Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal

I Supervise and I am Supervised

Paul Jackson — 2023-04-25

This article explores the roles of power in creative exchange. In it I reflect on my dual role of being both supervisor and supervisee. Written during the early-2021 COVID lockdown, I relate Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s panopticon to both academic supervision and to my commercial illustration practice. When working for art-directors and creative teams, a distant powerbroker (and their approval) offered certainty and security; in a PhD, that might not necessarily be the case. At that stage in my PhD, I felt uncertain of the hierarchies at work: was I working for my supervisors, or with them?

Exploring the doctoral journey and good supervisorial practice

Dr Zoetanya Sujon — 2023-04-25

Drawing from my own doctoral journey, this paper examines some key challenges facing doctoral students and what they mean for good supervisorial practice. These include high levels of pressure and uncertainty, resulting in often strong unmet emotional needs made visible through feelings of imposter syndrome. These challenges can be manifested in writing, in part because writing is complex, involving a writing-into-being of the professional self and authorial voice. These kinds of challenges appear to be commonplace in the doctoral journey, indicating that good supervisorial practice must account for students’ different contexts and relationships to their current and emerging professional identities.

Supervising PhDs in the arts in an age of ‘global challenges’: a question of permissions

Professor Malcolm Quinn — 2023-04-25

UAL Research Season 2021 was dedicated to the theme of ‘Earth and Equity: integrating environmental and racial justice’. This short essay raises the issue of how we should supervise PhDs in the arts in the era of ‘global challenges’, suggesting that the question of ‘integration’ and the intersection of environmental and racial justice that ‘Earth and Equity’ offers points to the question of a ‘permission to research’, in which global challenges can be addressed by a focus on who has permission to engage in practice-based research in the arts and under what conditions.

Unlearning, learning, learner: a provocation for super vision

Professor Andrea Luka Zimmerman — 2023-04-25

Considered and effective supervision of practice-based PhDs requires an expansion of and challenge to established modes of hierarchical academic and peer relationships. The production of knowledge, especially in this form-breaking field, cannot be separated from the means by which that output is assessed and circulated. This paper explores these tensions through case-studies based directly on the writer’s experience. It proposes embodied learning - a revisioning of earlier parameters of scholarship – and an informed overhaul of the perspectives, positions and priorities of institutional expectation. It proposes instead a spectrum-wide inclusivity whose radical generosity and creative openness benefits all involved.

Editorial

Dr Frederico Matos — 2023-04-25

This is the editorial for the tenth issue of Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, a special issue on PhD Supervision.

Becoming-Supervisor Becoming-Supervised

Dr Mark Ingham — 2023-04-25

PhD supervisors and PhD students from UAL were invited to take part in an experimental research study entitled Becoming-Supervisor Becoming-Supervised. This study was co-authored by two PhD supervisors at UAL, and an alumni UAL PhD student. The purpose of this research study was to gather their thoughts about interactions with PhD supervision. A questionnaire was sent out and below is the anonymous, randomised, unedited and verbatim assemblage of the answers given by 15 respondents. We hope it gives a snapshot of some of the reasons for being involved in doctoral research and supervision in an art and design context.

“See you on the other side”: researcher identity, threshold concepts and making a ritual of confirmation

Dr John O'Reilly — 2023-04-25

With the requirement of making a contribution to new knowledge in the field, in doing a PhD the researcher creates a curriculum. The researcher is also changing, in relation to what matters to them and the world they are making. But when the ritual of the ‘PhD confirmation’ is instrumentalized, the format of confirmation doesn’t relate to the scholarship of doing a PhD as ‘doctorateness’, threshold concept, or liminal process. If the PhD and its supervisory processes are to remain relevant, we need to re-situate the centrality of the pedagogical and ontological practices at stake in original knowledge production.