The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

eva Luating quaLity in artistiC researCh

inclusion of others in order to avoid the threat of the so- called ‘double doctorate’? We
discuss this further below.
The demands of international coordination according to the Bologna process (2010)
require that awards at various levels, broadly determined by how many years of higher
education have been completed, are comparable across the participating nations. one
consequence of this process, begun in 1999, has therefore been to create so- called
‘third- cycle’ courses, generically called doctorates, in countries and in subjects that
have hitherto not offered them. The creative and performing arts have been greatly
impacted by this drive (Chapter 1). Furthermore, the Berlin Communiqué (Berlin
2003) set up a requirement to standardize the way content and competencies are
described in higher education, leading to the so- called dublin descriptors (JQi 2004).
What is significant for our current discussion is that the dublin descriptors apply to
all subjects at either first, second or third- cycles, therefore implying that a doctorate
in the arts must have comparable content to a doctorate in any subject. This is the
source of the problem for those who employ ‘special pleading’ (Chapter 21) and want
the arts to have separate criteria and standards: in the eu there is now a politically
driven context that precludes it. nevertheless, the dublin descriptors still allow some
scope for the idea that the standards and criteria for doctorates might be fulfilled in
different subject- specific ways. For example, none of the following demand that a
textual thesis be written, nor that non- textual media such as artworks are excluded:

Qualifications that signify completion of the third- cycle are awarded to

students who:

have demonstrated a systematic understanding of a field of study and

mastery of the skills and methods of research associated with that field;

have demonstrated the ability to conceive, design, implement and adapt a

substantial process of research with scholarly integrity;

have made a contribution through original research that extends the

frontier of knowledge by developing a substantial body of work, some of

which merits national or international refereed publication;

are capable of critical analysis, evaluation and synthesis of new and

complex ideas;

can communicate with their peers, the larger scholarly community and

with society in general about their areas of expertise;

can be expected to be able to promote, within academic and professional

contexts, technological, social or cultural advancement in a knowledge based

society.

(JQi 2004)

two competing models

We will assume that the majority of well- informed institutions are using a definition of
research more or less compatible with Borgdorff’s (Chapter 3) that states that artistic
research is a merger of the requirements of professional arts practice and the traditional
requirements of the academy.