Supervising Artistic and Practice-based Research: Publishing for Urgency

This week-long seminar for supervisors explores the heterogeneous processes of PhD and postdoc publishing and supervision in the arts.

This event is fully booked, but you can still join our keynote presentations, which are free and open to all.

Tuesday, 20 August 2024 at 10:30

Keynote

Janneke Adema: Experimental Publishing as a Critical Praxis: Rethinking Distinctions between Research and Publishing

„In this keynote I will be presenting various methodological and conceptual framings that I have used to position my research and publishing practice, including critical praxis and scholarly poethics. My research practice consists of a series of publishing experiments that explore alternative futures for scholarly communication. These experiments reimagine humanities knowledge production by reperforming the humanist and print-based forms it is built on, including the scholarly book. Questioning this allows me to explore open online publishing forms that don’t simply reproduce uncritically the printed codex format and our established practices of knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption. My practice highlights more speculative forms of posthumanities publishing that, I argue, provide space for us as researchers and supervisors to think further about the distributed, heterogeneous, humans, nonhumans, objects, non-anthropomorphic elements, and material infrastructures collectively involved in our research and publishing processes. Especially now when, with the demise of traditional gatekeepers and the introduction of new modes of publishing and distribution, conventional distinctions between publishing (as the activity of making information available to the public) and research are blurring, this has contributed to a raised awareness of when and why we publish (and for what reasons).“

Wednesday, 21 August 2024 at 10:30

Keynote

Eva Weinmayr: Ecologies of Dissemination – towards a decolonial feminist politics of reuse*

“In this presentation I will draw on my collective artistic research practice which is concerned with the micropolitics of publishing and sharing. Presenting two examples I will discuss the many shifts that are needed when we move the focus away from output-based approaches towards collective processes, exchanges, and relationships that publishing practices can enable. The suggested shifts bring about many questions: Presuming that knowledges are always already shared and collective and that creative practice is deeply relational, how can we then develop a politics of sharing and reuse that does not buy into individual authorship as ownership? And then, if we consider authorship to be part of a collective cultural effort, how can we invent a politics of sharing and reuse that does not buy into a universalist approach to openness?

Open Access policies tend not to recognize that knowledge practices are situated in contingent social and historical conditions, nor that there might be ethical reasons to refrain from release and reuse. Therefore, it seems important to develop a politics of reuse that complexifies the binary between open (Free Culture, Open Access) and closed (IP, copyright) access while being attentive to power differences embedded in practices of reuse. This includes considering the situated conditions for production and an understanding that the defaults of openness and transparency have different consequences in different contexts.” * Ecologies of Dissemination is an artistic research project in collaboration with Femke Snelting.

Thursday, 22 August 2024 at 10:30

Keynote

Cally Spooner: A Hypothesis of Resistance – live METHODS

Cally Spooner will present the METHODS she used to write her practice-based PhD thesis, A Hypothesis of Resistance, which manifested as five serially published essays, subsequently drawn together into a single book-length study with extensive footnotes. For our seminar, Spooner will present the social, live embodied methodologies she used to write, including Live Publishing; ‘Cartographic power relation’s, in which all events — both Mico and macro -- are ‘real’. Symposium-like-Gatherings; her Psoas Muscle & Dictation. Spooner explores how these methods led her to adopt a first-person voice for her thesis writing and find social systems to support and enrich her writing, thus responding to her original frustrations with philosophy (and indeed theory) as an individually driven, mind-over-body discipline, and creating a practice-based PhD through which she could practice philosophy in ways that might unite bodies with knowledge and thinking with speaking.

 

About the event

Artistic and practice-based research propose situated responses to the urgencies of our current condition – planetary ecological collapse, systemic inequality, and border regimes. Artistic and practice-based research can allow for individuals, communities, and the environment to be imagined otherwise. 

How do supervisors navigate and support these urgencies through and alongside academic structures of dissemination and validation? How can we sustain and develop good practices of publishing artistic and practice-based research that can speak to multiple ways of knowing rather than primarily producing knowledge? How can we privilege the many and multi-faceted ways that artistic and practice-based research meets its public: the research itself as continuous dissemination and engagement, the dissertation, and possibly its defence as an act of publishing, and other frameworks for disseminating artistic research? Which approaches, formats, and platforms are recommended and can be developed by supervisors?

This seminar brings together professionals worldwide to discuss, for example, generating knowledge; experimental formats of interacting, distributing, and publishing; presentation skills across making and research; writing styles; ethics in supervision; and supervising collaborative publishing activities. 

The seminar is dedicated to collective knowledge exchange and community building for supervisors of practice-based or artistic PhD projects or those engaged with the development of administrative or academic frameworks. We hope for a diverse and varied community representing higher arts education institutions, universities, and other research communities. Some stipends covering participation fees will be available.

 

 

Core organizing team

  • Maibritt Borgen, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
  • Jacob Lund, Aarhus University
  • Iris van der Tuin, Utrecht University
  • Henk Slager, HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht.