ABSTRACT
The Tate Encounters research project arose as a product of a separation between policy, research and practice, in which research is seen to be able to bridge the space between policy and practice at points where implementation of policy runs into difficulties on the ground. The writing of this book and its forms of analysis were based upon an understanding of a double separation between theory and practice and the museum and the academy, constituting a kind of epistemic fault line. While the institutions of government, museums and universities involved in policy and practice have a common public remit to the production and dissemination of knowledge in pursuit of their stated aims, the separation of their institutional functions replicates a separation between certain kinds of theory and certain kinds of practice, in which knowledge and understanding is disaggregated for operational purposes. The constitution of a double theory/practice divide in the museum and academy as well as between them is manifest at two points. Firstly, within the academy there is a division between theoretically informed reflection in research and contingent operational knowledge in teaching, and in the museum between the know-how of operational practices and the know-why of strategic knowledge. Secondly, there is a theory/practice division between the academy and the museum, in which the museum is posited as the concrete operational sphere considered as the object of abstract reflection by the academy.
