Chinouk Filique de Miranda will start as the first Professional Doctorate at ArtEZ on September 1, 2023. 

The Professional Doctorate is equivalent to a university PhD but has a different character and a different internationally recognised title: PD. Whereas a PhD track at a university is aimed at developing professional researchers, the aim of the PD programme in higher professional education is to train researching professionals.

During the PD programme, De Miranda will conduct research on the various ways in which we experience fashion in the online landscape.

While the big fashion houses and multibillion-dollar companies are eagerly responding to this digital dimension of fashion, many small, local and critical fashion designers are being left behind. They don't have the digital skills, or don't (yet) know how they can adapt to the digital dimension of fashion. For this reason, during the four-year PD track, De Miranda will research, catalogue and ultimately strengthen digital literacy among these critical fashion makers. De Miranda: "For the first three years of my research, I will be focusing on bringing together existing digital counter-movements – i.e. hackers and programmers who are pushing back against the big players like Meta and Louis Vuitton – with critical fashion designers. I am curious to see what happens when you bring those two worlds together. For example, I want to ask them to work together to create a hacking tool for their own fashion practices." For much of her research, De Miranda will be working with master's students from Critical Fashion Practices, and she will be developing a new part of the curriculum with and for them focused on promoting digital literacy among critical fashion designers.  

During the four-year PD programme, De Miranda will have supervisors from both within and outside ArtEZ. At ArtEZ, she will be supervised by Daniëlle Bruggeman (Professorship Fashion). Bruggeman is proud that De Miranda has been chosen as the first PD candidate. "Chinouk is strong on practice-based design research into complex digital structures and making them accessible, enabling her to develop new methods, tools, tactics and strategies to stimulate digital literacy." 

For more information about Professional Doctorate at ArtEZ, visit the website of ArtEZ University of the Arts:  https://www.artez.nl/en/stories/2023-07-05-the-fashion-designer-as-maker-researcher-and-digital-whizzkid