Hi Kate,
I agree that your current topic requires a theoretical foundation to manage relations between 
abstract and professional knowledge in graphic design in particular, which will obviously have 
implications for its practice and education. Yet I also believe that the following:

> [snip]
> This is an important dimension that involves educating individuals rather
> than contributing to the body of knowledge of a field.
> [snip]

points to the range of (research) activities in which PhD students engage, as individuals learning new 
scholarly practices in the process of contributing knowledge to a field. I prefer to think of this as a 
landscape of knowledge rather than a body, as the former suggests multiplicity, diversity and room 
to move and look around. This process always involves a dialogue between professional 
knowledge/s (which often means more than designing and teaching) and in dialogue with other PhD 
students, supervisors, and as I previously mentioned, complete strangers who make the mistake of 
asking what you are researching – in my case when I said I was focusing on typography, the 
incredulous response was 'Can you actually do a PhD in typing?' Such dialogues reorient the 
becoming-scholar both inward (to their disciplinary landscapes) and outward (to the world) if indeed 
there is such a separation as individual learners who also produce knowledge. If we separate the 
two, what might be lost is the idea that scholars are also learners, particularly in emergent research 
landscapes such as design.

Rather than making a clear distinction between the range of institutional activities design academics 
at all stages of their scholarly careers engage in, I suggest that we are both educating individuals as 
well as ourselves while simultaneously contributing to the multiple landscapes of design knowledge 
whether or not we are the rare few who achieve top institutional positioning as previously described. 
This is the small scale of which I speak. The knowledge we co-construct with participants in our 
research, and participants in our incidental and formal conversations is a collective activity. This 
moves away from the idea of a great few and towards the idea of knowledge production as 
generated through small sets of collaborative dialogical activities between differently positioned 
people in particular places. 

To illustrate, yesterday I attended an informal discussion between a visiting scholar and the 
research centre to which I am associated through my doctorate and my other research job 
conducting collaborative ethnography within professional practice in a health care setting in Sydney. 
While my colleague presented a video which represents both a preliminary analysis of our 
ethnographic research and also an artefact developed to initiate collective analysis of selected parts 
of our data, the discussion focused on socio-materialist approaches to the analysis of professional 
practice. While I don't have space to explain what this is (reference below), our discussion gave me 
some language to talk about what was previously unspeakable in the thesis chapter I am currently 
writing. According to Ken's argument, this is discussion and reflection rather than a research 
activity, yet my epistemological position suggests that data and analysis are co-constructions 
generated through dialogue between two or more people and the material environment. Thus this 
particular dialogic interaction, as one of many in which I have engaged over the past six years of 
my doctorate, contributes to both research contexts in which I am engaged AS research activity. 
That is, together we generated new understandings about research methodologies and the 
positioning of the researcher within research sites and knowledge products such as videos, or in my 
thesis, 'zines. Particular instances of research activity such as are as important in building a 
disciplinary landscape as that contributed by large-scale studies because a landscape is peopled by 
individuals.

I think my 2 cents may be spent now!
cheers, teena

Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. & Sawchuk, P. 2011, 'Actor-network theory in educational research ', in T. 
Fenwick, R. Edwards & P. Sawchuk (eds), Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing 
the Socio-Material, Routledge, London.