A proper anxiety: practice-based PhDs and academic unease

Like any other PhD, practice-based PhDs are also the focus of much anxiety but, significantly, those anxieties reach beyond personal doubt and are shared by supervisors, examiners and senior academic management. Here, I suggest that the anxiety concerning practice-based PhDs should not be lightly dismissed because it is a product of the institutional relations practice-based doctorates put into place. At least in the short-term anxiety is structured into the qualification and the aim of this paper is to examine why. I argue that the demarcation of disciplinary boundaries is important for judgements concerning academic and artistic expertise. To become an expert you have to have a specialised field, which can only be only mastered if it is clearly defined. Practice-based research crosses many of these borderlines thereby creating anxiety about criteria of competence, assessment and authority. Significantly, however, the practice-based PhD has involved a shift in the institutional arbitration of competence. In the past art that crossed disciplinary boundaries was nevertheless evaluated within art colleges and in relation to their traditions and practices, whereas in this instance art is being judged within an academic context and with a different set of expectations in mind. Unlike other previously contentious forms of art practice, this is not a change in medium or subject matter that nevertheless remains within the parameters of the art college, but is a shift in the way that the art object is legitimated as such. The paper goes on to examine the practical and conceptual consequences of art practice being acknowledged as academically valid, exploring in particular the advantages and liabilities of anxiety for all concerned

Practice-based doctorates and questions of academic legitimacy

Over the last six years there has been a massive increase in the number of students studying for practice-based doctorates in Art and Design. It is now possible to do a practice-based PhD in over forty departments, although what is expected from doctoral students varies considerably across institutions. In 1997 the United Kingdom Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE) addressed the variance between practice-based doctorates in the report Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design. This paper examines the recommendations made by the report and asks to what extent does it acknowledge art as a legitimate research practice within the university. The UKCGE report recommends that all practice-based PhDs have a substantial theoretical and contextualising element that will demonstrate general scholarly requirements and render the artwork accessible to judgement. I argue that this proposal is problematic on several counts; it draws a firm line between theory and practice, places academic research in opposition to practice generally and artwork specifically, maintains the stereotype of art as anti-intellectual and forgets the degree to which theory is itself a practice. In addition it suggests that art practice can only be legitimised as research when it is framed by a conventionally academic enquiry. I suggest that instead of trying to make art practice fit academic regulations it would be more productive to use the practice-based PhDs as a way of re-thinking academic conventions and scholarly requirements

A dual inheritance: the politics of educational reform and PhDs in art and design

This paper examines the changing relationship of art practice to academic research in higher education since 1960. Whereas art practice was often conceived of as divorced from any notion of academic or theoretical work in the post 1960 art school, by the 1990s the ground had changed to such a degree that it was possible to pursue doctoral study in art practice. This emergence of practice-based PhDs can be considered as part of a larger shift in art education and its acceptance of theory. On the one hand, the practice-based PhD could be interpreted as the logical consequence of critical, politically aware practices. On the other hand, the founding of the practice-based PhD can be connected to a series of educational reforms, particularly the introduction of the RAE, and the increasing need for departments to develop strategies for economic survival. In addition to tracing both the pedagogical, institutional and artistic legacy of practice based PhDs this paper focuses on the way in which a predominantly socialist commitment to integrated theory and practice meets with conservative educational reforms over the ground of the PhDs. I argue that this both highlights the institutional input into what art practice or indeed research is acknowledged to be and raises questions concerning the possibility of maintaining a critical art agenda

Don’t touch! hands off! art, blindness and the conservation of expertise

The embargo on touching in museums is increasingly being brought into question, not least by blind activists who are calling for greater access to collections. The provision of opportunities to touch could be read as a potential conflict between established optic knowledge and illicit haptic experience, between the conservation of objects and access to collections. Instead I suggest that touch is not necessarily other to the museum; rather, the status of who does the touching and knowing is crucial and not the use of touch per se. It is expert territory and vested academic interests that are at stake here. Using Bruno Latour’s (1993) conceptions of hybrid networks and purified zones of academic practice, I then explore what the unacknowledged existence of touch means for museums and for notions of authority more generally. I suggest that if the apparent boundaries of disciplines are unconvincing in practice, then the possibility of expert knowledge is seriously undermined. Blind people’s demand for access through touch is not then a challenge of one paradigm to another but implicitly questions the accreditation of authority itself. As such it forms part of a wider institutional shift with regard to expertise and an increased need for negotiating between different conceptual frameworks. The ocularcentric bias of museums is increasingly being questioned by blind and visually impaired visitors who emphasize touch as a learning and aesthetic experience. This challenge is contentious not least because it ostensibly brings the individuals’ rights of access into direct conflict with museum conservation. I argue that concerns over conservation can, however, mask and serve to legitimate preconceptions about who should have access to collections; what counts as damage or dirt; and the means by which art and artefacts can be understood or enjoyed. It is expertise rather than the conservation of objects which is at stake. This article suggests that in campaigning for access through touch, blind people physically move beyond the barriers which reserve contact for the museum elite and simultaneously establish the viability of learning in a way that is not sanctioned by the art historical community. Thus resistance to touch in museums is not so much a concern for preservation as a defence of territory and expertise

Blindness, art and exclusion in museums and galleries

Drawing on interviews with blind people, this paper examines both their exclusion from museums and galleries and their responses to the art educational provision which is specifically designed to remedy that marginalisation. Blind visitors’ responses to these educational projects was polarised; respondents were either highly critical or very enthusiastic. This paper begins by outlining the interviewees’ criticisms which included, education officers’ misconception of how touch facilitates learning and aesthetic response, a lack of educational progression and blind people’s clear exclusion from mainstream events. I then ask why, given these problems, did other respondents respond so favourably, suggesting that these high levels of satisfaction were had little to do with museum provision but were the result of social interaction and of inclusion within the sighted community. I argue that, ironically, this sense of inclusion is premised on blind visitors’ structural exclusion from art institutions. Finally, the article examines those visitors who, illicitly or otherwise, already experience some aspects of the museum in multisensory terms but maintain that until museums’ and galleries ocularcentric orientation is reconfigured, there will be little possibility for these rogue visitors to develop their knowledge of art. Likewise, without institutional change educational events for the blind will continue to be an inadequate supplement to a structure that is and remains inequitable

Lifelong learning in museums: a critical appraisal

Museums are generally considered storehouses of treasure but recent government policy focuses on issues of social inclusion, life skills and employment. We critically examine current policy, comparing it to earlier educational approaches in museums and suggest that its implementation forms both a major institutional challenge and an opportunity for national museums

Embracing sculpture, holding stones: on gender and the details of touch

Book synopsis: Since the Renaissance, at least, the medium of sculpture has been associated explicitly with the sense of touch. Sculptors, philosophers and art historians have all linked the two, often in strikingly different ways. In spite of this long running interest in touch and tactility, it is vision and visuality which have tended to dominate art historical research in recent decades. This book introduces a new impetus to the discussion of the relationship between touch and sculpture by setting up a dialogue between art historians and individuals with fresh insights who are working in disciplines beyond art history. The collection brings together a rich and diverse set of approaches, with essays tackling subjects from prehistoric figurines to the work of contemporary artists, from pre-modern ideas about the physiology of touch to tactile interaction in the museum environment, and from the phenomenology of touch in recent philosophy to the experimental findings of scientific study. It is the first volume on this subject to take such a broad approach and, as such, seeks to set the agenda for future research and collaboration in this area

Independent Museums, Heritage, and the Shape of Museum Studies

Reflecting on the British heritage debates of the 1980s and 1990s, Robert Lumley asserted that they continue to influence Anglo-American definitions and perceptions of that subject. This article suggests that they had a correlative impact upon the parameters of museum studies. The museums founded during the 1980s were mainly small scale enterprises and they were devoted to many different topics, but commentators almost exclusively focused on the large independent organisations concerned with the recent industrial past. In doing so they associated the independent sector with ‘heritage’ rather than with established public museums. I maintain that this remains the case. Recent scholarship either considers independent museums in relation to the conceptual framework of the period or in terms of ‘community’, a discourse that is closely linked to recent developments in heritage studies. They are rarely, if ever, mentioned in analyses of architecture, professional practice, contemporary display or the role of museums. This omission effectively ascribes expertise and knowledge to public rather than independent institutions, maintains ingrained structures of social and cultural exclusion, and homogenises museum studies, limiting its concerns and scope

Rehabilitating unauthorised touch or why museum visitors touch the exhibits

In 2014 Senses and Society published a special issue on ‘Sensory Museology’. Registering the emergence of this new multi-disciplinary field, the editor usefully observed that ‘its most salient trend has been the rehabilitation of touch’. Arguably, however, touch has only been rehabilitated as an area of study insofar as it is authorised by the museum. Scholars have rarely considered the propensity of visitors to touch museum exhibits when they do not have permission to do so. In this article I suggest that the academic emphasis on authorised forms of contact privileges the institution’s aims and perspective. Conversely, researching unauthorised touch places a higher degree of emphasis on the visitors’ motivations and responses, and has the capacity to bring dominant characterisations of the museum into question. I substantiate and work through these claims by drawing on interview-based research conducted at the British Museum, and by investigating why visitors touch the exhibits without permission, what they touch, and what experiences that encounter enables