“Artistic research is a crucial part of the future of academia… [I]f the university is going to serve the next stages of human society, we need to continue to develop robust and transformative practices…” (survey respondent)
The Recommendations-For-Action centre around requirements for the artistic doctorate in dance and performance. We focus in particular on doctorates that situate creative embodied practice as the core mode of inquiry and as part of the manifest
outcomes of research.
The recommendations are available in five languages: English, Finnish, Swedish, Brazilian-Portuguese and simplified Chinese.
The recommendations emerge from research conducted by the Artistic Doctorates in Europe: Third cycle education in Dance and Performance project (ADiE, 2016-2019) (www.artisticdoctorates.com). ADiE is an Erasmus+ funded partnership between eight organisations across the UK, Sweden and Finland. The partnership undertook surveys, gathered case studies and curated events for stakeholders to share, reflect upon and enhance the experience and significance of doctoral education.
The recommendations revolve around creating collaborative research environments, discipline specific training, supervisory and examination processes and enhancing impact. Throughout we place a particular emphasis on the relationship between universities and the cultural sector in an effort to promote connectivity for candidates and to advocate artistic doctoral research within professional dance and performance contexts. The recommendations are underpinned by commitments to an ethos of care and the fostering of plurality.
You may want to read this document if you are:
• a prospective student thinking about undertaking a doctorate
• a supervisor or mentor of artistic doctorates
• a programme manager or academic involved in the design and delivery of artistic doctoral studies
• a cultural sector or industry partner interested in supporting, commissioning
or presenting doctoral research and/or its outcomes.
• a doctoral education provider looking for best practice in artistic doctorate provision
• a policy maker developing funding schemes, frameworks for research,
regulations or reviewing systems for doctoral studies.
DOWNLOAD THE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ACTION
THE RECOMMENDATIONS
To enhance the quality of candidate experience, research outcomes and identify pathways to impact, ADiE recommend:
Refining doctoral training and education
- Plural and inclusive approaches to artistic doctoral studies, recruiting candidates from less represented social groups and encouraging a wide range of research interests.
- Advancing expansive, discipline specific, training in artistic research and its methods and methodologies as current in dance and performance.
- Incorporating opportunities to maintain, develop and critically scrutinize enskillment and embodied practices in order to forward safe and rigorous practices.
- Regulatory and training frameworks recognize and support an expanded and flexible range of performative and multi-medial formats in artistic doctoral research and its attendant outcomes.
- Fostering in depth engagement with the protocols for ethical conduct and ensuring that criteria for research integrity reflect embodied practice and artistic research approaches.
- Creative leadership development form a part of doctoral studies, enhancing future career choice and the potential of candidates to be cultural change makers.
Supporting supervisors and examiners
- Enabling supervision processes that are genuinely practice focused, incorporating sufficient time and space for creative modes of feedback and enquiry.
- Promoting flexible, co-relational and co-generative supervision teams and processes as part of transparent research cultures.
- Ensuring examination processes attend to the multifaceted and processual nature of artistic doctorates such that the broad spectrum of artistic doctoral research can be fully addressed and examined.
- Advancing and promoting cross-institutional bespoke training and (inter)national networks for supervisors and examiners to share resources and develop models of good practice.
Improving infrastructures and environments
- Recognition of, and support for, production processes and associated financial costs by doctoral providers and cross-sectoral funders such that quality artistic research outcomes can be developed and audiences reached.
- Access to specialist environments and facilities afforded by effective management, planning and collaboration.
- Targeted and sustained collaborations between higher education and the cultural sector, as well as with other cross-sector industry partners, are developed and integrated into programmes.
- Enabling candidates to engage with international networks, across the academic and cultural sectors.
Enhancing impact and making a difference
- Reaching beyond university and arts contexts in research training, project design, partnerships and other activities, to enable cross-fertilization.
- Candidates are supported to boldly implement their work to the benefit of others, realising the potential of artistic doctorates to address communities, transdisciplinary issues and societal concerns.
