Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing through the Visual and Performing arts

While doctoral writing in the broader academy is a site of anxiety and contestation (Paré, 2019), doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts inhabits an even more contested space. For social and institutional reasons, the visual and performing arts are relative newcomers to the practice of doctoral writing (Baker et al., 2009; Elkins, 2014), and with theses that incorporate a creative/performed component, whole new ways of doctoral writing have opened up, including such features as new academic voices, highly innovative forms of typography, layout and materiality, and varied relations between the written and creative components. Understanding such diverse texts requires a multi-valent approach to recognise the ways in which doctoral writing has been re-imagined in this context, and the ways in which the academy can re-imagine a legitimate space for such academic work. In this chapter, we use a broadly social-semiotic framework to demonstrate the value of Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2014) and genre and discourse analysis (Martin & Rose, 2007; Paltridge, 2021) in understanding such diverse texts and their positioning within the academy. We report on an Australian study which examined 36 doctoral submissions across a range of visual and performing arts disciplines, demonstrating the underlying consistencies of these theses despite evident surface disparities. We argue that understanding doctoral writing as a practice of meaning-making potential helps lessen individual and institutional anxiety around such texts and provides productive ways forward for doctoral writing pedagogy for these disciplines, as well as for the academy more broadly.