Unlearning, learning, learner: a provocation for super vision

Considered and effective supervision of practice-based PhDs requires an expansion of, and challenge to, established modes of hierarchical academic and peer relationships. The production of knowledge, especially in this form-breaking field, cannot be separated from the means by which that output is assessed and circulated. This paper explores these tensions through case studies based directly on the writer’s experience. It proposes embodied learning –a revisioning of earlier parameters of scholarship –and an informed overhaul of the perspectives, positions and priorities of institutional expectation. It proposes instead a spectrum-wide inclusivity, one whose radical generosity and creative openness benefits all involved.

Context: My research interests are co-existence (including non-human subjectivities), filmmaking as engaged social and political practice, participatory re-enactment, military/spectacular relations, imaginative hybridity and narrative de-framing in documentary practice, forms of reverie, class and culture, place and senses of belonging.

I completed a practice-based and led PhD at CSM in 2006 on the idea of ‘secreting history’, exploring the spectacular and spectral relationship between Hollywood cinema and secret military operations, between personal history and public narrative on that history. This space in-between informs my research-based work.

Practice-led PhDs have increased since my completing it, however, the discussions concerning what constitutes practice as research are as alive now as they were then. This text is a provocation along with a thinking through approaches to knowledge production and in particular PhD supervision, which, I believe, are ongoing processes that cannot be laid to rest if we aim to partake in a worldmaking whose focus is not simply ‘the way it is’, in particular in relation to western dominant, binary and capitalist normative trajectories of knowledge production.