Graduate Research Conference (GRC)

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GRC - October 2008
GRC - June 2008
GRC - October 2007

The GRC is a twice-yearly gathering of research candidates enrolled at RMIT in disciplines associated with Architecture and Design. The GRC’s prime purpose is to be the tangible focus of a learning community – its home so to speak. As we all know, people learn more from each other than they do from abstract structures, and the GRC is first and foremost a gathering of peers.

In addition to being a long weekend of informal peer review, the GRC brings together these candidates with visiting critics from around Australia and from all over the world. We aim to invite critics who are emerging onto the scene, and many names that are now very familiar in the fields of design have been critics here in the eighteen years since the first GRC. The weekend commences with public lectures by those visitors who are new to the GRCs, followed by a social occasion, a banquet or a barbecue, and it proceeds with two days of work-in-progress reviews. There are potentially almost two hundred people involved in any GRC, and reviews now run in up to ten parallel streams, including the foundational invitation to practitioners whose work has already been acclaimed for its mastery through exhibition publication and award to examine that mastery, provide evidence about its nature and speculate through ongoing practice about future directions for practice.

The secondary purpose of the GRC is to structure the work of supervisors and their research candidates. Candidates are asked to present their work in progress to panels, and these presentations are organically related to everyone’s research work plans. Typically the initial presentation scopes the candidates proposition, the second covers project and literature reviews, a series of intermediate reviews cover tranches of project work devised to address research gaps identified between proposition and review, and in a review penultimate to their viva, candidates present the outlines of their catalogues, exegeses, and ‘durable visual records’ together with their design for their final presentation through exhibition, web, film or performance.

Excerpt from History of the GRC by Prof Leon van Schaik (PDF, 75 KB) (Opens in new window)