What are the career prospects after the PhD?

After the PhD: Career prospect

Leiden University offers training on competences, networking, negotiating, job interviews, writing research proposals, and entrepreneurship. The Graduate School organized a PhD career event in 2018. Most of ACPA alumni continue their career as professional artists. Their research has often strengthened their career as it offers new insights, not only in the work of the maker but also in music, art and design in the broader sense; the research contributes to knowledge about art/design/music and the international discourse in the field of research.

Some of the alumni have obtained (research) positions in Higher Arts Education Institutes (in and outside the Netherlands), and a few have obtained positions at research universities, thereby strengthening the position of artistic research within academia. See for the ‘afterlife’ of a few ACPA alumni 2012-2017 the Alumni in the picture-page.

Artistic research and society

Bringing art into academia (and academia into art) is not only an issue for contemplation in the philosophy of science or in the policy of higher education. It also prompt us to rethink what art and academia are or could be in contemporary society. Bridging the gap between two domains of life, which have been institutionally and theoretically separated since the late modern period, is topical in a period where contemporary art touches upon other life domains, including the domain of knowledge, and where academia reaches out to society, including art. Art thereby transcends its former limits, aiming through the research to contribute to thinking and understanding; academia, for its part, opens up its boundaries to forms of thinking and understanding that are interwoven with artistic practices. These ‘border violations’ have relevance for and impact on how artists and scholars operating on that border define themselves. Artistic research is therefore not only relevant for the domain of research, for academia, but just as much for society, i.e. for the art world and the world beyond art.