Moodle login: Moodle.gsmd.ac.uk Or access the link via the intranet: Student Area> Resources and Support> School Moodle VLE site Use your School login and password to get in All Courses>Postgraduate>Doctoral Research Training Home and A-Z of Topics One off enrolment key: seminarkey DO put an entry on the ‘introduce yourself here!’ forum Aim to build up moodle as a VLE resource, virtual community, address physical space and working habits of doc researchers.

Starting research as a practitioner What are your expectations for the session?

Useful first exercise Write a short first person account of what has brought you to research Why this topic? Why you? Why now? Handy tip: many researchers find it useful to keep a research diary of ongoing thoughts and what you’ve done (even if this is not part of your research data). Aim ‘fighting familiarity’. Can be used to start developing a ‘researcher stance’; Some supervisors ask for this anyway. Generate a set of critical questions about the categories you’ve created and the desires you are expressing. How does the structural/cultural operate within your own identity narrative?

What is research? Why are you starting it? Why do people do research in the arts? How is research on practice different from doing the practice? How can practitioner research differ from other kinds of research? Research training – function of, how you work with it and your supervisors. Your job to engage with it and see how it would work out in terms of your research – if it doesnt fit your model or project, you should compare/ take note for evaluating other people’s research.

Research on the arts Research for the arts Research in the arts What’s the difference? Research on the arts Research for the arts Research in the arts Borgdorff 2005 (after Frayling 1993)

Research on the arts Separation between researcher and research topic Reflection and interpretation e.g. Analytical/critical Philosophical/ aesthetic Descriptive/explanatory ‘Interpretative perspective’ e.g. Musicology Theatre studies Art history Literature

Research for the arts Applied research ‘art not so much the object of investigation but its objective’ Insights and instruments that find their way into practice Tools and knowledge for the creative process/artistic product ‘Instrumental perspective’

Research in the arts Researcher is often subject and object of research Embodied knowledge, tacit knowledge Philosophical roots ‘learning comes from experience’ (Dewey) ‘knowing how vs knowing that’ (Ryle – procedural vs declarative knowledge) Artistic practice as research process and research evidence ‘Performative perspective’

What makes what I do doctoral research? Intending to do research Being systematic about your enquiry Adopting a critical and self-reflexive approach Putting your research in context (practical/professional/academic) Putting your work into dialogue with others Coming up with a research question to direct your research Making an original contribution Disseminating your research

Reflexivity?

Introducing reflexivity: creating a “researcher stance” Kamler and Thomson (2014), Helping Doctoral Students Write A ‘reflexive scholar’ is not someone who reflects on their writing at periodic intervals, in journals and/or in quiet moments. Such a person would be reflective, but not reflexive. ...to be reflective is to be given to meditation whereas to be reflexive is to make the subject and object of an activity the same. Ctd….

Thus a reflexive scholar is one who applies to their own work the same critical stance, the same interrogative questions, and the same refusal to take things for granted as they do with their research data. Developing a reflexive disposition is profoundly about the being and doing of scholarship. It is about the personal and the person of the researcher: reflexive practice uses both the personal and discursive ‘I’. Reflexivity means looking for the social in the individual account, asking how particular events, categories and assumptions might have been produced through discourse, culture, political affiliations and/or social practice. It means learning not to take for granted the ways in which we have narrativized our identities, the ‘how we got to be where and who we are’ stories that we comfortably (re)produce. It also means interrogating how we might be perpetuating particular kinds of power relationships, be advancing particular ways of naming and discussing people, experiences and events. Reflexivity thus involves critical self-interrogation and discursive movement. Ctd…

Many doctoral researchers arrive at their supervisor’s door with passionate beliefs related to their proposed topic of study.... Our job as supervisors is not to change their passions or intentions…. But it is our task to ensure that doctoral researchers examine how their concerns might contain taken-for-granted assumptions, might bias their research, or prevent them from ‘seeing’ what is in front of their noses. In other words, our job is to help doctoral researchers look for and probe their own blind spots. Kamler and Thomson (2014), Helping Doctoral Students Write

Doctoral researcher as lone wolf???

Research as dialogue Who are you talking to through your research?

Who do I speak to through my research? Fellow practitioners Artists (same discipline/ cross-disciplinary) Teachers/ educators Academic – discipline/ field (e.g. sociology; education). Asynchronous dialogue. 2. Communities Audience Place – local/ international 3. Society Wider contemporary debates Radical change? Evaluation?

Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991, 1998) Community of Practice (CoP) are ‘groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’ (Wenger) CoPs share a common area of interest Members of a CoP ‘interact and engage in shared activities, help each other, and share information with each other. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.’ CoPs are made up of practitioners who are trying to achieve a shared goal Domain, community, practitioners

Identify potential communities of practice for your research Brainstorm with your neighbour…

Suggested reading Robin Nelson – Practice as Research – chapter on from Practitioner to Practitioner Researcher Darla Crispin – Is artistic research in music a feminist failure? Crispin – benefitting conservatoires, upholding what they do? laboratory, scientific model? Science speak?