Theoretical Constructs in Artistic Research Fall 2025

This doctoral level course addresses the different ways in which tasks and questions of theory and theorisation arise within artistic research processes while also looking at some key theoretical frameworks that are currently used across several artistic research programmes and inquiries. The course is targeted at a broad range of practitioner-researchers including those working in music (composition and performance), theatre, fine art, design, photography, film, and literary composition. Topics addressed in the introductory phase of the course include: the different senses of the term ‘theory’; the contrasts, dichotomies and alternate constructions of theory-practice; the growth of explicit theoretical production in relation to contemporary artistic and performing practices and research; the ”theory” expansion of the 1960s and 1970s that has created the idea of Theory (in contrast say to philosophy); competing accounts of aesthesis/aesthetics/the aesthetic/aesthesis; and the “practice turn” across a range of research traditions. In the subsequent stages of the course, we look at the application and usage of specific theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks in different instances of artistic research projects. Among the frameworks introduced through instances of concrete use in specific research projects are: phenomenology, hermeneutics, historical materialism, deconstruction, actor-network theory, postcolonialism and decoloniality, posthumanism, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, process ontologies, Afro-pessimism(s) and Afro-futurism(s), and indigenous cosmologies. Three areas of particular focus across the arc of the course will be: (i) the figure of the archive; (ii) the practices of editorial and publishing; and (iii) the process of mapping and describing the theory-practice of others. For this last aspect, the ongoing research on Mapping the Political Imaginary will be used as a case study. The course does not provide a comprehensive treatment of any one of these perspectives or traditions. Rather the course indicates the salient features of these approaches with respect to their specific operational role within actual research practices. The course aim is to help early-stage researchers build a clearer sense of what is at stake in the differences between these theoretical frameworks and also to attend to the tensions between the process of inquiry and the affirmation of particular theoretical preferences.  

Dates planned for Autumn 2025 are:

Application Procedure

Click the link for more information and to apply.