Dear Tim and Vivek,
I hope you will forgive me for also barging in on this one, and for being off the pace as ever, topic-wise.
Tim, you and I will no doubt disagree on many of the issues around the subject of PhDs by Creative Practice but I respect your views and agree with many of your observations, particularly your implicit criticism of the kind of hyperbole and ‘grand claims’ that are so prevalent in this area ("Research in creative disciplines reaches far beyond the conventional understanding of what knowledge is and what it is meant for.”). I suspect that a lot of this can be put down to a kind of over defensive reaction to the volume of criticism that creative practice-led research has come in for. Much of the hyperbole undermines or distracts from the good work that is going on.
A great deal of the argument/ debate about the big ‘R’ and little ‘r’ (Research as a training in Research/ research as a search for knowledge) seems to me to be trapped in the problem of trying to generalise something called ‘design’ (hence the endless attempts to define what it is). There is a world of difference between designing a road bridge and designing a picturebook or a textile pattern. A bad road bridge design may be seen to have rather more serious consequences than a bad picturebook design but both areas are equally important to our ‘cultural fabric’. Trying to place them within the same subject domain however is clearly silly.
The worlds of engineering or construction design, or artificial intelligence (about which I know next to nothing) must, I assume, sit comfortably within the traditions of the evidence based PhD. Here, your comment about the need to “… review what each has gained, (and) assess the reliability of the new knowledge andunderstanding …” makes good sense. But when we are dealing with what we might call the ‘expressive arts’ (and it gets particularly tricky in the areas where these overlap with functional design) it becomes harder to apply these rules of ‘reliability of new knowledge’ unless we are dealing only with the technical aspects of creation- materials and suchlike.
Nelson’s criterion that you cite- "... a cultural contribution of substantial significance ..." seems appropriate and reasonable to me.
It seems to me essential that the Art & Design subjects that fall wholly or partly within the expressive category assert the importance of this kind of PhD. There are a number of reasons for this. The primary one, in my view, is pragmatic and is based on the following contradiction:
· Art schools are increasingly requiring academic staff at all levels to have a PhD qualification
· Art students expect (quite reasonably) their tutors to be high level practitioners
If we are to avoid (and we must) a situation where practical arts subjects are taught by non-practicing theorists, or artists who are busy trying to be scientists, the PhD that is rooted in high level reflective practice is essential. This does not mean that there is less responsibility to disseminate knowledge, it is just a different kind of knowledge that other artists/ academics will take their own readings from, informing their practice in ways appropriate to their particular identity as artists. Put another way, it is difficult to know what the advantages would be of adopting an exclusively science-based, evidence-based approach to the PhD in the creative Art &Design sector. It is still a mystery to me why so many from the traditional PhD route regard the creative practice led route as such a threat or affront.
I was horrified, by the way, to read of the examiner who ‘bristled’ at being asked to read/ experience a viva submission in a particular order and refused to do so. This is rather indicative of the difficulties we have in finding suitably qualified examiners. In my experience, it is absolutely essential that candidates submit their work in a manner that does not give the examiner that choice, and in a manner that does not encourage the idea that the written element is the ‘research’ and the creative outputs are a sort of byproduct. The way that the dialogue between word and image/ artifact is presented is crucial.
Best wishes from Cambridge and welcome back!
Martin
Professor Martin Salisbury
Director, The Centre for Children's Book studies
Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration
Cambridge School of Art
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