Becoming a practitioner-researcher-writer

This chapter takes as its topic the "practitioner-researcher", a species of doctoral candidate common within the art, architecture and design fields, for whom a doctorate accompanies what is often a thriving, professional practice. For this group, professional practice and research have the potential to be mutually informing and transforming. The research degree offers both an opportunity to extend and reflect upon professional practice from a distance, and therefore to do things that are often not possible in the office, so to speak. In my experience, these candidates are very rewarding to supervise and have much to offer as researchers, for a host of reasons, but they can also struggle with a set of issues intrinsic to their situation, or perhaps predicament is more apt a term, straddling, as they do, the academy on the one hand and a professional practice context on the other. For the purposes of this chapter, I am going to treat these issues as coalescing around the problem of authority.