Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: two ends of a continuum (original) (raw)
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Re-imagining Doctoral Writing Through the Visual and Performing Arts
Re-imagining Doctoral Writing, 2021
It has been a privilege to work on this edited collection despite the fact that much of the work has taken place during a pandemic when, for many of us, our lives have been turned inside out. The series editors Terry Zawacki, Joan Mullin, Magnus Gustafsson, and Federico Navarro have been exceptionally helpful, as has been founding editor and publisher Mike Palmquist. Terry, in particular, has guided us with gentle encouragement and thoughtful suggestions throughout the process. We also thank the contributors for their work on chapters and for their collegial approach to this project. It has been a pleasure to work with you all, and we look forward to many years of collaborations in the future. We would also like to thank all the readers who read earlier drafts of pieces of this collection. We are grateful for your careful work. Cecile: I would like to acknowledge the support from Memorial University for assistance in the preparation of this manuscript and in particular for the Publications Subventions Program grant. I also want to thank my co-editors, Britt and Jamie, for a most enjoyable journey. Our virtual meetings became a highlight for me. I'm also extremely grateful to both of them for carrying the load when I became ill. They conveyed their compassion and care in multiple ways. Britt: As I type this on my phone (with one hand, while feeding my new baby), I am astounded at what can be accomplished when academics come together to carefully collaborate. As authors and editors, we have been through births, deaths, sickness (hello Covid-19!), health, layoffs, new jobs, as well as dissertation endings (congrats!), beginnings, and somewhere in between. I am grateful to my co-editors who have sustained me in more ways than I could possibly detail. I am grateful to the authors, who gracefully took on rounds of editing and review in order to push this piece further. I am grateful to the Algonquin Nation whose territory includes the Ottawa River watershed, which nurtures and sustains my life and the lives of my kin. Finally, I am grateful to my human, Sean Botti, whose countless hours of visible and invisible labour has contributed to making this project a reality. Jamie: I am grateful to so many people who have been a part of bringing this collection together. I would like to thank my co-editors, Britt and Cecile, for their rigour, generosity, and care. The fact that we have edited this book from different corners of the world has frequently opened up interesting juxtapositions in time and season and in terms of how we think about doctoral education and writing. I am grateful to chapter authors for working with us RE-IMAGINING DOCTORAL WRITING
Gleams of light: evolving knowledge in writing creative arts doctorates
2014
From the mid-1980s to the present, art schools have embedded themselves within university structures in Australia. Around 35 universities now offer research degrees in creative arts (Baker and Buckley, 2009). Accompanying this development, the teaching of art practice and theory has followed the humanities in embracing philosophies of semiotics and post-structuralism from Europe and America through the lenses of feminism and postcolonialism.
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2012
This article describes an investigation into the practice-based doctorate in the visual and performing arts, a genre that is still in the process of development. A key feature of these doctorates is that they comprise two components: a visual or performance component, and a written text which accompanies it which in some ways is similar to, but in others, is quite different from a traditional doctoral dissertation. This article focuses on the overall organizational patterns, or macrostructures of the texts that students submit as part of the examination in these areas of study, and how these patterns of organization are related to those found in more established examples of the doctoral dissertation genre in other areas of study. The study found that there is a range of organizational possibilities for the written text that is part of a doctoral submission in the visual and performing arts, each at different points on a continuum. Our study shows how the genre we examined has both the capacity for change, while remaining 'stabilized for now' in terms of its social action and purpose.
Writing Through the Visual and Performing Arts
2021
While doctoral writing in the broader academy is a site of anxiety and contestation (Paré, 2019), doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts inhabits an even more contested space. For social and institutional reasons, the visual and performing arts are relative newcomers to the practice of doctoral writing (Baker et al., 2009; Elkins, 2014), and with theses that incorporate a creative/performed component, whole new ways of doctoral writing have opened up, including such features as new academic voices; highly innovative forms of typography, layout, and materiality; and varied relations between the written and creative components. Understanding such diverse texts requires a multi-valent approach to recognise the ways in which doctoral writing has been re-imagined in this context and the ways in which the academy can re-imagine a legitimate space for such academic work. In this chapter, we use a broadly social-semiotic framework to demonstrate the value of Legitimation Code Th...
One of the significant challenges of the university today is the growth and expansion of the research student population. Research training and doctoral education has exploded around the world, including doctoral education in the creative and performing arts. This development has occasioned many debates – none of them simple. Positions intersect, overlap, concur, and contrast. This paper examines several key issues about the doctorate and doctoral study to ask what aspects of doctoral writing ought to remain the same across all fields.
Facing the final hurdle: creative arts PhD programs and examination standards
The creative arts are firmly established within the Australian academy, as is evidenced by the increasing enrolments at research masters and PhD levels, and by the fact that these disciplines -creative writing, visual and performing arts, designare sufficiently established for their practices and standards to be scrutinised and reviewed. Recent ALTC projects on this topic include: Webb and Brien 2008 (writing); Phillips, Stock & Vincs 2009 (dance); and Baker 2009 (visual art). The number of significantly funded research projects into this issue indicates that how the academy manages the transition of creative arts HDR candidates from apprentice to peer is (perceived to be) less transparent, and less consistent, than it might be.
The Doctorate in Fine Art: The Importance of Exemplars to the Research Culture
International Journal of Art & Design Education, 2004
The doctorate in Fine Art has had a troubled history in the UK. Although there are growing numbers of doctorates being undertaken and over forty institutions which offer doctoral study, there is still little understanding of this research culture. There is a developing literature, but it remains curiously focused on research methods and protocols rather than on establishing the character of the culture through what is being produced by doctoral students. Macleod and Holdridge have produced an AHRB-funded study of selected exemplars of doctoral submissions. The study seeks to make both a practical and strategic intervention in the ongoing 'making/writing', 'theory/practice' debate. It also seeks to clearly demonstrate how artist researchers have dealt with the academic requirements of the PhD and how the production of a substantial written text (generally 30,000 words plus) showing a keen knowledge and criticality of the subject field has been achieved. The exemplars demonstrate both the distinctive and the normative character of the PhD in Fine Art. However, the underpinning empirical research for the study (1996 -) has also demonstrated the critical independence of such exemplars within the broader field of academic research. Through a brief analysis of three doctoral submissions selected from the study, the paper seeks to draw out some of the more important findings and their implications for the developing research culture. Abstract JADE 23.2
Extending the notion of text: The visual and performing arts doctoral thesis
Visual Communication, 2013
Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts poses many challenges for the academy, not the least of which is accounting for the possible relations which can hold between the written and creative/performed components of a doctoral thesis in these fields. This article proposes that the interrelations between the two components in doctoral submissions of this kind can be theorized as being on a continuum of interrelations, with a number of key text types (or archetypes) being manifested. Through textual analysis of the written component only, the different possible relations can be distinguished through the ways in which the creative component is resemiotized in the written text, through both the verbal and visual semiosis of the written component. This enables us to identify a number of ways in which the 'one' project can be construed through its two different component parts, casting an important light on debates within the field in terms of the relations between creative practice and research.