What attracts arts industry professionals to undertake practice-based doctorates? Three Australian vignettes

ABSTRACT

Artistic practice has a well-established presence in graduate research training. Extant writing on creative arts doctorates considers various issues, ranging from policy and process requirements to programme design, and the nature of the text itself. In the disciplinary domain of music, narrative accounts are often employed toexplore doctoral candidates’ decisions to pursue practice-based doctorates. This article builds on this approach by comparing and contrasting the experiences of three creative and performing arts doctoral candidates from Australia. It describes their attraction to the doctorate and their motives for undertaking doctoral study, with the aim of enhancing our understanding of arts industry professionals as graduate research candidates.

KEYWORDS:

• Artistic practice
• creative doctorate
• artistic research
• practice-based doctorate

Acknowledgments

Groundwork for this article was presented and included in the proceedings of the 2018 Quality in Postgraduate Research Conference, Adelaide, Australia. The data presented in this article was collected subject to approval by the La Trobe University Human Ethics Committee (ref. HEC18008).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dan Bendrups

Dan Bendrups is a senior lecturer in research education and development at La Trobe University. His research considers the doctoral research experience, particularly in the contexts of transnational education and creative and performing arts.