Practice Ph.D.s, regulation and the elusive Type C

Kill, Rebekka

doi:10.1386/jwcp.5.2.319_5

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Rebecca Kill noted back in 2012 that in our discipline there was the danger that doctoral researchers will ‘produce a whole PhD's worth of practice plus half a PhD of text, hence doing about 150 percent of a PhD!’ (Kill 2012, 320). Extrapolating from this, the growth of doctoral expectations is in some ways a financial double‐bind for those in art and design undertaking practice research.…”

Section: Privilege and Doctoral Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Privilege and Practice—Challenges for Doctoral Education in Art and Design

Vaughan

2024

Int J Art Design Ed

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Increasingly, doctoral education is being challenged to reflect and act on issues of access and equity. I argue that in art and design the expanding doctoral expectations and emphasis on doctoral community impact the multiple and intersectional concerns around diversity, equity and belonging that urgently need to be acknowledged and addressed. The benefits of community are widely acknowledged in the literature on doctoral education, and it is increasingly recognised that there are specific nuances to the needs of practice research doctoral communities. Prompted by insights from interviews with art and design doctoral researchers, I examine available data on participation in doctoral research in art and design in the United Kingdom in conjunction with literature on doctoral education and practice research. My aim is to highlight concerns relating to privilege and belonging in art and design doctorates that should make us increasingly uncomfortable. I believe that as a community art and design in higher education urgently needs to actively consider these issues. As well as indicating the necessity for further research, I argue that conversations are needed to devise and advocate for more inclusive and culturally responsive doctoral education specific to the needs of practice research in art and design.

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Section: Privilege and Doctoral Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Privilege and Practice—Challenges for Doctoral Education in Art and Design

Vaughan

2024

Int J Art Design Ed

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Practice submissions – are doctoral regulations and policies responding to the needs of creative practice?

Vaughan

2021

Research in Post-Compulsory Education

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Vaughan 2020). The growth of creative methods and arts-based methods also means that data is increasingly gathered through creative means in many social science and education doctorates (Kara 2015, Leavy 2018). The doctoral contribution as thesis can therefore no longer be automatically assumed to be contained solely in a written text. This paper questions the extent to which research degree regulations and policies are reflecting and enabling the diversity of contemporary forms of knowledge articulation in practice-based research. Arising from my lived experience of supporting doctoral candidates to navigate regulations on the format and formatting of a submission, it draws on empirical research into research degree regulations at a number of universities in the United Kingdom, contextualised in relation to the literature. I reveal the assumptions and constraints embedded in regulatory practices and highlight ongoing concerns around the articulation and archiving of practice-based doctoral research.

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The phantom ‘practice-only thesis’

Wilsher

2020

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice

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As universities become accustomed to the complexities of their art and design faculties, a body of literature has emerged that explores some of the possibilities of a doctorate in the creative arts. In the area of fine art in particular, although not exclusively, there has been a drive towards a purely practice-based thesis. This article argues that the notion of the practice-only thesis is not only an unrealistic illusion that puts pressure on students, but also does not reflect contemporary professional practices. For an art practice to communicate any sort of specific knowledge it must be embedded in a pre-existing and continuously evolving flux of discourse produced through written and spoken language. The American artist Trisha Donnelly’s 2014 Serpentine Gallery exhibition is taken as an example. Critical writing in the art press produces an accepted interpretation, and this is what the artist ‘Trisha Donnelly’ comes to stand for. So artwork that might appear to be producing its meaning autonomously should be seen as a collaborative practice involving the artist together with their professional interpreters. Research students are required to produce a self-contained project which would seem to preclude the incorporation of writing or academic interpretation by others. But it is fundamentally unfair to demand a thesis without any written component since it does not exist in an expanded notion of the contemporary art world.

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Practice Ph.D.s, regulation and the elusive Type C

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Privilege and Practice—Challenges for Doctoral Education in Art and Design

Privilege and Practice—Challenges for Doctoral Education in Art and Design

Practice submissions – are doctoral regulations and policies responding to the needs of creative practice?

The phantom ‘practice-only thesis’

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