Intensive Residency PhD Training Course
22-26 September 2025, Højhuset, Herning
This course is designed to support practice-based PhD students in all areas and disciplines of Art Studies, deepening and strengthening their research methods and practices, and their understandings of the field's emergent and hybrid spheres of activity.
The wider field of Art Studies encompasses many practice-based researchers whose methods vary wildly and yet deeply overlap. Doctoral students and their peers in this field effect their research in universities, libraries, archives, museums, art studios and other practice-based contexts, deploying mixed and emergent methods often from a singular position and at times isolated from one another. This course aims to bring them together in purposive and valuable ways.
Increasingly, highly productive crossovers in these communities of practice are emerging and taking root. Artists are curating exhibitions and investigating the archives of their peers and elders; museum professionals are managing co-created community projects; art historians are working in collections-based contexts far from the university. What skills can these researchers offer to, and acquire from, each other? And how can they be supported to understand the interconnected value of their divergent and emergent knowledge producing practices?
The PASS Intensive Residency PhD Training Programme offers practical research methods training in critical skills for this community, delivered with hands-on pedagogical approaches including professional and peer-to-peer workshops. The programme distills PASS's previous pilot workshops, seminars, co-training, and practice-based activities into a five-day course with space for practice presentations and feedback. The Training Programme is rooted in PASS's Research Platform and designed to support and articulate deep understandings of significant areas of study across our communities, including their unique and hybrid research and practice methods, and to create lasting cohorts of highly skilled interdisciplinary peers in the field of Art Studies. The course will assist practice-based doctoral researchers to recognise their own emergent methods, support them in understanding adjacent fields crucial to their own investigations, and link them with significant trends in wider art research.
The aims of the course are to effect:
- Skills acquisition in practice-based research methodologies and applied art studies knowledge production, developed in collaborations between academics, museum and archive professionals, artists, and other significant researchers.
- Skills acquisition in self-organisation, in identification of emergent methods; in recognising and supporting epistemic equity; and in interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations
- Development of inclusive and exploratory critical thinking skills across widely divergent modes of practice and presentation skills for the expanded field of art studies
- Wider theoretical contextualisation of these methods in terms of bridge-building between academics, museum and archive researchers, artist researchers and others with a view to strengthening art's role and functions as a vital resource for a democratic society
The course target group is practice-based researchers in the field of art studies.
This course will create a significant network and cohort of researchers and PhD students at the increasingly important intersection of different practices in art studies, supporting them to co-create its future methods, meanings and modes. Ten participants will be selected to share their current research formally for feedback, and the residency format will allow for extensive informal exchanges for all.
The course will take place as a week-long intensive residency at Højhuset, Herning. Originally built in 1961 as a 'folkehøjskole', Højhuset is an integral part of Birk - a unique industrial utopic landscape in the heart of Jutland's textile culture. We will consider this context and its meanings as part of our residency, visiting Birk's museums and delving into the creative, commercial, and labour histories of the area.
Photo: Herning Højskole c1963: Herning Lokalhistorisk Arkiv / arkiv.dk
Course participants will have their accommodation, hospitality and travel paid for by the PASS, and will be expected to participate fully in the intellectual and practice-based work of the course programme. Ten participants will be selected to make presentations about their current work (in any relevant field) with a view to sharing methods, observations, and productive thinking. Social time and break-out sessions will enhance cohort creation. Required readings will be given, and ECTS points (number to be confirmed) will be accorded to those researchers working at PhD level.
Highlights from the Teaching Programme include:
- Practice-based Art Studies: Shared Landscapes and Epistemic Equity
- Art & Language: Practice-based writing inside and outside of the box
- Working Conditions: Creative Constraints, Advantages and Affordances
- Making Public: Exhibitions and/as/ Publications
- Activating Archives / Remaking Memory
- Museum as Method and Collections-based Research
Lecturers include:
- Mikkel Bogh, Professor and Center Leader, Center for Practice-based Art Studies
- Martha Fleming, Associate Professor, Center for Practice-based Art Studies
- Stine Hebert, Associate Professor, Center for Practice-based Art Studies and Co-Director, HEIRLOOM Center for Art and Archives
- Anne Julie Arnfred, Postdoc, Center for Practice-based Art Studies
The language of the course will be English.
Sample readings include:
Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. 'The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses'. Social Text, 79 (Volume 22, Number 2), Summer 2004, pp. 101-115.
Fraser, Andrea. 'From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique.' ARTFORUM September 2005.
Sholette, Gregory. 'Heart of Darkness: A Journey into the Dark Matter of the Art World' in Visual Worlds, Hall et al eds. (NY and London: Routledge, 2005) pp 116-138.
Mader, Rachel. 'How to move in/an institution'. On Curating, Issue 21, (New) Institution(alism), 2014.
Tullis, Jillian A. 'Self and Others: Ethics in Autoethnographic Research' in Handbook of Autoethnography, 2nd Edition. London: Routledge, 2021.
Hartman, Saidiya. 'Intimate History; Radical Narrative'. African American Intellectual History Society Journal Black Perspectives, 22 May 2020.
Fleming, Martha. 'Manifesto for Collections Based Research and Teaching.' . Periskop. Forum for kunsthistorisk debat, Nr. 23, Museet som akademisk læringsrum [Museums as academic learning spaces], 2020.
Sheikh, Simon. 'Towards the Exhibition as Research' in Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson, eds. Curating Research. London: Open Editions, 2013.
Paalman, F., Fossati, G., & Masson, E. 'Introduction' in Activating the Archive. The moving image, 21(1-2), 1-25. (2021)
Students making practice presentations will be invited to submit pensum materials for the assembled cohort to read as part of the co-training aspect of the residency.
- Application deadline: 18 July 2025
- Notification: 18 August 2025
- PASS courses are open to research colleagues across the Art Studies field, whether they are enrolled PhD students or hold other positions in the field
- Please write in English, Danish or another Scandinavian language with a motivation statement outlining your interests in the course and your reason for applying. This should cover your practice background and training, your relevant experience, and what you are seeking to gain from the course itself and from being part of this cohort. The statement should not be more than 500 words, sent via email (not as attached file) to pass@hum.ku.dk
- If you are a PhD student, the statement should state if you would like to receive ECTS credits from the course in relation to a PhD enrollment (we will shortly be able to advertise the precise number of ECTS points for various parts of the course on both the PASS website and on PhD Courses in Denmark)
- If you would like to be considered for selection to make one of ten practice presentations during the course, with the intention of receiving feedback from your peers, please submit a further page (an attached pdf with no more than 500 words and one image) outlining the contents of the proposed presentation and your addition to the reading list