PhD Thesis (images have been removed from E-version for copyright- request print to see images)

Towards a paracontextual practice* : (*with footnotes to Parallel of life and art)

This thesis offers and evaluates collaborative writing practices for teams of Design students at M-Level in Higher Education (HE). The research begins by asking why writing is included in current art and design HE, and identifies an assumption about the role of writing across the sector derived from a misreading of the 1960 and 1970 Coldstream Reports. As a result, drawing on recommendations that were made in the Reports for non-studio studies to be complementary to art and design practice in HE, I focus on how teams of design students can complement their design skills with collaborative writing. Some studies for addressing how design students learn from writing in HE already exist, but none have established a practice-centred teaching method for collaborative writing for design teams at M-level. My research captures the effects of my Approaches, Practices and Tools (APTs) across three case study workshops. I compare these with the most common writing model in HE designed for text-based study in the humanities.

My APTs use participants' designerly strengths to redesign how they can use writing to complement their practice. This provides learners with a means of identifying and creating their own situated writing structures and practices. I document how my practice-centred APTs position collaborative writing practices as a designerly mode of communication between design practitioners working in teams. I show it to be more complementary to practice and so more effective in comparison to models imported from the humanities. My explorations are carried out through two thesis sections. Section One is an in-depth literature-based rationale that critically informs my investigations. Section Two presents my methodologies and reports three case studies, in which I explore the emergent data collected through a range of qualitative methods, mapping and evaluative techniques. The findings are of importance to those teaching M-Level design courses.

Doing language together : collaborative writing practice for design teams in higher education

In disciplines with long histories in higher education, academic literacies, including writing practices, are less contested than in newer academic fields such as art and design The relatively recent incorporation of such fields and schools into the university sector has required these fields to create academic writing practices consistent with existing academic models or to justify their distinctive disciplinary practices Recently, for example, much has been written about the distinctiveness of practice-based, reflective and creative written genres, such as the exegesis and the studio or practice based thesis, as the distinctive voice of art and design However, such models have yet to gain broad acceptance in the higher education sector, where scientific (eg empirical research report) and humanities (eg essayist tradition) practices are far more familiar and of overarching significance Similarly to the sciences and humanities, the field of art and design in fact names a broad grouping of communities of practice, eg graphic design, fine arts, fashion design, with a range of expectations regarding practice and writing Whatever disciplinary consensus is reached regarding legitimate writing practices in art and design, it is important not to obscure these differences and make the same mistake that has hampered clarity in writing instruction for mainstream academic fields, a problem that is at the core of the academic literacies program for change and enlightenment The Writing Purposefully in Art and Design Network (Writing-PAD) aims to support and disseminate the range of genres associated with writing in art and design In the second part of this article, an account of the purposes, practices and scope of the Writing-PAD network demonstrates the characteristics of and consensus on forms of academic writing in art and design Together with our introductory review we hope to promote discussion about the necessary balance of consensus and dissensus that art and design fields require to remain vibrant

Writing purposefully in art and design: Responding to converging and diverging new academic literacies

This article draws lessons from a walkshop organised by the authors to Lithgow, NSW, where participants walked through a park dedicated to former coal-based infrastructures to arrive at the Lithgow mining museum. The aim of the walkshop was to better understand the tensions around groundwater and extraction in Australia. This article focuses on two key elements of the walkshop: (1) First, they interrogate an attempt to engage bodily with an elemental phenomenon—groundwater—that is for the most part inaccessible to human experience. The authors thus draw on the practice of posthuman phenomenology (Neimanis) to explain how bodily attunement to our own wateriness, alongside the “proxy stories” of arts and sciences expertise, can aid in bringing groundwater into lived experience. (2) Second, they ask how walkshopping—as a coming together—can nonetheless hold onto the ambivalences, tensions, and glitches that are part of sharing space in the face of fraught issues such as mining. Here, the authors turn to Lauren Berlant’s recent writing on the commons. They suggest that their walkshop was what Berlant would call ‘training’ in living with the awkward and complicit relations of being in common.
 
Funding acknowledgement
This research was supported by the FASS (University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) and Artsource Global City AIR - State Government of WA funding.

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Postcards from the Underground

Based on the educative proposal of Dennis Atkinson, this article discusses the written practices of two teachers who lecture for a Ph.D. in art education. The goal is to analyse the process of conceptual appropriation and curricular development over four consecutive years of this experience,\n in relation to both the pair of teachers and the students. Using a hybrid methodology, which combines autoethnography, self-study and the narratives of the teachers and the students, writing emerges as the main focus of the research, as it is an essential work instrument of the classroom,\n of the teachers’ personal reflection, and at the same time a spring that provides sources and means for its own analysis. It is through writing that one explores the appropriation of concepts as diverse as pedagogy of the event, real learning, intra-relation and intra-action, which leads\n to the process in which the teachers end up becoming the teachers yet to come.

Arts education and writing as research and pedagogic practice: Critical perspectives in higher education or how we became the teachers yet to come

In addition to contributing this editorial article, Susan Orr and Claire Hind guest edited this issue.

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Space and Place: Writing encounters self

This is your invitation to some of the many different ways to wander. 54 Ingtriguing encounters produced by artists involved in the Walking Artist Network and beyond. Edited by Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann.

Ways to Wander

Writing encounters within performance and pedagogical practice

Hotel Two Rooms was invited as a performance at the International conference: Cultures of Translation, Adaptation of Film and Performance. The research produced a complex play routes model illustrated in the published article: Hotel Two Rooms; The Practice of Adaptation, Projection and Play in Performance (2010). 

The project proposed the initial research question ‘How can notions of dark and deep play be used to construct performance material?’ And the subsidiary question ‘How does shifting the contract for participants in an intimate performance inform the principal research question?’ These questions were interrogated through a series of rules based upon Roger Caillois’ (2001) game categories and the results were unpacked using phenomenological approaches to data collection and interpretation based upon Lanigan’s (1988) model of capta, reduction and interpretation, refined by Ladly (2007). Notions of projection (from psychological, artistic, playful positions) and adaptation (mainly exploring transposition as a subjunctive experience) were established to compose material and collect data using Denscombe’s (1998) ‘face to face’ survey about the attitudes and experiences of each player in the hotel room. 

The research revealed varying attitudes of play from participants’ drawing upon their behavioural responses to intimate performance. Some of the results included: participants willingly confessing their hidden desires; participants proposing submissive roles for themselves and performing to an imagined priest or father figure; participants enthusiastically offering to play dead and subsequently revealing their experience of catharsis. 

The practice-based enquiry is drawn into conceptual discussion in the journal article which braids adaptation studies with play and psychoanalysis to name a strategy for making entitled ‘conceptual adaptation’. This term opens up the incongruous combination of forms when playing through a host of Julie Sanders’ adaptation terms, particularly version, echo, travesty and pastiche. Such terms formed the basis on which to construct the writing of performance proposals (contracts) for players but also as a way to analyse the types of play offered during the performance.

Hotel Two Rooms; the practice of adaptation, projection and play in performance

ABSTRACT This collaboration of images and words began as an online exchange during the UK’s third lockdown period in early 2021, responding directly to the ‘New Poetics of Space’ conference . At home Hind and Qualmann pondered on a heap of words that related to the places they intended to walk as soon as the stay-at-home restrictions lifted. The words: erosion, desire, planning, plotting, fear, cold, intention, discomfort, conjuring, and sensation were prompts to think creatively and imaginatively about the sites planned for performance, as a provocation on bodies, language, and the place of women in the natural and urban environment.

Claire Hind

Papers

Space and Place: Writing encounters self

Ways to Wander

Writing encounters within performance and pedagogical practice

Hotel Two Rooms; the practice of adaptation, projection and play in performance

She Walked to Sculpt, Interlope, Wrap, Lick & Squeeze Into Space