Counter-Capture Strategies in Practice-Based PhDs

1. Reframe Research Outputs

• Strategy: Define the artwork itself (in its lived relationality) as the primary site of knowledge, with writing as accompaniment rather than translation.
• How: Use the exegesis or written component to situate rather than subordinate practice. Let it document process, relational encounters, or shifts in sensibility rather than just “findings.”

2. Maintain Process Visibility

• Strategy: Resist final-product fetishism by foregrounding process as knowledge.
• How: Archive fragments, failures, and provisional forms; allow what is usually invisible (care, labour, relational adjustments) to be legible within the research. This protects self-emptying from being rewritten as “error” or “gap.”

3. Ethical–Aesthetic Criteria

• Strategy: Explicitly articulate beneficial practice criteria alongside academic criteria.
• How: Frame evaluation not only in terms of “rigour” and “contribution” but also in terms of care, relational sensitivity, and attentiveness to context. Some supervisors already use dual rubrics (academic + practice-sensitive).

4. Situated Knowledge Practices

• Strategy: Anchor research in the particularity of contexts rather than universal claims.
• How: Borrow from feminist and decolonial epistemologies (e.g., Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges”). This resists capture by refusing the demand for totalising or abstract generalisation.

5. Collaborative/Collective Modes

• Strategy: Embed co-production, dialogue, or relational encounters into the work.
• How: PhD projects that are with communities, peers, or publics distribute authorship and authority. This destabilises capture by keeping the project ecological rather than individualised and extractive.

6. Generative Writing Forms

• Strategy: Use non-traditional writing that mirrors the ethos of the practice.
• How: Fragmentary writing, dialogical transcripts, poetic forms, performative scripts — forms that resist over-securing meaning and allow openness, ambiguity, and beauty to remain part of the research record.

7. Supervisory Alignment

• Strategy: Choose (or cultivate) supervisors who understand the risks of capture and can advocate for expanded forms of rigour.
• How: Build supervisory teams with balance: one academic fluent in institutional requirements, one practice-oriented mentor who protects the ethical–aesthetic integrity.

8. Refusal as Method

• Strategy: Consciously decline certain framing devices or institutional requests that would betray the work’s integrity.
• How: Practice strategic opacity (Glissant)*, or “minimal compliance” — give the system enough to satisfy procedural requirements while holding open space for relationality and self-emptying.

* strategic opacity (Glissant) = the right to remain partially unassimilable — a protective tactic for keeping the ethical–aesthetic alive within structures that demand total legibility. [Édouard Glissant: ‘Poetics of Relation’, 1990] argues against the Western demand for transparency — the idea that identities, practices, or works must be fully knowable, explainable, and assimilable into dominant frameworks. Glissant proposes instead a “right to opacity”: the freedom for people, cultures, and practices to remain partially unknowable, irreducible, or resistant to capture. Opacity is not vagueness or obscurity. It’s an ethical stance: recognising that difference does not have to be flattened into sameness or legibility to be valid. Glissant reframes wandering (errance) as a sacred mission, in which the ‘sacred’ isn’t theological but relational: each encounter, each opacity, each difference is part of a larger poetics of Relation, and the mission is not to arrive at universality but to weave connections without erasing difference.

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Guiding the Ethical–Aesthetic in Practice-Based PhDs

1. Keep Ethics and Aesthetics Together

• Treat form and responsibility as inseparable.
• Ask: How does this way of making also shape how I live, act, and relate?

2. Position Writing as Companion

• Let the written component accompany the practice rather than explain or justify it.
• Use writing to share process, relation, and discovery — not just conclusions.

3. Honour Process as Knowledge

• Recognise fragments, trials, and provisional works as knowledge events.
• Avoid presenting only polished products; keep care and risk visible.

4. Value Situatedness

• Root research in its particular contexts and relations.
• Resist pressure to make universal claims that flatten nuance or fragility.

5. Cultivate Relational Sensitivity

• Make space for dialogue, collaboration, and co-production.
• See research as with and through others, not only about something.

6. Balance Supervision

• Supervisory teams should combine academic fluency with practice sensitivity.
• Protect the project’s integrity while meeting institutional requirements.

7. Use Strategic Opacity

• Meet necessary formal demands without over-explaining or closing down the work.
• Leave room for ambiguity, openness, and sensibility to remain active.

In practice:
A strong practice-based PhD doesn’t separate making from reflecting, or aesthetics from ethics. It nurtures skill, care, and openness as one movement — allowing knowledge to emerge in ways that are rigorous because they are situated, relational, and alive.