1. 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.

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

3. 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?

4. What is research? 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.

5. 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)

6. 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

7. 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’

8. 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’

9. 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

10. Reflexivity?

11. 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….

12. 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…

13. 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

14. ‘Practitioner researchers face several challenges when they begin framing the research problem. First, practitioner researchers may initially conceive of their problem as a problem that needs to be solved, rather than a problem that requires further investigation.’
Cox, 2012, Teaching Qualitative Research to Practitioner Researchers

15. Exorcism exercise…

16. What problems would you like your research to solve?

17. Doctoral researcher as lone wolf???

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

19. 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?

20. 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

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

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