Assignment:
Please write down any question you never dared to ask about artistic research.
Methodology/description/concept:
During their practice-based artistic doctoral research students often encounter questions that they feel hesitant to ask. This could happen because the answer seems far too obvious to them, or there might be no forum available to discuss these particular questions. To address this problem, an exercise was initiated with the intention to create a safe space for them to raise and discuss these questions.
As part of the task, each student anonymously wrote down three questions they had never dared to ask about their doctoral research or artistic research in general. These questions were then mixed in a hat and each student randomly selected one question to discuss it with a partner.
After debating the questions in pairs, a collective discussion began, and each of the teams shared their elaborated response they had come up with to the rest of the participants. This exercise provided a platform for students to ask questions they may have been hesitant to ask and gain thoughtful insights from their peers.
Some of the ‘taboo’ questions:
- Why do you think the advocacy capacity of the arts communities is so weak?
- Does it make sense to go into theoretical research that theorists have explored much better than myself?
- In relation to the overall reason of the research why the argument ‘just because of that…’ is inconsistent within artistic research?
- Do you know any graduated PhD (DLA) students who could make any use of their degrees in their professional life abroad?
- Is art more worthwhile when being backed up by a research?
- What is the function of instinct in the creative process?