Abstract
The doctoral study of Art & Design has significantly evolved over the past 20 years; while in the United Kingdom in particular, the increase in practice-led research and practitioners undertaking PhDs has contributed to the expansion of Art & Design doctoral study. Despite the growth of Professional Doctorates, only a small number of Universities in the United Kingdom offer one in Art & Design. Based on our research into doctoral study at Birmingham City University we argue that through the entwining of professional practice and practice-led research, the ethos underpinning the Professional Doctorate is encapsulated in the very nature of the Art & Design PhD. Our students have revealed aspirations and motivations in which academic, practitioner, industry and other creative roles are complexly entwined, blurring the traditional binary of academic and nonacademic professional roles both inside and outside the academe, nuanced aspirations which we locate as “para-academic.” Moving on from the PhD and Professional Doctorate viewed dualistically as either aligned with the philosophical and theoretical or the professional, doctoral study in Art & Design occupies a more fluid space in which the para-academic is a positive position in relation to professional identity. We contend that doctoral study in Art & Design and the Professional Doctorate in other disciplines can play the role of critical friends to one another, whereby both parties can be enhanced by not just seeing but recognizing reflections of the self within the other.
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© 2016 Jacqueline Taylor and Sian Vaughan
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Taylor, J., Vaughan, S. (2016). A Different Practice? Professional Identity and Doctoral Education in Art & Design. In: Storey, V.A. (eds) International Perspectives on Designing Professional Practice Doctorates. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137527066_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137527066_8
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