writing and the Phd in fine artbuild up a defined culture with at least a core of shared ambitions. While this may
not be completely identifiable with a specific field, such as performative writing or
new technologies, or indeed schools of thought such as continental aesthetics, it is
at the moment underestimated how important it is to see group cohesion, shared
understandings and mutual support as instrumental to the furtherance of research
cultures. in the uK we are fortunate that in the area of performance in particular,
the practice of networking is well established by appropriate websites such as paRip.^5
it hosts challenging papers, extensive bibliographies, summaries of research symposia,
conference and projects as well as well- maintained descriptions of current phds and
research fellowships, etc. paRip is of course well funded, and has worked within the
terms of the arts and humanities Research Council (uK), which is often difficult
when the discipline is outside humanities departments. With appropriate funding,
paRip has been able to give guidance on the development of research cultures
and publish reports, such as that by nelson and andrews (2003). This report gives
substantive advice on admissions, research development, the balance between the
written and practical outcomes; standards and expectations, research methodologies
and the role of the written. it also offers advice on examination and examiners, as well
as supervision and supervisory issues and although its description of the role of writing
is too prescriptive in our view, it is the kind of report that could prove indispensable to
the development of appropriate research cultures in the arts.
it might be useful in this context, to take a side look at a very different report. in
this report, James elkins (2005a) posits the idea of five kinds of written dissertation:
first, the dissertation is art history; second, the dissertation is philosophy or art theory;
third, it is art criticism; fourth, it is natural history or economics or any of the fields
outside the humanities; or fifth, it is a technical report. Whilst we do not have space to
give a fuller account of these types, there is ample evidence that the phds cited in our
chapter do not simply fall into one type. indeed, in this text, elkins proposes that the
technical report is an appropriate description for the phd cited earlier which provides
the ‘terse economy’ of writing and making an individual piece of work, which might
also constitute ‘a hoax’ (price 2000). it cannot therefore be placed within the context
of a technical report; that would be to repress its complex provocations. We should at
this point be cautious about categorization. We propose that considerable work still
needs to be done to present phds more fully and to attend to them more carefully.
publications by mika hannula, have begun this process. The results of such attention
to the detail of submissions have lent insight into what writing is, for instance:
Writing is simultaneously thinking and doing, both observing the world and
creating it ... writing itself is one of the forms in which reality is created.
Writing as a way of thinking, doing research and reporting it has to find
a way of treating language in the pluralist manner so that the uniqueness of
artistic experience is not lost when our thinking about it is communicated!
(hannula et al. 2005: 4, 37)it is easy in this context to begin to identify how writing might be developed
within research communities. some of the most useful resources to build up such
an understanding are the journals briefly mentioned in the first part of the chapter.