[-empyre-] Practice in Research

[Kirk Woolford]

and another thing...

I've just caught up with Johannes comments about defending practice. Initially, as I suspected, he did intend the comments as a provocation. Of course, Kathryn Bigelow needed to defend Zero Dark Thirty. She would have defended it against the studios, critics, financiers, producers, writers, etc. As creative professionals, we are continuously defending our work as well as arguing its value. In the "private sector" we defend against, or even toward, curators, funding bodies, and critics. In academia, we defend against, and toward, our colleagues in "higher" positions than us. As PhD students, we prostrate ourselves and defend our work before esteemed peers in the hope of valorisation through titles. In the academic process, nobody taps us on the shoulder with a sword, but it often feels as through we've been hit with one. 

As far as Johanne's questions about " whose knowledge criteria? what kind of knowledge are you defending?" the current criteria for the UK are agreed by each REF working panel ( http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/2012-01/ ). As others have commented, we used to have an awkward situation in the UK where the AHRC and RAE had different definitions of knowledge dissemination, i.e., research. The RAE accepted creative practice *as* research whereas the AHRC only accepted practice accompanied by critical, reflective text as research. The AHRC has since shut down its Practice Led and Applied research grant scheme, but still requires applicants for existing schemes to, "provide an account of methodology that suggests a self-conscious, systematic and reflective practitioner." ( http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Documents/How%20to%20write%20a%20good%20proposal.pdf )

As far as defending ones practice in later stages of ones career, I'd be more than happy to regale you with exciting experiences of walking through practice-led CVs with Deputy and Pro-Vice Chancellors and explaining why 10 exhibitions should be given the same respect as 10 co-authored papers or discussing the value of a performance in a small academic theatre with professors of Medicine and Engineering. 

In answer to Johannes, what we're defending is our right to be considered professionals in our discipline, and to be considered to have the same level of professionalism as our colleagues in other disciplines. Amongst ourselves, we may argue the relative merit of a piece of work, or the most helpful method of carrying a piece of work forward, but this is done in our own tribes, and this practice is normally referred to as criticism or critique. Whether-or-not critique can be considered research is a question for another post. 





In one of the first statements of this discussion, somebody pointed out the fact that PhD students in the Arts and Humanities tend to be older than those in the Sciences. This is generally because in the Arts and Humanities, the PhD (or other form of doctorate) is seen as a mark of the highest level of research achievement, whereas in the Sciences, it is viewed as minimum starting point or, as I was humorously told by a Professor of Computer Science, "a licence to practice". In the sciences, the PhD is generally awarded when a researchers is deemed ready to begin his or her research career. We appear to have somehow mixed up the notion of a practice-based PhD with that of a Habilitation, or what I understand of the  Docteur d'État and Docent, and we require very high levels of achievement rather than simply demonstrating that the candidate is capable of functioning as a professional researcher. Perhaps that's the root of the debate. If we can't agree to guidelines or even boundaries for creative research, how can we agree that we've trained a student to a required level? In some disciplines, such as Management Studies, a PhD is a bound collection of 3 peer-reviewed journal articles.  Would anybody grant a PhD for 3 articles in Leonardo or Performance Research?


all the best, 
-k




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Kirk Woolford
School of Media, Film, and Music
x6589