Practice at the peripheries: exploring the practice-led PhD in arts and media at UWS

Kathryn A. Burnett and Graham Jeffery will lead a discussion, including screening and sharing some examples and extracts of student work, exploring the approach to practice-led research that has been developed in the School of Creative and Cultural Industries at UWS. This will explore some issues in arts and media-led collaborative practice, with examples of particular doctoral projects that address issues of landscape, memory, identity and place using a variety of art-based approaches including photography, sound art, documentary practice and collage. With the School we have developed a transdisciplinary research environment which attempts to allow for artist-led investigation, but, crucially, within a critically aware and theoretically informed framework. Much student work has focussed particularly on the communities and environments that surround the university, both physical and imagined, and we will share some particular ways in which PhD projects have addressed these contexts.