As a doctoral candidate at one of the universities in the docARTES network, the formation of a supervising team takes place at the beginning of your doctoral trajectory. Supervision is always related directly to the degree awarding institution.
Owing to the singularity of a doctoral programme in the creative and performing arts, where artistic research calls for high achievement both in the artistic and in the scholarly aspects of the research, the expertise embedded in the supervising team is a crucial factor in the course of study. Thanks to international collaboration, doctoral candidates can rely on an international team of supervisors covering a diverse range of musical specialisms.
The supervising team (also referred to as supervisory committee or individual PhD commission) generally consists of one or two supervisors who may, depending on the university where you are registered, be joined by additional members. Minimally one of the candidate’s supervisors must have the right to act as promotor, that is: to confer the PhD degree (ius promovendi). Usually, one member of the team directs the supervision. The other members of the supervising team will usually be staff members with specific affinity to the field of interest, experts that are available from the docARTES partner institutions, or external specialists. The supervising team as a whole is concerned with overviewing the artistic development as well as the academic embedding of the PhD-project.
All members of the supervising team are familiar with your research dossier, its artistic content, the research proposals contained in it, the intended research methods, the hypotheses, and the expectations with regard to possible results and the provisional final outcome. They study, analyse and, in a more general sense, form an opinion of the material that you put forward and the processes and products of your artistic development. As part of this, they must continually be able to assess whether the expected final result of your project will be capable of withstanding the critical scrutiny brought to bear on a thesis for a doctorate at the university. They provide comments, give advice, and proceed in the course of the process to evaluation, checking and assessment. All of this takes place within the framework of your agreed plan of study.
More detailed information about supervision can be found in the Handbook.
