HabiT Research Proposal Template
The new Ph.D. program HabiT (Habitat in Transition) is designed to create an interdisciplinary, innovative and collaborative training and research context specifically for teachers and students to address contemporary and complex challenges related to the critical issues of Sustainable Transition (environment, welfare, living space).
http://www.unina.it/didattica/post-laurea/dottorati-di-ricerca/bandi-di-ammissione
PhD students will be oriented to conduct research on the most relevant topics of the global agenda and the new dimensions of contemporary design with methodological rigour, creativity and transdisciplinarity.
PhD students will develop transversal research skills, bringing together critical theories in the fields of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sustainability with scientific and technological disciplines to produce original, experimental scientific work on a topic that contributes significantly to the scientific debate and at the same time has a relevant positive impact on society.
The research developed by HabiT will converge in the T-Lab, which will be activated within the DiARC-AbiT project of excellence. The objective of the T-Lab is to strengthen the synergies between the different disciplinary fields present in DiARC that contribute to the definition of adequate responses to the challenges posed by the Sustainable Transition, focusing on methodological and design innovation to outline transformative and evolutionary change scenarios and to enhance the dissemination and sharing of knowledge in multidimensional arenas, within public engagement and action-research activities.
PhD applicant:
Cycle:
Title of the Research Proposal:
Abstract
The abstract is a summary of your Ph.D. Research Proposal should be no longer than 150 words. It starts by describing in a few words the knowledge domain where your research takes place and the key issues of that domain that offer opportunities for the challenges and innovations you intend to explore. Taking those key issues as a background, you then briefly present your research statement, your proposed research approach, the results you expect to achieve, and the anticipated implications of such results on the advancement of the knowledge domain.
Keywords
This section is an alphabetically ordered list of the more appropriate words or expressions (up to 5) that you would introduce in a search engine to find a research proposal identical to yours. Commas separate the successive keywords.
- Introduction (max 2.000 characters including spaces)
The introduction gives an overview of the research project you propose to carry out. It explains the background of the project, focusing briefly on the major issues of its knowledge domain and clarifying why these issues are worthy of attention. It then proceeds with the concise presentation of the research statement, which can take the form of a hypothesis, a research question, a project statement, or a goal statement, devising the challenge to face. Identifying and describing a challenge in relation to critical transition issues (environment, welfare, living space) capable of interpreting the programme objectives, describing what it is possible to see beyond it that can serve to manage and solve.
The research statement should capture both the essence of the project and its delimiting boundaries and should be followed by a clarification of the extent to which you expect its outcomes to represent an advance in the knowledge domain you have described.
The introduction should endeavour, from the very beginning, to catch the reader’s interest and should be written in a style that can be understood easily by any reader with a general knowledge background.
- State of the Art (max 2.000 characters including spaces)
State of the Art, also known as the Literature Review, serves several very important aims. First, it demonstrates that you have built a solid knowledge of the field where the research is taking place, are familiar with the main issues at stake, and have critically identified and evaluated the key literature.
On the other hand, it shows that you have created an innovative and coherent view integrating and synthesizing the main aspects of the field so that you can now put into perspective the new direction that you propose to explore.
State of the Art must give credit to the authors who laid the groundwork for your research so that when, in the following sections, your research objectives are further clarified, the reader is able to recognize beyond doubt that what you are attempting to do has not been done in the past and that your research will likely make a significant contribution to the literature.
State of the Art should include comprehensive references, which you list at the end of the proposal. Ideally, all influential papers, books, book chapters and other texts produced in the knowledge domain you are exploring which are important for your work should be mentioned here and listed at the end of the proposal. You must ensure that no document you refer to is missing from the final list of references, or vice versa (for guidelines on how to cite according to it, cf. https://www.mendeley.com/guides/harvardcitation-guide).
- Objectives (max 3.000 characters including spaces)
This section explains your plan to tackle your research problem by exploring a transdisciplinary vision for the challenge resolution. It clarifies the research objectives of your project, taking as its background your description of the state of the art. The clarification of the research objectives should build solidly on the State of the Art and relate your research to the work carried out by others. It should elucidate what your work develops from their work and the extent to which it diverges from theirs to open new and yet unexplored avenues.
- Methodology (max 2.000 characters including spaces)
This section explains how you plan to tackle your research problem. It describes the methodological approaches you have in mind to face the key research challenges of your project and the data you want to use to address them. This section should be detailed enough to let the reader decide whether the methods you intend to use are adequate for the research at hand. It should go beyond merely listing research tasks by asserting why you assume that the methods or methodologies you have chosen to represent the best available approaches for your project. This means that you should include a discussion of possible alternatives and credible explanations of why your approach is the most valid.
- Work Plan
The Work Plan identifies the steps to achieve your objectives, establishing specific milestones and timelines. Your work plan should anticipate the problems likely to be found along the way and describe the approaches to be followed in solving them. It should also anticipate the conferences and journals to which the work is expected to be submitted. In short, it should be able to reinforce, in the mind of the reader, the conviction that your approach is feasible and solidly oriented toward results. The Work Plan must be realised with a diagram or flow chart.
- Conclusions and Expected Outcomes (max 1.500 characters including spaces)
This section briefly restates the objectives of your research project, recaps the research approach you plan to follow, and clarifies in a few words what you expect to find out, why it is scientifically valuable to find it out, and on what basis you expect to evaluate the validity of your results, considering the expected outcomes in terms of skills acquired, construction of innovative practices, advancement of scientific research on the subject, benefits in relation to the built environment and settled communities.
- References
In this section, you should list selected references (a maximum of 10) throughout the Research Proposal, ensuring you comply with the referencing conventions or citation styles established for your field. You must ensure that no document you refer to in preceding sections is missing in the final list of references, or vice versa.
For guidelines on correctly reporting your references according to the Harvard Style, visit https://www.mendeley.com/guides/harvard-citation-guide
- Examination will be in English
- 8-minute interview
- 7-minute pitch
