Zombies? Well, you’ll have to read past the break for those! Until then, some rather dry … that is, critically important … discussion of research in landscape architecture. : )
Practitioners in the academy are often an awkward fit. Professional education (e.g., landscape architecture) sits alongside natural science, social science, and humanities disciplines in university settings, and yet the culture of academic programs in the professions can differ sharply from the rest of the campus. Longer hours spent in studio classes, more time spent on outreach/service to communities, and research focused on applied problems are typical differences for faculty in professional design programs. Research productivity differences between practice-oriented faculty and faculty in other academic disciplines can be significant. On university campuses across the U.S., there is increasing demand by administrators for greater research output by all academic units, and these demands have created consternation in some landscape architecture circles. How do we maintain the traditional culture of professional education in landscape architecture and also begin to resemble more our research colleagues in natural science, social science, or the humanities?
The answer for some landscape architecture academics has been to adopt the research strategies of either natural science, social science, or the humanities, in some cases aided by Ph.D.s in a traditional research discipline. Urban and regional planning programs are largely populated with Ph.D.s in political science, economics, and other social sciences (usually with a lawyer thrown in for good measure), but with few faculty who have ever practiced planning. Could that be the future of landscape architecture education too? Some clues to another possible future after the break.
Creating a strong community of practice
Is there another route for increasing research productivity among landscape architecture faculty – a route that respects the practice-oriented nature of the discipline (or, speaking in a more limited sense, the practice-oriented nature of many faculty)? Answering that requires dwelling a bit longer on the current models of success. One over-simplified categorization might be the lone wolf researcher focusing most of his/her efforts on the publication of a book (perhaps THE book that is supposed to lead to tenure) versus the “research team” common in the natural sciences. On my campus, dominated by biological sciences, there are hardly any solo-authored publications produced in any given year; publications at ESF are almost all the result of team efforts, including work with graduate students. There are limitations, in my opinion, to both of these models. The lone wolf model requires an investment of time that can be incompatible with long hours of studio instruction. The team model conceivably lightens the load for the individual, but it requires getting on the team in the first place – harder if your practice-oriented discipline does not look like the others on the team. (Perhaps this is why I keep being asked if I am a social scientist, because those are in high demand now by for federal grant-seeking teams.)
A different kind of model, one that is not based on this solo vs team simplification, is one where a common activity of landscape architecture academics – service to communities – is refined in a way that makes peer-reviewed publication more possible. Participatory action research is the umbrella for much of this work. That is a step in the right direction, in my opinion, because it (searching for the right word) validates? and refines the contribution of what practitioner/professionally-oriented faculty do. It also can provide a mechanism for the kind of peer review that is so valued in the academy. There is some risk in this approach, though, in that there is not yet widespread acceptance of the idea of service-as-research, no matter how the work is conducted or the findings are packaged.
And that leads me to an emerging opportunity afforded to all of us through technology, but perhaps especially significant for design academics given their sometimes awkward fit as university researchers. The opportunity is to build “strong communities of practice” for landscape architecture academics with shared interests. An article in yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed, forwarded to me by my colleague Susan Dieterlen, advances the idea of communities of practice created through new approaches to electronic publication and, most importantly, refinement of research through dialogue with a broad range of reviewers, an interaction afforded by the Internet.
Zombies? That is the metaphor that Kathleen Fitzpatrick, author of the soon-to-be released Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, uses to describe the scholarly monograph. Fitzpatrick has some standing to critique the traditional approach to scholarship; she is the Modern Language Association’s director of scholarly communication. The article gives a good account of Fitzpatrick’s argument. Among her provocative assertions:
The scholarly press book, she writes, “is no longer a viable mode of communication … [yet] it is, in many fields, still required in order to get tenure. If anything, the scholarly monograph isn’t dead; it is undead.”
and:
Here are two ideas Fitzpatrick proposes to kill for good: Peer review is necessary to maintaining the credibility of scholarly research and the institutions that support it; and publishing activity in peer-reviewed journals is the best gauge of a junior professor’s contribution to knowledge in her field. (S. Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, 9-30-2011)
It is this notion that has resonance for me – the idea that new modes of scholarly communication can create “strong communities of practice,” fostering the development of landscape architecture research beyond the limited models we currently use.
If we are going to take full advantage of the new ways of working that digital technologies make available, scholars will have to consider the possibility that we can accomplish more collectively than we can alone. This is not to say that the individual voice [valued in the humanities] will be wholly subsumed within that of the Borg. Instead, it is meant to suggest that that voice will very often be found in more direct dialogue with other scholars, an interconnectedness that will make clear that, in fact, the individual voice that we so value has never been alone [it has always been built on the work of others].
The argument is for an “open, post-production review process” that “focuses on ‘how a scholarly text should be received rather than whether it should be out there in the first place'” (Kolowich). Fitzpatrick used such a process in the development of her own (maybe not zombie) book by placing the draft online for review using CommentPress. Fitzpatrick writes about this in the Journal of Electronic Publishing:
On July 25, 2007, the Institute for the Future of the Book released version 1.0 of CommentPress, a theme for WordPress that facilitates the web publication of lengthy documents in a fashion that is both internally and externally networked, and that allows for reader commenting and discussion at a level of granularity ranging from the document as a whole to the individual paragraph. The goal of CommentPress, as the project’s “about” page presents, stems from the desire
“to see whether a popular net-native publishing form, the blog, which, most would agree, is very good at covering the present moment in pithy, conversational bursts but lousy at handling larger, slow-developing works requiring more than chronological organization—whether this form might be refashioned to enable social interaction around long-form texts.” (About CommentPress)
To the junior faculty member: don’t wait until after you have achieved the safety of tenure to take a chance on a new way of working; it might not be easy, but effort spent educating your senior colleagues about innovative modes of scholarly production will be effort well-spent. Seek out mentors and supporters, both within your institution and outside it, build a strong community of practice, get your work into open circulation, document the effects that work is having – and then teach the folks who are going to evaluate your work how to read it, and how to read the evidence of its effectiveness.
Praxis in Landscape Architecture 
Hi, great article. I resonate with this right now as a landscape arch in practice for 10 years who decided to return to academia to pursue an MA last year. I decided on Planning and not MLA for several reasons, partly because the ‘research’ side of LA seems dominated by precedent-building… Although it’s possible I’ve just been away from the classroom too long. The play between theory and practice is certainly important, but i agree that at a graduate level we do need more frameworks for research.
Perhaps one problem is that LA is so broad. It is a natural and social science. It is arts and humanities. It has strong ties to architecture, planning, and even engineering. Faculties should encourage research methods tailored to suit the proposal of the student… Qualitative and/or quantitative.
For me personally, I’m researching what makes urban agriculture successful in hopes of determining how we might best plan (and design) for it in the future. I’m using case study and action research. I think these methods best suit the topic, and they allow for ‘real world’ perspectives and results and further bridge the gap between theory and practice… At least I hope so 🙂
One book that might offer some guidance for grad students is Landscape Architectural Research: Inquiry, Strategy, Design. I’ve only read the beginning preview but it looks promising.
Thank you for the response, Noah. Before posting, I edited out a line at the end that raised the issue of LA perhaps being too broad. There’s no doubt that it complicates matters, as you state. You also make good points about the ways in which faculty support student research. If the faculty is unsure about research, it is difficult to clearly guide graduate students! I guess I’m endorsing the trickle down effect – stronger support for faculty research, stronger research communities (and there should be many, given the breadth of the profession), leads to stronger support of student research and thus a virtuous circle, as some of the graduate students then go on to become faculty themselves. I second your endorsement of the book, Landscape Architectural Research by Deming and Swaffield.
I cannot resist to add my two cents, in a technology class, I was told to look at blogs and Wikipedia for the most current methods for system analysis. I think when I said I was to reference Wikipedia and blogs some people nearly fell over at the though of those being sources of reputable information.
Yet if you look at a journal as a exceedingly slow blog you can see similarities. As mentioned in another article about journals the value of a published journal article is not the circulation but the citations. Blogs have trackbacks and pingbacks for citation. One thing this adds that is not in a print journal is forward linking, seeing what was inspired by an article rather than just what the author referenced.
Communities of practice seem like a team of consultants on a design project. They are not creating articles for review they are creating actual products that are reviewed by the client and many times regulator agencies. So I would think the “Participatory action research” model is very viable just a matter more of changing the expectations of what is an article or even a journal.
If the journal is an exceedingly slow blog, then what is a book? : ) Oh yes, some are zombies. Changing expectations, generational shifts, momentum of rapidly evolving technologies – all factors at work. But they are realities that universities are slow to embrace (understatement).
If you add up all the unusual demands on LA faculty in the above post (traditional service and professional orientation + emerging emphasis on research + breadth of discipline requiring extreme flexiblility in research methods and traditions + grappling with new media), it’s no wonder many of us fall short in one area or another. As junior faculty striving to get a zombie book published, I love the idea of doing something innovative and collaborative with it, but can’t take the risk of being too innovative. Simply put, I’m not doing another dissertation, so I need to get all the career mileage I can out of this one. In retrospect, I wish I had been aware of this model (in the original Inside Higher Ed article) earlier, when I was developing my dissertation proposal and research. How fabulous it would have been to have all that feedback then.
A more open alternative to peer review could be a really good fit for a discipline like LA, where new knowledge comes equally from practitioners and scholars. Traditional peer reviewed journals are opaque to practitioners, and generally not read outside a small circle of academics. Particularly in research areas dealing with effects from climate change, the greater speed of idea to dissemination could be of great value. I remain stunned at the years it can take to get “new” research finally in print in a peer-reviewed journal.
I love the “undead books” reference. But I can’t agree with her on abolishing peer-review, if that’s her argument — the peer-review issue is one I don’t think we have a solution to yet– how else can we encourage people with experience to improve the quality and rigor of new work? How do we prevent new work from being accepted when it includes errors, or is so ideologically driven that it’s the equivalent of FOX News in journalism? I don’t want to work in the FOX News version of a university, where the “message of the day” is what we’re supposed to pursue in our scholarship, and being accurate is second to supporting the message of the day. Talk about zombies!
Landscape Architecture is a tricky field because it draws on so many disciplines to accomplish a set of desired ends. Like engineering, it’s both synthetic and experimental — but like clinical medicine and social work, it’s very focused on human experience. Engineers get to leave people out, most of the time. And medicine gets to ignore large-scale infrastructure while it focuses on treatments of various kinds in a social environment. I think the exciting thing about our field is that we CAN develop theory, apply it, and critique the results — across broad sets of basic disciplinary knowledge. But we need to make some efforts to be more rigorous about linking our work – of all kinds – to results.
The Landscape Architecture Foundation is pursuing new linkages through its case-study approach, CSI, which is funding faculty and students to work with firms to document the effects of excellent design. And I’m trying to link that work to the National Science Foundation’s recent intiative to build Sustainability Research Networks, by connecting practice with theories about collaboration (communities of practice is a good example– leading to testable hypotheses about collaboration… boundary object theory and knowledge mapping are others). My mantra is, let’s figure out where this is all going and get there in the early stages so we can help lead the new efforts many groups are making to link theory development to changes in practice, and vice versa.
Thanks for raising the issues, Margaret!
Fitzgerald is not arguing to abolish peer review, but instead is arguing that the number of reviewers should be increased by making access easier and giving credit for “helpfulness” and participation in the scholarly exchange. The current model concentrates power in the hands of the journal editors and the few expert reviewers who review each paper. From the article, referring to the need to encourage more peer review of journal articles in a scenario where more submissions are let through the gate and post-publication review becomes the norm:
Thank you for the comments, Kristina. You note the tricky issues with landscape architecture and the fact that it draws on many disciplines. That activity at the edge of disciplines is often where new advances are made, but the newest developments at edges are often not captured by journal publication until a number of years have passed and then new journals develop to cover the emergent field. If landscape architects operate often in those interdisciplinary spaces, perhaps emerging technology can foster that. That’s what I am seeking with climate adaptation planning, for example.