[iDC] Praxis-based Ph.D.s

[David Hakken]

On Jan 11, 2007, at 2:56 AM, Margaret Morse wrote:

> Dear IDCs,
> I introduced myself briefly last week.  I teach at the University  
> of California at Santa Cruz in the department of Film and Digital  
> Media. I am also the Chair of the Digital Arts/New Media MFA  
> Program, but that isn't on the table here.  Trebor suggested that  
> thinking about media education might proceed from specific examples  
> to larger questions.  I want to describe the  Ph.D that has been  
> proposed by Film and Digital Media--it hasn't been sent to the  
> highest levels of the university for for acceptance yet-- as one of  
> possibilities ways of thinking about such a Ph.D.
>
> There are many reasons to create a practice-based Ph.D. for  
> example, the practical need for (media) artists in academia to have  
> full access to doctoral status in order to forge a successful  
> career in the academic hierarchy,  the positive belief in (media)  
> art as a mode for creating knowledge that should have access to a  
> broader or deeper foundation of studies,

Dear Margaret
Thanks for your interesting post.  I was hoping you could also  
address the nature of the knowledge claim you are making for (media)  
art; for example, a relatively weak claim would be that, in the  
process of trying to represent what we know in media, we become aware  
of what we don't know, so we go back and find it out, whereas a  
stronger claim would be that making (media) art is itself its own way  
of knowing.  I ask as an information ethnographer who has recently  
studied knowledge management and Knowledge Society claims, as well as  
someone who once put a great deal of effort into trying to write an  
ethnography of IT and social change with my partner, PhD in English  
literature.  The effort failed over, among other things, whether  
writing was an act of representing what we had learned elsewhere  
(e.g., via fieldwork) or was itself an act of knowledge creation.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts

David

> the acceptance of a wider range of learning styles and modes of  
> expression in a multi-media/digital culture, the fading  
> significance of the specificity of media within digital and multi- 
> media production that integrates writing and imagery and so on.  
> What I am going to describe in the next couple of posts is a  
> strictly academic rather than professional Ph.D. that might be  
> based on distance learning and aside from summer doesn't consist of  
> courses taken in full-time residency.  I hope others will  
> articulate a range of practice-based  Ph.D..models.
>
> Our program is not actually an exclusively practice-based Ph.D.,  
> rather it is a combination of theory and practice.  The process of  
> designing this Ph.D. took several years and included two retreats  
> for the whole faculty.  It grew out of a practical need in the  
> department to overcome a split between criticism and production in  
> our faculty and our courses.  We functioned as two parallel worlds  
> also split with an exception or two, by gender.  The critical  
> studies faculty financially supported the department with large  
> courses, but had less power, the production faculty had smaller  
> courses and was dominant. Such class divisions can go either way in  
> a media department--often production faculty are the underclass.   
> We began to work against this hierarchy by hiring what we called  
> "hybrids"--scholars who were artists/artists who were scholars and  
> who teach critical studies and production.  These colleagues were  
> thought of and indeed are models of the kind of student we want our  
> Ph.D. program to produce. Problems have arisen in the workload of  
> "hybrids" and in evaluating their creative and scholarly production  
> fairly that we are working to resolve.  The whole idea of "hybrids"  
> does, of course, still depend on the difference between critical  
> studies and production that is questionable.  Furthermore, thought  
> is going into revising our undergraduate curriculum in order to  
> integrate from what we have learned through designing the "hybrid"  
> Ph.D.  In reflecting on this history, I decided the impetus for  
> our  Ph.D. was not abstract reasoning, but rather a matter of  
> establishing social justice within our own domain as well as  
> realism about the waning sense that departmentalizing ourselves  
> based on medium made in a digital culture.  In other words, digital  
> media studies played a role in this process.
>
> I am going to close with that for now.  In my next post, I'll say  
> something about the Ph.D.'s structure and provide a url. Since this  
> strand is part of a discourse on media education, I will also say  
> something about our undergraduates courses and how the division  
> into separate media has become questionable.  I am not sure any of  
> you will find this interesting--I await your thoughts. I haven't  
> decided exactly where this is going--but seeing the way threads  
> morph on IDC, that would not be my decision.
>
> Best wishes,
> Margaret Morse
>
>
>
>
>
>
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David Hakken
Information Ethnographer
Professor of Social Informatics
Director of International Activities
School of Informatics
Room 1033 Eigenmann Hall
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47406
dhakken at indiana.edu
812-856-1869 office; 812-391-2966
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/research/profiles/dhakken.asp
"Creating intellectual property is the essence of what we do at  
Microsoft..."--Microsoft press release, August, 2005