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Event

2026
11.00am - 4.00pm

Event

On Slow Research: An Open Doctoral School Event

  • Location

    University of the Arts London, 272 High Holborn, London WC1V 7EY

  • Date
  • Time
This UAL Open Doctoral School event invites doctoral researchers, supervisors, and research-curious colleagues to consider Slow Research.

On Slow Research: An Open Doctoral School Event


Friday 13 March 2026

Date and time: Friday 13 March 2026, 11:00 - 16:00 (UK time)

Hybrid event: in person, at University of the Arts London (UAL), 272 High Holborn, London, UK and online via Microsoft Teams

Who for: For the public, UAL postgraduates and research community, and the ‘research curious’


What might it mean to take research seriously enough to slow it down?

Across disciplines, doctoral researchers are navigating cultures of acceleration: compressed timelines, proliferating expectations, and an increasing emphasis on measurable outputs. At the same time, many forms of inquiry (including practice-based, interdisciplinary, and community-engaged research) depend upon patience, return, hesitation, and attentiveness. They require time that is not easily standardised.


This UAL Open Doctoral School event invites doctoral researchers, supervisors, and research-curious colleagues to consider Slow Research as an epistemic, ethical, and methodological orientation. Rather than proposing slowness as withdrawal or refusal, we frame it as a way of recalibrating research time: foregrounding care, situatedness, and process as constitutive of knowledge-making.

The event will explore questions such as:

  • What kinds of knowledge require slowness in order to emerge?
  • When does speed become ethically problematic in research?
  • How might doctoral study function as a space for hesitation, iteration, and return?
  • How do we defend slow work within fast systems?

Through short provocations, shared reading, reflective discussion, and practice-based exchanges, the event will offer space to think together about how research might be conducted otherwise: without abandoning rigour, ambition, or responsibility. The event is open to doctoral researchers at all stages, supervisors, early-career researchers, and the research curious. No prior expertise in slow scholarship is required.

Slow Research does not promise better outcomes, only more attentive ones. It asks what research becomes when care, time, and responsibility are treated not as obstacles, but as resources.

For the Open Doc School ....Professor Dr Jaana Erkkilä‑Hill, University of Lapland, Professor of Visual Arts, Vice-Dean for Research, expertise in slow research, and she's going to talk about 'creative loitering'


The schedule will follow shortly…

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