[iDC] Praxis-based Ph.D.s

[Margaret Morse]

Dear IDCs, sorry I've been out of the loop--campus email was out--and 
I have a raging cold or is it flu.  Outside it is rare to have 
temperatures below freezing here (Berkeley) and yet here it is.  I've 
put rags consisting of old T shirts and undies over my succulents in 
the hope of protecting them from killing frost.  What a sight.

Many thanks to Mary Anne Staniszewski and Simon Bigg's for their 
descriptions of quite different Ph.D. models and their rationales. 
I'd like to comment on the two other posts that responded to mine 
now, then on the two other models and our "hybrid" Ph.D. proposal 
tomorrow, after I see if my succulents survived.

Robert Labossiere's provocative post reminds me of being a graduate 
student when I could live on my TA salary alone. What luxury of time 
I had to think and follow up wherever my ideas led.  That bliss must 
be rare today.  Another observation that contemporary grad students 
of new media "working on the cusp of leisure/pleasure" spend hours 
and hours in pursuits that have few concrete outcomes suggests that 
there is something about the subject of new media itself that may be 
more fragmentizing and elusively virtual.  While I doubt that any 
"body-in-pieces" can be reconstituted or made whole by an academic 
program, there are ways to concentrate an area of studies.  Our 
M.F.A. in Digital Arts/New Media, for instance, is concentrated into 
foci according to three specific areas organized by strong points in 
the faculty--though these will necessarily shift.  It is also a two 
year MFA, meaning that from the moment students enter our door, they 
are actively researching and individually narrowing down their final 
thesis project proposals.  Our partly practice-based Ph.D. model is 
more fluid and topically determined by the student--but ultimately 
limited by the need to interact with a faculty and an advisor with 
specific areas of expertise.

David Hakken poses a weak and a strong claim of media art to knowledge:
"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."
For me, media art falls into the first and second category.  I am not 
an artist, so I can only guess that making an art piece is like 
writing, in that the act of formulating language itself brings out 
unanticipated insight and utterly new perceptions.  This reminds me 
of the essay by Kleist on "the gradual completion of thoughts while 
speaking."  I only know what I really think when I write about it. 
As a visitor who interacts with and art piece or who traverses an 
installation, say by the San Francisco artist Jim Campbell, I learn 
phenomenologically from my own perceptual and emotional experience of 
each piece.  I drew on Bachelard's idea of the "subjective 
experiment" (from his Psychology of Fire) in one of the critical 
essays I wrote about Campbell's installations to situate this kind of 
knowledge.

  David goes on:
" 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."

I once had the book mentioned by David Hakken on my shelf (now in 
storage due to moving twice--but I'll get back to it).   It isn't 
clear what "failure" means here if it is means not being able to 
decide whether knowledge is learned elsewhere in experiences that are 
recorded in some way or in the act of writing itself.  I think of 
"fieldwork" as absolutely necessary and already knowledge, but it is 
not the same as the act of working through the ethnographic notes for 
patterns and meanings and finding the words to express them. It is 
finding the words that is hard, but it is the point at which I  go 
beyond my prior conceptions and prejudices and learn/write something 
new.

Thanks for responses so far!  I too would like to hear from someone 
whose been in the Plymouth program or the like.

Margaret