[-empyre-] Research in Practice, week two, January 14-20

[t.memmott at underacademy.org]

In Sweden the dissertation defense is setup where you defend your dissertation directly with an opponent, usually a senior 
scholar in the field of study. This usually lasts between 2-5 hours. Then the discussion is open to the grading committee, 
followed by questions from "the public" (meaning anyone in attendance). 

It is a rigorous full day event.... once the defense is over you sit around and wait for the committee to come back with their 
decision.  Thankfully, this is usually followed by a stiff drink, or three...



On Tue Jan 15 10:13 , Maria Damon  sent:

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>    Talan:
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>    What is a dissertation "opponent"? That is a role that has not been
>    part of my experience in the States, either as a PhD candidate or as
>    a professor in a doctoral degree-granting program.
>
>    bests, md
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>    On 1/15/13 9:55 AM,
>      t.memmott at underacademy.org wrote:
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>      Hello -
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>I’ve never really thought there to be much of a divide between theory, research, and practice.  They seem to overlap, walk 
hand 
>in hand, be brethren of a sort. The all involve a degree of rigor tempered with playfulness. Though methods may vary. The 
>primary difference may be their final output, what is developed from each. 
>
>I started from the position of a visual artist working primarily in assemblage, installation, and video. As a young art student I 
>can recall a number of meetings with advisors where the topic of discussion was not the artifacts themselves but my process, 
>my concepts and methods. One professor told me that I was the only student he had that came in with a concept, proposed 
>research, and began to make “the thing” when the concept was fully formed. To a certain degree, even then, I thought of 
the 
>artifacts as relics of, or remainder from the research practice.  So, like Maria, the connection between research and practice 
>seemed natural to me and I started to call myself a “research artist.” (I still do)
>
>My advanced degrees are an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where I was the first electronic writing graduate 
fellow, 
>and a PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University.  Now, looking at these two degrees it may seem like both could be 
>practice-based, and to a certain degree they are. But, where an MFA in literary arts is about creative writing and the 
expectation 
>is that you produce a novel length manuscript – in my case a combinatoric literary application, the PhD in Interaction 
Design, I 
>would argue is more practice-led (at least in my case); in that, my interest and practice in electronic writing practices is what 
led 
>to my writing the dissertation, which is titled _Digital Rhetoric and Poetics: Signifying Strategies in Electronic Literature_. 
Though 
>the dissertation does include a web supplement of research-based practical experiments, the writing itself was the main 
output 
>for the PhD. And, I should add that my supervisor, grading committee, and dissertation opponent largely ignored the practical 
>experiments. 
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>Pursuing the PhD was primarily about academic advancement for me. I had already been teaching for 10 years, and had left a 
>tenure track position in California to come to Sweden to teach in a program called Literature Culture and Digital Media, since 
>renamed and reconfigured as Digital Culture and Communication. Though before taking the appointment I was told otherwise, 
>what I discovered in Sweden was that the MFA was not considered a terminal degree and was no better than a one-year 
Swedish 
>MA. This meant that at the time I was hired I was already as far up the Swedish academic food chain as I could be.  The 
>opportunity arose to complete the PhD at Malmö University and I took it.  I am happy that I did, as it has allowed me to 
advance; 
>but, it has little effect upon my practice.  
>
>One thing that I still find interesting is the term “interdisciplinary” has been bantered around since the 1980s and for 
>institutions has become something of a catchphrase. It sounds very good in a brochure but I really, still, wonder how often 
>interdisciplinary work really happens and how successful the work is. How are students trained in this regard? In researching 
>various programs that use this term what I have discovered, and venn diagrams could easily be generated to show this, is that 
>most programs that promise interdisciplinary studies offer a lot of one thing, with a smidgen of courses from other areas. 
>
>Though collaboration is sort of the default setting for cultural practice in the digital age, interdisciplinary examples are 
isolated 
>and tend to not rest very well within the academy. What sort of institutional changes are necessary for true interdisciplinarity 
to 
>be embraced programmatically?
>
>Onward!
>Talan
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>      _______________________________________________
>empyre forum
>empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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