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

[Maria Damon]

Talan:
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

On 1/15/13 9:55 AM, t.memmott at underacademy.org wrote:
> Hello -
>
> IâEUR^(TM)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 âEURoethe thingâEUR? 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 âEURoeresearch artist.âEUR? (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 âEUR" 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.
>
> 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 âEURoeinterdisciplinaryâEUR? 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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