This strategic partnership was based on years of collaboration of several European conservatoires where the music master programme for New Audiences and Innovative Practice (NAIP) was developed and implemented. The partnership also included new partners, which had in the years before the start of the project witnessed the progress of the NAIP programme and thus gained interest in its methodologies and ideology. This partnership project consisted of several events over two years period aimed at further development, improvement and promoting of methodology and joint curriculum using mobility in the form of two intensive study programmes, three working groups, two joint staff training events and two periods of staff development. The core of the NAIP programme is creative collaborative learning, where mentoring and practice based research play a major role. The aim is to be a platform for professional integration, entrepreneurship, creative collaborative practice, cross-arts and cross-sector practice and community engagement within the domain of higher education. This is particularly relevant as the music world is increasingly in need of more variety of skillful and flexible musicians capable of relating to society and finding new roles and carriers, at the same time as traditional employment opportunities are less and less accessible. The programme calls for creative musicians who have achieved a high standard of performance and show strong potential of entrepreneurship, leadership and communication skills. This project has strengthened the foundations of developing and promoting creative collaborative learning with enhanced quality, utilizing cross border collaboration and extensive dissemination and thereby making way for greater relevance of higher music education in Europe and beyond.

"VOX early MUS aimed to improve the quality and relevance of higher music education through creating a joint master program on vocal early music small ensembles, at the excellency level. Under this frame, prestigious teachers, students and professionals from European conservatories and potential employment institutions gathered in order to exchange good practices on innovative methods and approaches in teaching, learning, assessing and performing vocal early music, taking into account four important dimensions: internationalization, vocal pedagogy, artistic performance and professional integration.Having young specialized professionals in vocal early music appears as an evident need nowadays: quality, professionalism, true aesthetic values are the alternatives this music offers. Thus, implementing vocal early music for small ensembles in the university curriculum - as a joint master program - arised as a common need of the partner institutions. This new learning offer in music education leads the students and graduates to identify new professional competencies and wider career opportunities. Partner institutions in VOX early MUS:1. National University of Music Bucharest - coordinator (Romania)2. Den Haag Royal Conservatory (Netherlands)3. ""Joseph Haydn"" Conservatory, Eisenstadt (Austria)4. ""Arrigo Pedrollo"" Conservatory of Vicenza (Italy)5. ""Arrigo Boito"" Conservatory of Parma (Italy)6. Association of European Conservatories - AEC (Belgium)7. Fondazione Italiana per la Musica Antica - Rome (Italy)8. National Choir Association - Bucharest (Romania)VOX early MUS addressed both direct and indirect beneficiaries - as target groups. More than 90 students - from five European conservatories - who have the vocal skills, knowledge and a special interest in approaching and understanding vocal early music - benefited of the intellectual outcomes of the Transnational Project Meetings and tested the innovative teaching methods put in act during the three Intensive Programmes. All the activities during the three years (Steering group meeting, Transnational Project Meetings and Intensive Programmes) were connected to the main objective of the project: ellaborating a new Master programme for Early music small vocal ensembles, based on the two intellectual outputs: Curriculum design and development handbook on vocal early music small ensembles (O1) and ""VOX early MUS mastering excellence"" - an electronic didactic support (O2). The working group consisted in 13 experts and teachers from all the partner institutions, with a high level of expertise and experience in the early music field. Due to the project's needs, the working group splitted in two sub-groups, focused on: 1. Curriculum design and development: preparation of the Joint Master Programme (chair: Isaac Alonso de Molina - Den Haag Conservatoire) and 2. Repertoire research: collecting the research studies of the institutions in the field of vocal early music and preparing the three Intensive Programmes (chair: Nicolae Gheorghita - UNMB) . The two sub-groups cooperated ""in parallel"" between and during the Transnational Project Meetings. Collaborative tools have been used in order to facilitate the ""distance collaboration"": online platforms to exchange information, research studies, repertoire suggestions, list of Intensive Programmes participants and organisation, Skype sessions, etc. The three Intensive Programmes have been conceived as a laboratory for the future Master programme. Each of them gathered together 30 students (6/conservatoire) and 6 to 12 teachers and experts during eight days of Voice-labs, where the theoretical aspects and perspectives have been put in act through one-to-one and ensemble training, body awareness, workshops of improvisation, ornamentation, conferences, lectures and artistic performances. The Multiplier event - has been organized by the AEC and hosted by the National University of Music Bucharest, between 25th and 26th of May 2018 as an important dissemination opportunity for the project. Co-organized within the Early Music Platform of the AEC, the event gathered European experts from the Early Music field. Along with the main activities of the project, the management played an important and constant role - shared between the coordinator institution and the partners - being responsible for the quality assurance of the planned and implemented activities, expected results, impact on the target groups and project sustainability.The newly formed consortium on vocal early music pedagogy will continue to provide teachers and students in order to make functional the Joint Master Programme. Based on the principles and the intellectual outputs, this master program ensures a clear and formalized structure, internationally-oriented towards the students and the employment market.Besides the existing partners, VOXearlyMUS is open for additional institutions interested in participating at the Joint Master Programme."

Reflective Entrepreneurial Music Education Worldclass - RENEW’ is a two years project (2016-2018) developed by five higher music education institutions (The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus, The Royal Conservatoire The Hague, The Norwegian Academy of Music, The Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Sibelius Academy) and a European network organization (The Association Européenne des Conservatoires, Académies de Musique et Musikhochschulen - AEC). The project has directly contributed to the improvement of the employability of future music graduates through the artistic, pedagogical and entrepreneurial development of higher music education studies while initiating a cultural shift within institutions by changing teachers’ mind-set and approaches to guiding students through their programmes-Developing an entrepreneurial mind-set, including instinctively self-critical and reflective processes. During the two years of the project implementation, the six RENEW partners have worked together on the development of tools and models to generate change inside institutions. Each project partner has planned, hosted and successfully delivered five student bootcamps (one per HME partner institution) involving both teachers and students from very different disciplines and providing them with conceptual tools placing entrepreneurship in the wider context. In addition, the RENEW consortium has organised a joint entrepreneurial staff training for teaching staff that has brought together international experts to design staff development sessions aimed at teaching staff members involved in promoting an entrepreneurial mind-set within institutions as well as regular teaching staff members.Based on the experience and know-how gathered during the project teaching/learning/training activities, the RENEW project consortium has provided HME institutions with a description of how to implement a Joint European Module for Entrepreneurship teaching. The concrete results give guidelines about the establishment of several Joint European Modules mixing elements both at local and international level. The joint module description includes information on the curriculum in terms of content, workload and teaching methodologies- Arrangements for admission and assessment- Quality assurance arrangements- Models for financial sustainability in terms of costs and tuition fees. In addition, the RENEW project has succeeded in expanding the entrepreneurial mind-set among HME institutions in Europe and helping them better understand the importance of this topic and the need of addressing it in order to be able to help future students engage and face the profession. The partner institutions participating in the project have develop tools and expertise that will allow them to implement entrepreneurship in their curricula and train their teaching staff for them to be able to answer the challenges involved in preparing students for the profession. In the long term, not only the institutions that have directly participated in the development of the project will see be benefit from the outcomes of the project but also all HME institutions inside the AEC network (around 90% of all the HME institutions in Europe) will count with models and tools to better embed entrepreneurship in their curricula.

The idea is to experiment with a combination of emerging digital and artistic methods of inquiry in order to reframe the photographs and films produced by Dutch anthropologist Paul Julien during the last decades of colonisation of various countries on the African continent. This reframing will be done in several ways. Firstly through crowd-sourcing information with those whose communities and (now) histories were depicted by Julien by sharing his pictures on social media. Secondly by the production of artistic responses to the collection with members of several of these communities. And thirdly, the process and an analysis of it will be made public in an experimental mode of academic publishing, which in turn will be subjected to reflection and analysis by the applicants and other peers.

Society continues to place an exaggerated emphasis on womens skins, judging the value of lives lived within, by the colour and condition of these surfaces. This artistic research will explore how the skin of a painting might unpack this site of judgement, highlight its objectification, and offer women alternative visualizations of their own sense of embodiment. This speculative renovation of traditional concepts of portrayal will explore how painting, as an aesthetic body whose material skin is both its surface and its inner content (its representations) can help us imagine our portrayal in a different way, focusing, not on what we look like to others, but on how we sense, touch, and experience. How might we visualise skin from its ghostly inner side? This feminist enquiry will unfold alongside archival research on The Ten Largest (1906-07), a painting series by Swedish Modernist Hilma af Klint. Initial findings suggest the artist was mapping traditional clothing designs into a spectral, painterly idea of a body in time. Fundamental methods research, and access to newly available Af Klint archives, will expand upon these roots in maps and women’s craft practices and explore them as political acts, linked to Swedish Life Reform, and knowingly sidestepping a non-inclusive art history. Blending archival study with a contemporary practice informed by eco-feminism is an approach to artistic research that re-vivifies an historical paradigm that seems remote today, but which may offer a new understanding of the past that allows us to also re-think our present. This mutuality, and Af Klint’s rhizomatic approach to image-making, will therefore also inform the pedagogical development of a Methods Research programme, as part of this post-doc. This will extend across MA and PhD study, and be further enriched by pedagogy research at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, and Konstfack, Stockholm.