Extending the notion of text: The visual and performing arts doctoral thesis (original) (raw)
Related papers
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...
Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: two ends of a continuum
Studies in Higher Education, 2011
Doctoral degrees in the visual and performing arts are a fairly recent entrant in the research higher degree landscape in Australian universities. At the same time, a new kind of doctorate is evolving, a doctorate in which significant aspects of the claim for the doctoral characteristics of originality, mastery and contribution to the field are demonstrated through an original creative work. A substantial written contextualization is also generally required to clarify the basis of these claims. Managing the relationship between the written and creative components is a challenge for students and supervisors. The study reported on in this article examined the nature of the written component of doctoral degrees in the visual and performing arts submitted for examination in Australian universities, as well as the range of practices and trends in the kinds of texts that are presented in doctoral submissions in these areas of study. The study included a nation-wide survey of doctoral offerings in the visual and performing arts, the collection of a set of ‘high quality’ doctoral texts, and interviews with doctoral students and supervisors. This article reports on two doctoral projects that can be seen to represent opposite ends of a continuum in the set of doctoral works that were examined.
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.
Seminar – Of Artistic Research: considered through hybrid writing and visual practice
i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society, 2023
The exposition involves the adaptation of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's logical square, to convey an idea of artistic research practice considered from the perspective of the human subject's position in its midst. As part of the discussion the author has used some evidence of a previous presentation at a seminar, integrating such material with that of a newer project concerning the visualization of a nightmare image of a phantom in a portal. The tools of the research are a hybrid form of writing that embroils fictional and academic modes as a language-based practice, and visual artistic practice. The author takes Lacan's idea of the confounding of any logical argument by automatic obfuscation of it by unconscious process, and imagines that he has an other to him as a subjective second voice. The question of voices is central to the research; the suggestion that one does speak to oneself in various ways simultaneously that may be fashioned as distinct and separate. It is argued that the research aspect of artistic practice involves just a section of Lacan's logical square, particularly concerning contingency. This orientation may call to question one's tendency to reason and find meaning from the necessary locus of inquiry from the vantage-point of the language-based Symbolic – of Lacan's three psychic structuring registers Imaginary, Symbolic, Real. The element of fiction provides a literary inclination whereby, while the artistic research speaks about itself as research and references a visual practice, the exposition could also be considered a language-based practice in its own right. (This is a re-formatted version of an exposition published in the Research Catalogue, accessed through the provided weblinks.)
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
How to do things with words: textual typologies and doctoral writing
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2009
The paper reflects on modalities and typologies of writing practice within the fine art practice-based doctorate, exploring how looking at ways in which artists have engaged with writing as process, practice and visual/sonic form, can better inform the ways that doctoral writing itself may develop. Using tools developed through a close reading of Katie McLeod's work on typologies of doctoral writing, conducted in 1995, the paper generates a discussion about the relationship between art's methods and critical writing practice. It suggests that the practice-based doctoral project might be considered as a mutually constitutive one, combining both art making and poetics within an integrated whole, and arguing, with McLeod, that in the practice-based doctorate we are seeing the re-emergence of the artist as scholar, informed by practice and alive to art's investments in writing's digital, visual, performative and sonic forms in a period that theorists have dubbed 'the late age of print, an age in which the status, form and function of writing, and of print media, are being radically and productively challenged.