On Tuesday 28th June 2022, The School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London, held its inaugural Postgraduate Research (PGR) Showcase at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on The Mall in London. Heralded as an opportunity to discover where creative curiosity meets critical thinking, Birkbeck doctoral researchers and alumni shared and presented their creative practice research. Talks and exhibits on view to the public included poetry, photography, film curation, audio-visual essays, and...

This final episode of the current season is a short montage compiled from the first four conversations between Sophie and guests, sharing their experiences and expertise in all things relating to how we (can) academicize arts and humanities practice as research.  Dip your ears into the philosophical and practical musings of these scholars, researchers, and educators who use their artistic and creative practice in and as research: Anne Douglas, Emile Devereaux, Lucy Wright, and Rachel Hann....

Katy Beinart completed her PhD in 2019 at University College, London. It was called Détour and retour: practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton. Lizzie Lloyd also completed her PhD in 2019, but at the University of Bristol. Hers was titled Art writing and subjectivity: critical association in art-historical practice Katy and Lizzy began a collaboration together immediately after handing in their PhD theses. They had much in common, both having...

Equipped with a diploma in Drama, Libro Levi was originally planning to be a performer and was writing plays and novels before taking a break to do an MA, and then being encouraged to do a funded PhD at the University of East Anglia. Completing in 2009, they had aimed to write an 80,000-word novel with a 15,000-word critical piece, as a counterpoint. Acknowledging the struggle to articulate something that is inarticulate, they had tried to understand and analyse the logic of the imagined...

This is the first time that curator, Sunshine Wong, has reflected on her PhD: Beside engagement: a queer and feminist reading of socially negotiated art through dialogue, love, and praxis. Completed in 2019 at the University of Wolverhampton, this is a theoretical exploration of curatorial practice and commissioning inspired in part by some bad experiences Sunshine had when working as a freelancer. She had hoped doing a PhD would provide her with clarity but also some camaraderie since she...

Olumide did her PhD straight after an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East London. It was titled Fishing for Naija: Border crossing as framework for language and literary form and comprised a critical theoretical section and her original novel When We Speak Of Nothing.  She was one of the first creative writing PhD students at the university and spent much of the first two years, with the support of two great supervisors, reading, thinking, and exploring critical theories so that...

In this episode, Rob Watson discusses how his PhD in participation and advocacy in community media came about, having been inspired through his engineering expertise in digital technologies to set up radio production courses and to run De Montford University’s student-led station as local community radio. Not coming from a social sciences background, Rob had a steep learning curve, settling on a symbolic interactionism framing and employing immersive participant observation in the field. In...

Nina’s first degree was in performing arts in the 1990s. She then did a Masters in composing and became a sound artist working on radio features and documentaries. She started teaching at university in 2007 and began discussing a PhD in 2014, inspired by experimental projects for the BBC through which she was developing a way of working through musical storytelling. She completed her PhD by publication in 2018 at Bournemouth. It was entitled "Music, Narrative, Voice and Presence". What she...

Cara completed her PhD in 2017 at the University of Bristol which houses one of the largest British theatre collections in the world. Her thesis was called Activating Archives and involved interrogating the integration of archival theory with performance art. It was an AHRC-funded project aimed at modelling strategies for engaging with archive material on three levels: artists dealing with their own material; artists dealing with others’ work; and how institutions recontextualise such...

Fiona is Professor of Museology in the History of Art department at Birkbeck, University of London. She did her PhD at Keele University between 1993 and 1998; it was called “Artwork and the boundaries of academia”. Fiona’s was one of the first art practice as research (or theory/practice) doctorates in the UK and she admits to finding the whole process a very difficult experience because of this. Her grounding was a degree in fine art from Leeds where social and feminist history informed her...

Harold completed his PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance at Leeds Beckett in 2020. He started it in 2016 on a part-time basis and appreciated the opportunity to carve out ring-fenced research time whilst teaching on the BA in fine art. Harold likens the process of finding the original contribution to knowledge to climbing Everest. His thesis was grounded on case studies of other artists; he identified a synergy between critical...

Four more speakers from our training event: Dr Agata Lulkowska https://www.staffs.ac.uk/people/agata-lulkowska Agata is Senior Lecturer in Film Production at Staffordshire University where she specialises in practice-based PhD supervision in filmmaking. With a background in film practice, photography and installations, her PhD “The Arhuacos, film, and the politics of representing the ‘Other’ in Colombia” was undertaken at Birkbeck. It was unfunded and took her eight years part-time. She...

This week's episode is the first of two featuring audio recorded from the CHASE-funded Corkscrew Workshop held in June for practice-based PhD students. The host, Dr Sophie Hope, kicks off by welcoming the participants and provides a short outline of her own doctoral journey. There follow four more short presentations https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8004718/sophie-hope https://sophiehope.org.uk/ Reflecting on her career, Sophie admits how privilege has informed her decisions without...

In this episode, Sophie talks to Lucy Lyons whose passion for drawing and the process she calls ‘slow looking’ converges with a fascination for anatomy and pathology. Her PhD, entitled Delineating Disease, was completed at Sheffield Hallam in 2009 involved investigating medicine through the methodology of artistic practice. She has continued to pursue this path and is now a registered medical illustrator and teaches at City & Guilds of London Art School. Likening the exploratory...

Becky Shaw’s PhD, completed in 1998, was rooted in nursing research exploring sculpture as a ‘significant occupation’ for patients in palliative care. Through this collaborative work with occupational therapists, nurses and patients, Becky considered aspects such as the value of time spent with others on creative activity and the permanence of personal identity as carried through objects when the creator is no longer present. After further research on death and dying, Becky returned to...

Following an anthropology degree, Emile began doing site specific performance; this led to an MFA in digital media and then a PhD in media philosophy. While his PhD was not practice-based, Emile continued doing interventions, participatory projects and performances as a way to research through practice. Emile retuned to academia after the life changing experience of working in New York during 9/11. He found an academic home in the interdisciplinary research context of the media studies...

In this episode Sophie talks to Lucy Wright who, in 2014, completed her PhD titled 'Making traditions, practising folk : contemporary folk performance in the Northwest of England : a practice-led enquiry'. They discuss the importance of creative uncertainty and how often people are talking at cross purposes when discussing practice research. Lucy reflects on her turn from ethnographer to artist. She talk about her precarious career in short term academic jobs, which rarely recognised her...

In this episode Sophie talks to Dr Rachel Hann who completed her PhD in 2010 from the University of Leeds in theatre and performance. The title of her PhD was 'Computer-based 3D visualization for theatre research: towards an understanding of unrealized utopian theatre architecture from the 1920s and 1930s'. Rachel talks about the importance of supportive, critical supervisors who motivated her to push her research forward. She refers to the influence of the principles of The London Charter...

In this episode Sophie talks to Professor Anne Douglas, who completed her practice-based PhD in 1992 from Newcastle University. Anne reflects on the practical and philosophical backdrop to how her sculptural work as public art developed into a PhD in the late 1980s. Anne introduces some of the precedents to practice-based PhDs in music and visual arts from the 1970s and 1980s and her 22 year career at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. Anne shares how she developed a focused research programme...