Doctoral studies at the Department of Art

Doctoral studies at the Department of Art focus on research through contemporary art practices, visual culture phenomena and research in art education and curating.

Mikko O. Koivisto The Art of Egress kansi ja sisus — Mikko O. Koivisto's dissertation "The Art of Egress". Graphic design: Tuomas Kortteinen. Photo: Mikko Raskinen.

Doctoral studies through the Department of Art focus on research through contemporary art practices, visual culture phenomena and research in art education and curating. Research themes include artistic, arts-based and practice-based research, contemporary philosophy, philosophy of science, aesthetics, research methods, critical theory, academic writing, and studies in the specified area of the individual research project. Research within the doctoral studies in the department focus on practices through contemporary art, art education, curating, critical research and activism in art, and the intersection of art, science and technology.

Contemporary Art

The research in contemporary art is based on art practice, and/or theoretical art analysis. At the Department of art, research can be done based on artistic episteme through artistic or arts-based research, focusing on the ways in which art engages with its spatial environment, creates temporal events, encourages participation and social engagement, and develops new roles of the artist, researcher, spectator, and participants. Emergent contemporary art research includes interdisciplinary practices such as intersections of art, science, and technology, curating, and their relationships to society, environment, education and community.

Visual Culture

Visual culture is the study of images and of the various roles they play in and as culture. As a field of study, visual culture overlaps with many other fields, e.g. film studies, critical theory, art theory and philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology and media studies. At the Department of art, visual culture is researched especially in relation to contemporary art, acknowledging the limits of the visual realm and extending to other sense and areas such as material culture, new materialism, and modes such as conceptual, verbal, temporal.

Art Education

Art Education is the study of the production of knowledge, beliefs, and values that takes place within and outside of schools, through the process of production and exchange. It includes historical, artistic, arts-based, philosophical, epistemological and sociopolitical research in the areas of art, pedagogy (public, critical, digital), schooling, education, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. It focuses on researching and problematizing particular ways of ordering and giving sense to different significations, and interrogates how certain art and artistic knowledge, theory, and practice becomes institutionalized and organized.