Challenging Institutionalization explores the heterogeneous processes of PhD and postdoc supervision in the arts to formulate shared horizons.

The publication is structured around a series of lectures and conversations that took place at the 2023 Supervising Artistic and Practice-Based Research summer school at BAK (basis voor actuele kunst) in Utrecht. The school brought together students and PhD and postdoc supervisors to reflect on and challenge the existing formal educational pathways for artistic and practice-based research. Keynote propositions were provided by Barbara Bolt (Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne), Geoff Cox (London South Bank University), Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Amsterdam), Andrea Phillips (BxNU Institute), and Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design). Participants engaged in topics around pedagogical formats and generative kinship; queering methodologies, knowledge, and institutional preconditions; archipelagic thinking and decolonial frameworks; criticality and community within institutional preconditions; modes of critical self-reflection and positionality; the interface(s) of “writing” and “practice,” and the urgent interfaces of artistic research and art activism in a period of environmental collapse.

This publication consolidates the school’s collective mappings into a constructive toolkit for PhD researchers, supervisors, and evaluators, which will provide concrete pathways for pedagogical approaches to the societal and planetary urgencies of our era.