The Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance (CKP) at the University of Kent was launched in September 2010.
The desire to see a centre for studies in the field emerged in response to a number of synergies developing amongst scholars in the School of Arts and the desire to have a forum for generating interdisciplinary research through collaborative work. It now involves academics and practitioners from a range of disciplines including Drama, Psychology, Architecture, Anthropology, and Engineering & Digital Arts.
CKP recognises that cognition is a relatively new but rapidly developing field of research with significant implications for scholarship in the Arts and Humanities. In the words of Professor Bruce McConachie, who is a member of the CKP Advisory Committee:
Cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, evolutionary theorists, and linguists disagree about many aspects of consciousness, emotions, spatial perception, speech and all the other processes and attributes that facilitate and enhance performance spectatorship.. In general, scientists no longer model the operations of the mind/brain on the digital computer, the primary paradigm for cognitive science in the 1960's and 1970's. ..several schools of thought now compete in all areas of cognitive scholarship among the thousands of researchers in the field. (McConachie: 2008).
CKP is the first research center in the UK to be devoted to this expanding and exciting field in the area of performance studies. It builds on the work from a number of interdisciplinary conferences which have involved artists, neuroscientists, health practitioners, scientists and literary theorists. In doing so CKP aims to play an active role in the development of a national and international network of scholars and practitioners who believe that performance has a significant contribution to make within the field of cognition.