A Final Presentation

30-min video made for PhD reviewers, shared with you

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This article includes a 30-minute video presentation made for two panelists in a formal PhD milestone for Monash University’s (Melbourne) Art Design and Architecture faculty. It is a summary of PhD candidate Myriam D. Diatta’s research at the three year mark. Expected completion 2021.

This matters because the better you understand your own work, the more complex it gets and the more things you realize there are to take care of — a sign you’re asking thoughtful, critical questions.

Scroll down to watch the video, but if you want some context, here it is:

What’s the context? (Practice-Based Research)

This is a presentation of a practice-based PhD. What does that even mean? Why does it it matter? Typically (including in art and design fields) academic research (i.e. research that’s done in a university system) looks like an up and coming academic or an established professor sitting down and writing about what artists or designers are doing — over there. Or it looks like analyzing and theorizing about how a creative field is changing—from the outside looking in. To over-simplify it, this kind of research is removed from the practitioners doing the everyday work and the folks they work with. And it’s removed from the lived-in knowledge you have as you do the work itself. The lived-in knowledge happens through the artists or designers who make things and work with people through their everyday practice. Again, to over-simplify it, practice is not always easily in conversation with the bodies of knowledge about ‘the ways the world works’—yes, the hegemonic cigar and armchair kind but also the kind of knowledges that are disruptive, critical, and ancestral, too. It takes a lot of time to engage with bodies of knowledge thoroughly. It is a luxury to have that time and access. Academic spaces are extremely physically and ideologically exclusive and elitist, to say the very least.

Practice-based academic research is a relatively new approach to structuring PhD degrees. They work to ground the written, thesis-based world of scholarly writing in actual practice. A practice-based researcher does their art practice or does their design work and uses academic research to understand their work. A practice-based researcher bases their work in both written theory and everyday practice.

This matters because in the work you do—whether it’s interviews, taking care of family, managing a team, being a neighbor, or organizing services, for instance—it’s not easy to back up that work with clear, thoughtful reasons for why you do it the way you do. It’s not easy to answer to questions like, “Why did you do that one thing in that way?,” “What does that do?,” “Why is it important?, “How does that actually work?,” and “…where does that approach come from ultimately, and is that history aligned with what your work is about in the first place?” These questions might apply to how you address a conflict with another person, how you draw conclusions about something that happened, or how you insert yourself in a situation. These aren’t easy things to answer because the work we do is social and it’s complex. This matters because the better you understand your own work, the more complex it gets and the more things you realize there are to take care of—a sign you’re asking thoughtful, critical questions. And it is a sign of what was overlooked before. This matters because it lets me, someone doing a practice-based PhD, to look at the work I do and have been doing and be able answer to those questions. It lets me articulate my practice not only do it or speak briefly about it.

For me, becoming adept in this kind of investigation of my research practice mattered so that I could turn up with self-accountability in collective activities with others. I explore these general questions for practice-based research in a very specific context (academia), for a specific time (for three years during the day on weekdays between 2018 and 2021), for a pointed purpose (unmaking the world we live in) situated in my own positionality in the world (living with Double Consciousness). The research I did is for other folks with similar positionalities in the world as I have. The research I did is for other new scholars figuring out how to be in between intimate life and academic life. The research I did is for critical arts practitioners who are invested in aligning our values to the everyday ways we show up.

About my PhD research

The ways we show up in a meeting, for a friend, or respond to an emergency may be in deep conflict with the critical theories about the social conditions we live in that we might commit to. Further, there normatively is a separation between theories that are thought about and stories that are lived. This research worked to mess with the false separation between critical theory and everyday experience. To do this, the PhD built on the provocations painter and sculptor Torkwase Dyson and ethnographer Robin M. Boylorn each make for ‘doing theory and thinking story,’ to borrow Stacy Holman Jones’ framing of the concept. Becoming adept in this kind of investigation in my research practice was for the purposes of turning up with self-accountability in collective activities with others.

This dissertation has described how reflexive model-making and a reflexive writing method offer a way of enmeshing critical theories and the things we do, say, and think in the everyday. The methods were practical processes for naming and investigating where the ways we show up may be in deep conflict with the critical theories about the social conditions we live in that we might commit to. Ultimately, the research finds that there are multiple efforts it took to enter a shared, critically reflexive space; it took multiple paths, a particular ethos, and a set of commitments to find my way into this space. While self-reflection, accountability, and analysis of one’s own positionalities are often one component within a larger approach aimed towards making things, services, and relationships differently, this research project dedicates an entire practice to staying with critical reflexivity.

For me, becoming adept in this kind of investigation of my research practice mattered so that I can turn up with self-accountability in collective activities with others.