Working the Space: Augmenting Training for Practice-based Research

The worlds of practice and academic research produce powerful cultural identities: for this reason, practice-based research students must work hard to construct a space for themselves within these differing forces. The need to “work the space” in this way is a creative and constructive part of practice-based research but often not recognised or catered for in university doctoral training. In this chapter, I explore some of the national requirements for doctoral training in the UK. These indicate that cohort development is desirable for all students, but the model of training is geared to the teaching of research skills for individual researchers and weighted towards scientific processes and terms which are not necessarily applicable across disciplines. Drawing on work with art and design PhD candidates in a UK university, I offer alternative ways to go about group research training which build researchers’ understanding and construction of their space without eschewing engagement with more generic notions of research. These approaches draw on historic cultures of organising in art and design, employ critical and creative practices and challenge how we might see training, skills and being a researcher. From this I suggest a number of principles for how practice-based research training can happen that might also be applied beyond art and design.