Expert-performance-practitioner-centred modes of knowledge and models of intelligibility: disciplinary specificity and the digital submission

The ongoing focus, in the university, on inter-disciplinarity has tended, over recent decades, to encourage many researchers to overlook the disciplinary specificity of expert or professional performance-making practices in the performing arts, and to erase issues of disciplinary specificity from the discourses many of us produce and reproduce in the contexts of research. Alongside this development in discourse production we tend to find widespread ‘difficulties’ when it comes to the inclusion – in, for example, higher degree research ‘documents’ - of other modes of presentation of expert practice. In this chapter I ponder some of the implications of this neglect or erasure, for those of us who seek to document performance-making in the higher degree context, and how some of us might begin to argue for and effect change in a key area of contemporary higher degree practice: the digital thesis produced, submitted and assessed in the postgraduate/higher degree context and set-ups. An enquiry through expert practices, into the practices bound-up in digitised presentations of research is thus, by very definition, an epistemic enquiry, praxiological in nature.

Pre refereed version as permitted by publisher, but embargoed until after publication. The final, refereed version of this work is available from http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book235745/

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