Artists with PhDs

Note to readers: a number of people have visited looking for the materal on definitions of artistic research. It is in the chapter “Fourteen Reasons”; scroll down to numbered para. 90.

And as always, comments are welcome!

There is some material on tuition — I think it’s at the end of the “Reasons to Mistrust” chapter? — anyway it’s difficult to get that information because supposedly inexpensive EU institutions charge a lot for non-EU students, but those fees are meliorated by grants, etc. The best I’ve been able to do is estimate.

Yes, another nice addition, thanks so much! I wonder what the best book on this might be.

You’re right, from the point of view of the graduates; I was thinking of the administrators’ and institutions’ perspective! I’ll add something to balance that out.

Thanks, that’s an excellent suggestion to help broaden the discussion.

“How to determine if the studio practice is at PhD level?” is not a different question from “Is this faculty member tenurable?” The answer is either criteria-based assessment (hello, audit culture) or peer-review (“I’d never want to be a member of a club that accepted me as a member…”).

It is crucial to point out that North American PhDs in the end are examined by the Committee who has been advising the candidate all along. There is a public defense, but the final decision is by the Committee established at the beginning of the research. Elsewhere, PhDs are examined externally.

An important point: part of the infrastructure established at RMIT, one of the leaders in practice-based (design) research, was what was known as the GRC – Graduate Research Conference (it is now called something different). Every 6 months, every candidate, no matter where he or she was in their candidacy was required to present on their progress before their peers and a panel of experts external to their supervision. This meant that everyone involved – candidates, prospective candidates, supervisors, externals – was exposed to the collective process of evaluating practice-based research. The intense weekend events were a combination of boot-strapping and quality assurance, with benchmarking possible between different disciplines (landscape, architecture, fashion, visual communication, etc) and between different stages of the process (seeing a candidate’s first progress review vs a candidate’s ‘penultimate’ review, prior to submitting for examination). The weekend was bookended by public defenses on the Friday and Monday. As a result, I believe that RMIT would strongly push back on your claim that ‘no one knows how to assess the (practice-based) PhD.’

The GRCs I attended were the richest aspects of my academic career to date and I miss them so much that I am now determined to establish the ritual as part of practice-based design PhDs at CMU (having failed to get up design PhDs at Parsons).

Barbara Bolt’s work is useful on this:

http://www.barbbolt.com/publication.htm

MA or MFA?

In design, there is a significant body of literature building on Hubert Dreyfus’ Heideggerian/Merleau-Pontian account of expertise development. The argument provides a useful (and I believe phenomenologically accurate) explanation for the role of the dialectic of self-consciousness/incorporation. In short, it is not that mastery = less self-consciousness, but rather  pattern-based metaconceptual capacities.

The larger context here could be the attempt to recover phronesis (the ‘art’ of judgement?) from the dominance of techne.