PhD Thesis Structures

The relation between the format of an academic thesis, the research material on which it builds, the argument it intends to make, and the narrative through which this argument is made, is an important query for any doctoral project. In this seminar, we will discuss these relations, grounded in the experiences and reflections of three invited guests presenting how they worked with these questions, and other aspects of dissertation-making, in their specific and in many ways quite different doctoral theses. The seminar will move from their specific work towards an increasingly wide discussion, utilizing also a collection of thesis works brought to the table to provide additional concrete examples of different ways of composing a thesis.

This seminar is arranged in collaboration between the doctoral course communications and the research seminars in architecture.

Reading material: Seminar Abstracts (pdf 48 kB)

Suggested reference: Dimensions: Journal of Architectural Knowledge: Species of theses and other pieces

Jenny Lindblad is a researcher in the Dept. of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. She is an urban anthropologist, whose research focuses on urban expertise, planning politics and environmental imaginaries related to wetlands and soils, in France and Sweden. Her doctoral thesis investigated the social life of a planning bureaucracy in Bordeaux, France, in a time of national reforms aimed at transforming bureaucratic procedures. By following the making and uses of a land-use plan, she explored what calls for flexibility and negotiation in reforms aimed at public administrations come to mean in the quotidian work of bureaucrats, planners and politicians.

Vasily Sitnikov is a ETH Zurich PostDoc Fellow at the Chair of Digital Building Technologies. He holds a Doctoral Degree in Architectural Technologies from KTH School of Architecture (Stockholm 2020), his postgraduate degree in Art and Architecture from Städelschule Architecture Class (Frankfurt am Main 2014) and graduate degree in Architecture from Moscow State Institute of Architecture (2011). He is an alumni of the Marie Curie Research Fellowship and a member of the Innochain Early-Stage Research Training Network (EU Horizon 2020). His doctoral research was dedicated to an alternative ecological production for digital precast concrete – the concept known as Ice Formwork.

Sepideh Karami is an architect, educator, writer, and researcher with a PhD in Architecture, Critical Studies (KTH). She is currently a Lecturer in Architecture and the Director of Postgraduate Research Programme at the University of Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA). She has been committed to pedagogy, research and practice in different international contexts such as Iran, Sweden, Kenya and the UK. She works through artistic research, experimental methods and interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of architecture, performing arts, literature and geology, with the ethos of decolonization, minor politics and criticality from within. She has presented, performed and exhibited her work at international conferences and platforms, and is published in peer reviewed journals.