Advancing Supervision for Artistic Research Doctorates

Advancing Supervision for Artistic Research Doctorates produces intellectual outputs ready to use for those involved in doctoral supervision across all art disciplines. Innovative formats like an interactive mindmap, exhibitions and essays, a non-normative guide book, a web based tool kit and a prototype for a training module deal with all dimensions of the triangular doctoral framework: institution – supervisor – PhD candidate.

Advancing Supervision for Artistic Research Doctorates is developed in a transnational cooperation setting coordinated following the publication of the ELIA position paper “The Florence Principles on the Doctorate in the Arts”. The consortium comprises nine partner institutions and is coordinated by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Aims and Topics

Advancing Supervision for Artistic Research Doctorates aims to improve doctoral education at art universities. It addresses doctoral supervision as the core component in doctoral education, proposing a balanced set of measures to improve supervision on a practical level (addressing institutions and students), a strategic level (addressing membership organizations), and on an advocacy level (addressing stakeholders and policy makers). The members of the project consortium, led by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, come from all artistic fields (fine arts, media arts, performative arts, architecture and design, music, art theory) ensuring a transdisciplinary perspective of supervision in artistic research. The strategic partnership includes various European institutions in order to take into account a comprehensive range of national and local frameworks, and it includes members from different types of art universities, ensuring the validity of the project findings for all institutional contexts.

The project proposes to closely investigate six areas in which tools and measures will be created to advance doctoral supervision in artistic research:

• defining supervision (supervision vs. other concepts like mentoring, coaching, etc.);
• ethical dimensions in supervision;
• new competencies for supervisors;
• professional education for supervisors (training);
• the art of giving feedback in artistic research (transdisciplinarity);
• the role of the research environment for supervision.

Outputs

The four intellectual outputs dealing with these issues take on the formats of mind maps, handbooks, online tool kits, briefing scenarios, a training concept as well as a comprehensive final publication on „Undoing Supervision | A Non-normative Guide on Key Issues in Supervising Artistic Research Doctorates“, which will document and summarise all project findings. In addition to these outputs, the project will develop training tools and modules to create an original and tailor-made training activity for the field of artistic research. This training activity will account for the fact that state-of-the-art doctoral supervision needs to be implemented in a triangular way, establishing a process that includes student, supervisor, and institutional decision makers. Therefore, the training will address these three target groups and devise a training method that will advance the skills of all three actors involved.

Events

The project will organize three multiplier events, the first one is carried out in collaboration with an big international stakeholder event organised by ELIA, the ELIA Academy. This cooperation will ascertain the widest possible broad dissemination of results and interaction of the strategic partnership consortium with students, supervisors, university leaders, stakeholders from the higher arts education sector, and policy makers. The second multiplier event addresses the target group of supervisors, beyond the partner institutions. The third and final multiplier event will present the project results to a broad audience, and encourage in particular the debate with representatives from other fields and disciplines. The embeddedness of the consortium members in Europe-wide network organizations ensures the sustainability of the project and the achievement of high-quality results.