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Phd february session

Saturday 28 february 2026

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Sunday 1 march 2026

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phd workshop
practice research in the arts
With danica maier and emma cocker

Practice Research in the Arts with Emma Cocker and Danica Maier (Associate Professors at Nottingham Trent University, UK) is a combined exploratory talk and workshop session designed to support participants in understanding the different approaches, distinctions, and methods used within this evolving field. The session draws on an online resource developed by Emma and Danica on the Research Catalogue (SAR), which introduces and clarifies key terms and concepts associated with Practice Research in the Arts (e.g. practice-based vs. practice-led, practice as/through/in research, artistic research, research-creation, etc.).

Emma and Danica will begin by surveying and unpacking the interwoven histories, terminologies, and theoretical frameworks that underpin these different approaches. The session will share distilled summaries of core terms, alongside further references, quotations, and bibliographies—providing a useful overview of current discourse and definitions. Following this collective exploration, participants will work in small groups to reflect on and begin mapping their own constellation of approaches and methods—identifying how their individual research practices align with, diverge from, or question the broader field. This process supports a deeper understanding of one’s own research positioning, which is crucial when undertaking doctoral-level research. The session is valuable both as an introduction for those at the beginning of their research journey, and as a grounding or reframing for those already immersed in doctoral practice research.

The Zoom session will begin with a group talk, where Emma Cocker and Danica Maier will introduce and discuss a range of different approaches/methods to Practice Research within the arts. Drawing on their online resource, they will share histories, geographical differences, definitions, distinctions, and examples that help clarify the varied terms and method that make up this evolving field. This introduction will be followed by a participatory workshop involving group sharing, small group discussions, and opportunities for individual reflection. Participants will be supported in beginning to map their own research approaches, considering how their practices align with, diverge from, or intersect with broader definitions within the field. We will conclude by returning to the full group for shared reflections, questions, and wider discussion. This is an active session designed not only to share information about artistic research methods, but also to help participants clarify and articulate their own approach within the discipline.

Dr. Danica Maier is an artist, Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK, and a Transart Advisor. Her research engages with materially embedded approaches to art-making, often exploring the slippages of intersemiotic translation between drawing, textiles, and text. Central to her practice is the notion of the unrepeating-repeat, a method for playfully disrupting repetition and fostering perceptual shifts. Maier works with site-specific installations, objects, drawing, and performance to invite slow looking and attention, fostering embodied moments of aspect seeing. Collaboration forms a significant part of her practice, where shared projects become spaces for individual experimentation within collective frameworks of artistic research. She founded and led The Summer Lodge (2009–2019), an artist residency at NTU, and is involved in several long-term artistic research collaborations, including Bummock: Artists in Archives (2015–ongoing); Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity (2018–2024); and Returns (2013–ongoing), developed from Topographies of the Obsolete; Smatterings (2023-ongoing) a collective of UK-based artist-lecturers exploring studio-based art education. In 2019, she performed as part of Convocation within the Research Pavilion in Venice, and launched her co-edited publication No Telos!. Her published artistic research appears in JAR (Journal of Artistic Research), TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, and the Journal of Research in Arts and Education, among others. Beyond her artistic practice, Maier is a qualified mentor and coach, offering independent support to artists and broader creative practitioners.

Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research includes diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language, involving an ecology of embodied, relational and performative writing, reading, conversation and listening-based practices. Cocker often works with other artistic researchers on durational projects, where the studio or site-specific context becomes a live laboratory for collaborative exploration. Cocker was a key-researcher in the PEEK-funded project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2014 – 2017. She was a contributing artistic researcher in Ecologies of Practice, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019; and was co-editor of ‘Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research’, a Special Issue of Phenomenology & Practice, 2022. She is co-founder of the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research, 2019. Cocker has published artistic research in JAR (Journal of Artistic Research), RUUKKU and VIS (Nordic Journal for Artistic Research). Her writing is published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2011; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User’s Manual, 2022; Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond Dance, 2024, and the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2024.

Cocker and Maier co-lead the Artistic Research Group at Nottingham Trent University and the DREAM sessions (Doctoral Research Encounters in Artistic Methodologies) a seminar series specifically for PhD researchers focusing on the “how” of practice research in the arts.

Danica maier bio | site

emma cocker site

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