are experts in their fields and are widely published.
Intersectionalities: Politics-Identities-Cultures – examines issues of equality and diversity, power, technologies of resistance and control; researching the links between culture, politics and identity from a variety of disciplines and from an intersectional perspective.
Transforming Creativity – research on transformations in cultural production and creative economies from the everyday to the industrial, wrought by digital, networked and participatory media culture.
The Data Image Lab – enables interdisciplinary dialogue through the creative and critical investigation of data. The Data Image Lab at Winchester School of Art is engaged in specialist research and practice relating to the production, examination and visual manifestation of data. The mission of the Lab is to enrich our critical and conceptual understanding of data and society, facilitating and enabling interdisciplinary dialogue with a range of partners through the application of art and design research methods. The art school setting provides an innovative site of production and expertise, enabling a wide range of work and creative experimentation.
The Winchester Luxury Research Group – encompasses luxury-based production across the areas of fine art, design, and media, and is engaged in a range of research projects that concern the theory and practice of concepts such as pleasure and sumptuousness, excess and waste, extravagance and consumption. It is home to the academic journal Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption.