PhD Spring School 2023

Lecture title: ‘So why do you want a PhD?’

... “earning a PhD demonstrates the expertise and ability to teach the content of a specific subject field, teach the research methods of that field, conduct independent research, and supervise research students and train researchers” (Friedman 2014)

Delighted to be joining discussions with HKPU’s Spring School in May and eagerly anticipating discussions with the doctoral community, Prof. Anne Boddington would like to explore the evolving and contemporary purpose of doing a PhD, and the motivations and reasons for pursuing doctoral studies, in the visual and performing arts, architecture, or design.

Do PhD studies do, as Friedman (above) suggests? Do they serve to make us more inquisitive, better teachers, researchers, artists, performers, architects, or designers or does such study stultify the joy and wonder of the very subjects under investigation?

Throughout higher education, while we may learn and know more stuff, hone our values, and develop a sense of the difference we wish to make, we seem to persist with teaching what we already know, and fail to articulate what we don’t know and hence what we may need to research and understand better together. To join up our thinking to that of others. How does the experience of the PhD assist us, or is it part of a more cynical global cycle of ‘qualification’ and ‘certification’ – doctoral title in search of a purpose? The percentage of faculty with PhD’s is frequently deployed as an indicator of the ‘quality and vibrancy of the research environment’, but is the contemporary PhD as it is currently practised, fit for purpose, and does it provide the skills, knowledge, and competencies we need to collaborate, contribute to the vibrancy of the academy or to the world beyond it?

In the true sense of a ‘school’ this is a provocation for an extended conversation.

Lecture title: Eating Justice, or the Business of Design in Late Capitalism

Through a series of transdisciplinary projects between food curation, politics of sound, ethical philosophy and socio-spatial justice, this lecture is a provocation on the status, role and responsibilities of design and designers in so called ‘late capitalism.’ Taking seriously the ‘busi-ness’ of design, the lecture riffs the conceptual connection that Gilles Deleuze makes between ‘to think’ and ‘to eat,’ as a matter of more-than-human jurisprudence; partaking in a bit of tim sum: touching the heart of becoming-political, through eating, ingestion and digestion.