Hidden Cities: Artistic Methodologies and Practices at Advanced Levels to Explore Urban Transformation

Introduction

PhD students across Europe are invited to join the UNIC Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) "Hidden Cities: Artistic Methodologies and Practices at Advanced Levels to Explore Urban Transformation," organised by University College Cork (UCC) in collaboration with UNIC partner institutions. This innovative programme explores how artistic and sensory methods, from improvisation to embodied practices, can offer new research perspectives and reveal hidden aspects of urban life. It brings together students from diverse fields, including arts, humanities, social sciences and beyond, whether their research is practice-based or theoretical.

This course provides PhD students from EUR the opportunity to dive into artistic approaches to research. It is offered as a Blended Intensive Program (BIP) within the framework of the European UNIC project.

Artistic methods invite you to use artistic expression as a powerful tool for inquiry. Whether through writing, theatre, music, visual arts, or digital media, the arts offer unique ways to explore complex human experiences and social phenomena.

Artistic research encourages reflection and empathy, care and compassion, and multiple ways of knowing beyond what words alone can capture. It values sensory, kinaesthetic, and imaginary knowledge, and often leads to outcomes that go beyond traditional academic outputs, such as artistic works, performances, or visual installations, alongside written insights.

“For all that we [...] have sought to ’contain’ the human experience through this or that model or theory, human lives resist such containment; they, we, are open works, fields of meaning that are, in the end, elusive and mysterious. […Our modes of] inquiry avows this elusiveness and embraces the irreducible mystery that is us. Art cannot help but be involved in this form of inquiry, for it is only through art and the research it spawns that there is hope of finding a language adequate to the human condition.” (Mark Freeman, 2025)

Throughout the course, students are supported to understand how artistic methods embody a distinct approach to methodology, and how these methods might influence their own research processes. The teaching team will guide and support you along the way, ensuring you gain both practical experience and a deeper understanding of these innovative research approaches.

The course combines online preparatory lectures with live, in-person meetings, creating an interactive and supportive learning environment.

Key terms: qualitative research, artistic methodologies (such as sensory methods, improvisation, embodied methods), co-designing artistic concepts, advanced course, relevant for students in any PhD phase. 
ECTS: 5

Entry level and relevance

This course will bring together PhD students working in practice-inclusive or practice-oriented research in the arts (including disciplines such as theatre, music, dance, visual art and design; art history; architecture; anthropology; environmental studies and ecology; education; business; environmental humanities; gender studies; language and regional studies; philosophy); students who are undertaking arts PhDs but who may be doing purely theoretical work; students from related disciplines; and finally, some students who are working far outside the practical arts in their PhD topics, and are interested in integrating arts methods.

No specific knowledge or experience is required, except an open attitude towards artistic methodologies. Students in all phases of their PhD trajectory are welcome to join.

Relevant with other courses

There is no significant overlap with other courses offered by the EGSH.

Sessions and preparations

For the exact programme, please visit: 
Hidden Cities - UNIC blended intensive programme

The online sessions include lectures on urban spaces; coloniality, ownership and the power politics of urban space; artistic methodologies and ethics; and examples of art projects designed to explore the difficult aspects of urban engagement with the arts and culture and other topics of interest, contributed by the teaching team. While some of the focus is on cases in Cork, the artistic approaches that will be discussed can be applied in many urban contexts, including Rotterdam.

The first four offline workshops in Cork will likely cover using artistic and sensory methods to uncover and reveal unusual aspects of urban space; data in artistic methodologies; data management and configuring data gathering; improvisation as a research method in the arts; spatial exploration and public interventions; and imagining the audience as co-artists. A range of different artistic modalities will be used, drawing from theatrical, visual, spatial, choreographic, tactile, and auditory/musical strategies.

In the last offline workshop, students will be put into small groups that are trans-disciplinary. They will be asked to develop a concept for an artistic intervention in Cork that would reveal a hidden aspect of the city’s spatial history and that invites the past, present and the future to encounter each other. They will present that concept in the morning of day 5. Simultaneously, all students are supported to understand how this process embodies a distinct approach to methodology, and to how these methods might influence their own research processes.
 

Applications, including a short motivation letter, are open until 15 september 2025. 

EUR students can contact Pauwke Berkers (berkers@eshcc.eur.nl).