Vision & Philosophy

'Techne' comes from the ancient Greek word to describe craftsmanship, craft or art and the human ability to make and perform

Techne understands that graduate training in the arts and humanities today has entered a new phase of rapid and dynamic change, offering students complex new opportunities and challenges with far-reaching implications for what they will require, and should expect, of their supervision and training.

We confront a crucial challenge: how to preserve the profound scholarly resources, skills and capacities of the arts and humanities while at the same time securing their relevance and importance for the future? This question opens pathways along which, as much as we hope to lead our students, we also expect to be led by them. 

^{Credit: Christina Skarpari. Close-up of 'Kopella' pot made by Vasoulla,Kornos, Larnaca district, 2022.}

Techne is built around this ethos of a mutually beneficial exploration with our students, of what might be achieved by combining the old and the new – the past and the present – the traditional and the innovative.

Students will require both a thorough grounding in disciplinary specificity and an interdisciplinary skillset for an intellectual landscape in which scholarship, history, theory and practice are becoming increasingly and complexly intertwined. Conventional distinctions between traditional scholarship and practice-based research as well as disciplinary boundaries are all increasingly at odds with the needs of researchers to foster multiple capabilities as they prepare for a diverse range of professional outcomes and career portfolios, both within and beyond the academia. In this sense we recognise that Techne is inseparable from the episteme, phronesis and poeisis, while training will successfully negotiates the new realities of the knowledge economy and require a patient and full apprenticeship in the craft of research.

We aspire to recruit the very best students who can benefit from and contribute to the philosophy.

^{Credit: Victoria Burgher, Shattering Whiteness: performance as practice as research.}