Collaborative Doctoral Awards Projects

Collaborative Doctoral Awards (CDAs) provide funding for doctoral studentship projects to work in collaboration with an organisation outside higher education. They are intended to encourage and develop collaboration and build partnerships with a wide range of organisations in the public, private and third sector, including grass-roots and activist organisations. They enhance the employment-related skills and training available to the research student during the course of the award. Collaborative Doctoral Awards are not only a route into academia but also provide hands-on work experience in the cultural sector and transferrable skills.

Our CDA Briefing is essential reading for all of our CDA supervisors and students and sets out LAHP’s expectations in relation the CDA research relationship.

Listed below are the Collaborative Doctoral Award studentship projects that we have funded.

2022-23 Collaborative Doctoral Award Projects

• The working-class museum: exploring the lived experiences of 21st century working-class Londoners

  King’s College London in collaboration with Museum of London

  Primary academic supervisor: Serena Iervolino
  Secondary academic supervisor: Hye-Kyung Lee
  Collaborative Partner lead contact: Domenico Sergi

  

  UK museums have historically neglected large parts of British society by showing little interest in the stories and experiences of working-class people. Issues of class differences have been rarely foregrounded in museum displays and public programmes. This is despite many UK museums holding relevant social and working history collections. In a time of deep systemic crisis marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has further aggravated class divisions entrenched in British society, socio-economic differences need to be urgently addressed in UK museums and academic debates. This PhD project aims to examine how socio-economic differences and working-class experiences can be meaningfully addressed in UK museums. Using the Museum of London and, more broadly, the city of London as a case study, this project will look at the analytic category “working class” through the lived experiences of low-paid Londoners. The project will implement innovative research methods (e.g. auto-ethnographic and arts based methods) to record and document the lived experiences of working-class Londoners. It will also test the use of collaborative methodologies in research practice (e.g. community conversations). Finally, the project will seek to foster sector-wide debates on the research subject through engaging museum professionals, activists and subject specialists in dissemination and engagement activities.

• Screens of Inclusion

  King’s College London in collaboration with Migration Collective

  Primary academic supervisor: Belen Vidal
  Secondary academic supervisor: Chris Berry
  Collaborative Partner lead contact: Lily Parrott

  In the aftermath of the 2015 European ‘Refugee Crisis’ there has been a growing corpus of films exploring the issues around refugees, migrants and European identity. Many of these films have been exhibited at film festivals such as the Migration Collective’s annual London Migration Film Festival (LMFF), with the aim of bringing together art, academia and action “to challenge the mainstream rhetoric on migration” 1 . From its outset, the LMFF has grappled with the issue of inclusion, holding workshops and talks on the ethics of telling the stories of refugees and migrants. ‘Screens of Inclusion’ will be developed in close collaboration with the LMFF, with the aim of critically exploring what counts as inclusive filmmaking, arguing that inclusive films cannot exist without inclusive film cultures. The LMFF will be a key case study of what an inclusive space could look like and how that can drive change in wider cultural understandings of migration and migrants. The research questions will focus on the LMFF as representative of the political economy shaping human rights film festivals, and how it constructs the migrant as an active subject through screen representations and exhibition spaces which create counterpublics – a public, or a public sphere which stands in conscious opposition to dominant anti-migrant ideology and which displays a reflexivity about their opposition2 . By November 2021, the UK parliament will pass the Nationality and Borders Bill which will curtail the rights of refugees and fundamentally challenge the principle of refugee protection. Other countries are also implementing anti-migrant policies, such as the French criminalisation of aid workers or Greece’s push backs in the Mediterranean. Many of these policies lack grounding in human rights law3 but promote an anti-migration rhetoric to the public. Due to limited resources and a complicated regulatory environment, the voluntary sector has limited capacity to challenge this rhetoric. Cultural organisations such as the Migration Collective can help change the public’s views on migration. Despite lively academic engagement with nationalism and screen representations of immigration in Europe4 , there is a lack of film scholarship that embeds a critical look at refugee and migrant subjectivity into an analysis of the networks of production and exhibition in which moving images of migration, particularly images generated by refugees and migrants, circulate. This project seeks to redress the situation by working with the Migration Collective and other established organisations – including the third sector and activist groups, such as PsycheDelight, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and Patients Not Passports – to investigate and challenge the mechanisms of exclusion of refugees and migrants embedded in commercial cinema. In doing so, I aim to put forward new practices that address the barriers to inclusion of refugees and migrants in filmmaking and film culture.

• ‘A musical feast for the Mile Enders’? Music, social inclusion and community engagement

  Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Spitalfields Music

  Primary academic supervisor: Alastair Owens
  Secondary academic supervisor: Paul Edlin
  Collaborative Partner lead contact: Sarah Gee

  

  This project traces the way that music has been used to engage local communities and tackle social marginalisation in London’s East End since the late 19th century. Musical outreach and community participation have come to be recognised as effective means for engaging with populations at risk of exclusion. But these present-day activities have a longer history. Using East London as an (illuminating) example, this project aims to track the different ways that music has been used to enrich and improve a people’s lives, from late-Victorian ‘civilizing missions’ and programmes of ‘moral reform’, through twentieth-century initiatives to nurture a nationally-significant concert culture for ‘deserving’ and appreciative cockneys, to radical contemporary interventions that seek to tackle social injustice, community fragmentation and give voice to marginalised groups. Alongside producing an original and timely thesis, the student will work with Spitalfields Music to produce a small online exhibition based on the research, organise a ‘London Festival of Music and Community Engagement’ at Queen Mary University of London, and work with both organisations to develop understanding of how best to evaluate musical outreach programmes – a key concern as the charity emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and approaches its 50th anniversary.

• Disability and the Home: Space, Domesticity, and Identity in London, 1840-1945

  Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Museum of the Home

  Primary academic supervisor: Matthew Rubery
  Secondary academic supervisor: Alison Blunt
  Collaborative Partner lead contact: Danielle Patten
  Collaborative Partner supervisor: Rebecca Jacobs

  

  This project will study the urban history of disability at home in London from 1840-1945. Based at the Centre for Studies of Home, a partnership between Queen Mary and the Museum of the Home, it will be the first research project to analyse the museum’s collections in relation to disability. The research will make an original contribution to broader debates about home, housing, disability and the city through its analysis of the lived experience and spatial politics of home for people living with physical and cognitive disabilities in the century before the founding of the National Health Service. The project will recover the ways in which home and domesticity were experienced by people with various kinds of physical and cognitive disabilities. It will also chart how the experiences of living with disabilities at home were shaped by broader forces including urbanization, industrialization, and nationalism as well as ideologies such as self-help and the eugenics movement. The proposed research will focus on the lives of people with disabilities in urban domestic settings; diversify knowledge about urban homes and domestic life beyond able-bodied, middle-class lives; and establish how attitudes toward the accommodation of disability have evolved in the UK.

• Performance-based co-creation with young people as political activism

  Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Fevered Sleep

  Primary academic supervisor: Kiera Vaclavik
  Secondary academic supervisor: Maggie Inchley
  Collaborative Partner lead contact: Louisa Borg-Costanzi Potts

  

  This project explores the ways in which intergenerational co-production of performance-based works and their preservation can help overcome the marginalisation of children and young people, formulate their worldviews, and shape their political activism. It takes as its focal point three key productions by the widely acclaimed company Fevered Sleep whose pioneering work is part of a long, if poorly documented and under-theorised history of co-creation with young people as a form of political activism in the UK. The project charts the evolution of the organisation’s work with young people and situates it within those little-known or unacknowledged histories. Drawing on performance and cultural studies, sociology and childhood studies, and innovatively building bridges between those fields, it will excavate, explore and disseminate practices which enable children to be more effectively seen and heard. Children and young people will be engaged throughout the project lifecycle, as interviewees and audiences directly shaping research outputs and as contributors on an equal footing to adults in events and workshops. The project facilitates exchange between creative practitioners and researchers concerning co-creation with young people and enables Fevered Sleep to archive and present their working methods to the wider public, articulate their distinctive contribution and disseminate best-practice.

• Disrupting Digital Girlhood: Exploring the performativity of female identity in digital space through autobiographical performance as socially engaged practice

  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with Little Fish Theatre

  Primary academic supervisor: Amanda Stuart-Fisher
  Secondary academic supervisor: Marilena Zaroulia
  Collaborative Partner lead contact: Alex Cooke

  Developed in partnership with Little Fish Theatre, this CDA will examine how adolescent girls engage with modes of performative self-narration through social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Drawing on practice research methods from applied theatre and arts for social change, the research will develop a critical framework rooted in discourse analysis that will advance proposals for alternative models of engagement with online self-authorship and the formulate practical, interventional strategies that encourage adolescent girls to be more critical of the representations they create, consume and endorse (Spence, Frohlich and Andrews, 2013; Georgakopoulou, 2016). Through an engagement with theories from feminist digital media and digital activism, the research will argue that rather than being understood as passive re-iterations of gender norms, these forms of online enactment might better be recognised as radical forms of autobiographical performance; it will explore how young women can be repositioned as digital creators without falling into the powerlessness of post-feminist, neoliberal rhetoric (Olufemi, 2020). Drawing on critiques of of heteronormative reinforcement in public space and online (Butler, 1990), the research will examine how social media platforms ultimately contribute to and affirm hyper-feminine performances of adolescent female identity online. The inquiry will also consider how intersectional (across economic class, gender and sexuality, race) and marginalised identities are performed by adolescent girls on social media platforms, examining the ways in which self-narrated online performances might be understood as challenging the prejudices and forms of bias that are interwoven into the populist culture of social media. The COVID-19 pandemic has elicited an increased reliance on digital media, highlighting how ubiquitous digital forms of communication are and how intimately social media is sewn into our sense of identity and social selves. Yet in an age of increased digital dependency, online performative presentations of girlhood and the ways these suppress autobiographical performances of self are under-theorised and ripe for further interrogation.

• ‘The system enabled it’: Sexual Violence and Contemporary UK Theatre Institutions since 2017

  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with Intimacy for Stage and Screen

  Primary academic supervisor: Tom Cornford
  Secondary academic supervisor: Diana Damian-Martin
  Collaborative Partner lead contact: Elizabeth Talbot

  This studentship will assess patterns of sexual violence and its reporting across prominent industry contexts in UK’s theatre institutions since the #MeToo movement’s rise to prominence in 2017, including actor-training, creative and rehearsal practices, and ‘safe working practice’ initiatives. Working closely with Intimacy for Stage and Screen (ISS), the student will interrogate these contexts and consider what they reveal about a) the gendered operation of theatre institutions, and b) the gendering of the cultural commodities they produce. The student will produce original research, shedding light on the failure of contemporary theatre institutions to take seriously allegations of sexual violence and the specific impact this kind of institutional betrayal (Freyd, 2013) has on women workers, especially those further marginalised, e.g., by race, class, sexuality or disability, and disproportionately affected by increasingly precarious working conditions. The student will contribute to ISS through knowledge exchange activity including a symposium in collaboration with the organisation Houselights, workshops and public events. Additionally, the student will produce resources on developing safe working practices for public use. The student will gain a thorough understanding of research processes, supported by Central’s expertise in both theatre theory and practice, and ISS’s expertise in ‘consensual creativity’ and its constitutive practices.

   

• A study of diversity and music-making in early childhood: Towards inclusive research and practice

  Collaborative Doctoral Award in collaboration with Royal College of Music and MERYC England Music Educators and Researchers of Young Children

  Primary academic supervisor: Jessica Pitt
  Secondary academic supervisor: Mary Stakelum
  Collaborative Partner lead contact: Alison Street

  

  This collaborative award focuses on music in early childhood, which although acknowledged as the most formative period of human growth and development (OECD, 2017) remains under-represented in research and scholarship (Young, 2018) and falls outside the remit of the government’s statutory framework for music education (see DfE, 2011). This project partnership of the RCM lead supervisor and MERYC England developed from a shared concern to address this gap in knowledge (see for example Pitt, Arculus, & Haynes, 2017) and to foster collaboration between music practice and research that respects and values cultural diversity of this younger population (see MERYC England aims in case for support). Using MERYC England’s materials the student will compile a cultural history of early childhood music education (ECME), charting conceptions of inclusion, and testing the extent to which these resonate with stakeholders (children, caregivers and early childhood professionals) and identifying new directions in music research and practice.

2021-22 Collaborative Doctoral Award Projects

• Black British Experience on Film and TV: Racialised Media Representation and its Effect on First-generation Caribbean Migrant Identity

  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with Sight and Sound Magazine (British Film Institute)

  This collaborative doctoral project between Central and the BFI’s Sight & Sound journal examines the long-term effects of racialised representations in UK film and TV production on first-generation migrants from the Caribbean. Employing documentary film as a practice-based methodology, it interrogates, through recorded oral histories and analysis of archival footage, the Black British experience and its media representation from the 1960s–present. The project’s reparative method places, at the centre of its practice, the lived experience of media representation and its impact on identity formation for those who lived through the racialised landscape of post-war Britain. Its focus is on a 60-year period encapsulating immense social and cultural transformation for the Caribbean community, including independence from British rule and the ‘Windrush’ era of mass migration, both coinciding with the rapid expansion of the domestic TV market in the UK. The collaboration with Sight & Sound gives the student access to the BFI archive alongside immersion in Central’s creative research culture. Central’s expertise in theory and practice, and state-of-the-art film and editing facilities complement Sight & Sound’s expertise in film and media, the opportunities it provides for public engagement through film festivals and the forum it offers to disseminate policy impacts.

• Decolonising the Sloane Herbarium

  Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Natural History Museum

  

  ‘Decolonising the Sloane Herbarium’ will investigate a foundation collection of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in order to re-imagine our understanding of its global and imperial dimensions. The Sloane Herbarium was created between c.1680–1753 by the de facto founder of NHM, Sir Hans Sloane, and comprises around 120,000 dried plants mounted in 265 folio volumes. The specimens come from over 70 countries and dependencies, having been contributed by upwards of 300 individuals. Many of these collectors operated within commercial and political enterprises immersed within nascent British imperialism, including the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, but these historical entanglements have never been comprehensively mapped and analysed.

  NHM has begun to recognise the importance of these histories to re-frame its collections for contemporary audiences, but lacks the informational means to answer even simple questions such as what proportion of its foundation collections were acquired as a function of the slave trade. This project will leverage existing institutional data, enriched with new archival research, to address this shortcoming. It will surface hitherto hidden histories of the Sloane Herbarium, generate an exciting new database for future generations of researchers to exploit, and inform ongoing institutional conversations at NHM about provenance, collections datasets, and decolonisation.

• Climate Collaborations in the Arts: How arts organisations are responding to the climate crisis

  Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK Branch, Inhotim
  Institute (Brazil)

  The project will investigate the role of the arts and cultural sector in tackling climate change and in leading responses to environmental emergencies in local and global contexts. It will study how two major third sector organisations in Britain and Brazil – Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK and Inhotim Institute – are seeking to understand what effective steps they can take to embrace and advocate for change through the curation, production and support for arts practices.

  CGF(UK) is a London-based charitable organisation focused on building coalitions to tackle complex global problems and on supporting arts organisations articulating their civic role. Inhotim is home to one of Latin America’s largest contemporary art collections in a botanical garden. Its neighbouring community was the site of one of Brazil’s biggest dam disasters. The research will enable the doctoral researcher to work with both organisations to identify and share learnings about their innovative responses in North-South contexts, and the findings will be of benefit to the wider cultural sector within and beyond the UK and Brazil, in promoting environmental awareness by community building, make meaning, and taking action. The research will also be relevant to networks of policymakers engaged with climate change at local and international levels.

• A multi-vocal narrative exploration of the impacts of criminalisation of abortion on everyday life

  Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Amnesty International

  This project is an interdisciplinary study developed by Amnesty International and Queen Mary’s Schools of Geography and English. It will apply creative writing methodology to social science questions on the impact of criminalisation of abortion on everyday life in Ireland, Northern Ireland and England. By collaborating with individuals living under all three abortion regimes and building on the literary genre of auto-theory, the research will generate a multi-vocal narrative that theorises the impacts of abortion criminalisation.
  The project will ask how criminalisation is experienced; how criminalisation organises and regulates bodies; and how these experiences penetrate beyond the legal status of criminalisation – i.e. following a law change. The outcome will be two-fold: whilst adding to both academic and Amnesty’s research on abortion criminalisation, it will also develop a creative, experimental, feminist research methodology that de-centres the storyteller and hands the power of narrative construction to those whose story is being told, contributing to work on interdisciplinary feminist research methodologies in both academia and human rights practice.
  The outputs will be: 1) creative – a multivocal narrative novel; 2) critical – research papers on abortion criminalisation and the literary methodology; 3) impactful – Amnesty publications/dissemination of research via Amnesty.

• The Plantation Nation: Imaginations of Post-National Britain in the Plays of Earl Lovelace, Mustapha Matura and Dennis Scott

  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with National Theatre (Black Plays Archive)

  

  This collaborative doctoral project between Central and the National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive (BPA) will generate an original account of the development of post-colonial British nationhood from the 1960s to the 1980s, rooted in the now mainly unknown plays of Earl Lovelace, Mustapha Matura and Dennis Scott. The project will retrieve a Caribbean strand of Black British playwriting that is now usually overlooked. It will also develop a critique of accounts of British national identity that over-emphasise whiteness and fail to account for the nation’s colonial construction through the exemplary case of the economic structures, racialised relations and lived experiences of British-Caribbean plantation societies, that were fundamental to the nation and yet positioned outside it. Using the work of Lovelace, Matura, and Scott to develop a reparative history of the multiple cultural translations that constituted Britishness in its colonial phase will also enable the student to critically interrogate methodological nationalism and reframe contemporary Britain as what Stuart Hall called a ‘post-national’ society. The studentship will bring this historical and theoretical work into direct dialogue with Black British publics, generating impacts on the cultural self-understanding of those who still live as racialised subjects within the post-imperial nostalgia of contemporary British culture.

• Red Cross or Red Star? The Tension between Humanitarian and Socialist Internationalism in World War II Aid to Russia

  Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies (SCRSS)

  

  While aid is often seen as apolitical humanitarianism, World War Two aid to Russia (i.e. Soviet Union) came from a wide spectrum of the British public, but especially from the Labour and Trade Union movement, where the motivation was less humanitarian than the explicitly political rationale of solidarity and socialist internationalism. This project seeks to analyse the ways these donations were given, solicited, collected and received during WWII, especially through analysis of the various publicity campaigns. The project will examine how the politically driven Communist, Labour and Trade Union exhortations to aid ‘Russia’ differed from the government-led Red Cross ‘Aid to Russia’ Campaign, fronted by the Prime Minister’s wife, Clementine Churchill, explicitly framed in apolitical and humanitarian terms. Tension between these approaches was the consequence of government attempts to lead and control popular sympathy for Russia, to ‘steal the thunder of the left.’

  The aim of the project is to approach wartime British attitudes to the Soviet Union from a new angle, focusing on the Society for Cultural Relations/SCRSS, which marks its centenary in 2024, relating them to recent debates about humanitarian aid, and supplying a case study problematizing dominant accounts of aid as apolitical and purely humanitarian.

• Implicit Histories: Decoding the 1921 Archive

  School of Advanced Study in collaboration with FindmyPast

  

  Historians have long sought to recover marginalized voices and experiences, and the popularity of genealogical websites such as Findmypast (FMP) demonstrates the public appetite for understanding these histories better. This studentship is framed around the centenary release of the 1921 census, which FMP is digitising in partnership with the National Archives for a major public launch in January 2022, the largest release of UK census data in a generation. FMP, which partners with more than 400 archives, has identified a public need around the interpretation of ambiguous historical language conventions, especially euphemism, in the official records. Newspapers and other contemporary contexts help supplement socially coded phrases used to conceal experiences once considered ‘taboo.’ The student will have an unequalled opportunity to access back-end datasets at FMP from October 2021 and will work with literary historians and data scientists to reduce the opacity in textual archives, deciphering the conventions and euphemisms of previous generations to make them easy to understand for anyone researching today. The project will identify patterns such as coded phrases used in different records, and repeated patterns in census and other connected data, that once uncovered will help reveal unwritten histories buried in the archives.

• How do Domestic Asylum Authorities Adjust Decision-Making in Light of Medical Developments?

  Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the Home Office

  

  This thesis will consider whether and to what extent asylum authorities adjust decision-making policies in light of medical developments by focusing on two main issues- whether the immigration status of an individual (asylum applicant or refused asylum applicant) should determine the right to access healthcare and the medical duty of healthcare professionals to provide treatment whilst the second part of this thesis will analyse who is qualified to determine mental health needs of asylum applicants and whether this is for medical or immigration status purposes. This thesis will therefore consider the difference between decision making by medical authorities compared to decisions made by immigration authorities regarding the mental health conditions of asylum applicants, examining each one in turn and determining the coherences and incoherence involved in these assessments.

• Pan-African Performance Networks: Creative Arts Practices to resist Coloniality and Neoliberal Globalism

  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with Pan-African Creative Exchange

  

  Model: Nsovo Nukeri ; Photographer: Mark Dobson

  This collaborative doctoral project between Central and the Pan-African Creative Exchange (PACE) offers a critical and historical analysis of performing arts-based development practices across the African continent, focusing on case studies in Senegal, Nigeria and South Africa. In 2015, African arts and creativity constituted only 1% of global creative output. In relation to this the project will theorise alternative cultural and economic systems for the sustainable development of autonomous creative networks operating across Africa’s diverse creative cultures. The project will thus contextualise the practice developed by PACE, through an examination of the legacies of cultural underdevelopment for contemporary performing-arts practices in Africa, from the postcolonial period onward, and in particular, in relation to the wider influence of these histories within today’s neo-colonial commercial practices. It draws on Central’s expertise in a number of areas, including the ecologies involved in performance arts practice and policy; applied, social and postcolonial approaches to theatre studies; and Central’s commitment to facilitating the development of arts practices in the Global South. It also draws on the practical expertise, experience and knowledge within PACE regarding the challenges confronting African artists today, promising a highly impactful project rooted in PACE’s extensive artist networks and policy fora.

2020-21 Collaborative Doctoral Award Projects

• Wasafiri: The history of a little magazine and the material conditions affecting the publication and reception of BAME writing in Britain, 1980-2020

  Queen Mary University London in collaboration with the British Library

  

  This project will explore the background and history of Wasafiri, a ‘little magazine’ known since the early 1980s for its pioneering role in providing a critical forum and platform for Britain’s black, Asian and minority ethnic writers. Drawing on unique archival sources, now housed in the British Library Contemporary Collections and not as yet publicly available, the particular history of this magazine will act as a paradigm to offer broader insights into the material conditions affecting the production, publication and reception of BAME writing in Britain from the fraught era of Thatcherism in the 1980s to the present. The project is particularly timely given the BL’s recent acquisition of the archive, the magazine’s celebration of 35 years of publishing and the scarcity of material currently available in tracking the history of this writing, including the early history of several now well-known figures, featured in the magazine long before they were to rise to national and global prominence. The prescience of the magazine’s mission in terms of its global vision and inclusive aim to diversify the canon will be illuminating in the context of postcolonial studies now and moves to decolonise the curriculum across the educational and publishing sectors.

• Race and the Body in Early Modern Drama and its Contemporary Performance

  King’s College London in collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe

  

  This project aims to produce an urgent revision of the critical study of the body in Shakespeare’s England and on stage by considering the relationship of race to the understanding of bodies in early modern culture – ‘urgent’ because of the persistence of the idea of a white ‘norm’ in such studies which looks very outdated in the context of recent research demonstrating the presence of non-white people in early modern England – and to assess the value of a recuperation of early modern notions of the racial body for the analysis of contemporary performance. The thesis will advance the field by conducting research in intersectional ways, combining methodologies such as historical phenomenology, critical race theory and performance studies. It will examine race in relation to Shakespearean/early modern drama through a range of topics including: the systems of the body, the relationship between dissection and the colonial enterprise, the performance of race on the early modern stage, cross-cultural encounters, black presence in Tudor/Stuart England, England’s role in the slave trade, and the ways in which the theatre acknowledged and represented these encounters; and it will reassess contemporary theatrical choices in respect of race in light of this new

• Inclusive Design for Shared Autonomous Vehicles

  Royal College of Art in collaboration with Tata Motors

  

  ‘Inclusive Design for Shared Autonomous Vehicles’ will explore and advance vehicle
  designs to meet the requirements of disabled, elderly and potentially marginalised users of
  shared autonomous transport systems, and investigate how supporting these users benefits
  the wider user population of such systems. Studies show that the early adopters of shared
  autonomous vehicles are likely to be these individuals because current transportation
  systems are not well equipped to support their needs, particularly in rural areas. Often public transport is not inclusive enough, door to door solutions are not well developed, and low-income users are unable to afford the customised personal mobility solutions. As implementation of autonomous transport systems accelerates, there is an opportunity for autonomous vehicles to increase the accessibility of public transport and reduce costs for marginalised populations by providing journey sharing, door to door pick-up and drop-off services and advanced journey scheduling. Inclusive design methods such as empathy,
  design anthropology and journey mapping will be key research approaches to observe, interpret and translate people’s needs into vehicle designs. The outputs of these studies will aim to benefit all vehicle users, making autonomous vehicle designs more widely available for the target populations and better for the entire travelling public.

• The Shared Gaze: Reimagining Sexual Reproduction through Visual Arts Practices

  Royal College of Art in collaboration with Birth Rites Collection

  

  The project will create a unique research platform between Royal College of Art (RCA) and the Birth Rites Collection (BRC) which is hosted by the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care, King’s College London. BRC is the only public art collection in the world that takes birth and the maternal as its subject and it is installed across four buildings on Guy’s campus. The Shared Gaze research project aims to bring the birthing body into view, considering the midwife’s highly skilled and yet often contested knowledge base through the frame of visual art. Viewing Tereze, 2016, Courtesy Birth Rites Collection

  In turn, the visual arts can, by foregrounding the role of the visual, view birth through aesthetics and cultural theory bringing wider questions and new knowledge to birth practitioners. This discursive space between the fields of midwifery and visual art is currently under represented in the overarching field of maternal studies. There is a need for a new interdisciplinary platform for researchers and industry specialists (health practitioners, policy makers, artists and curators) to work across sectors to challenge the historical invisibility of the birthing body in both the history of Western Art and also in a conventional medicalised birth setting which can often deny the agency of the productive birthing body. This project will allow a researcher to reflect upon and work with the Birth Rites Collection whilst being based at the RCA and it is envisaged that the contribution would be in the field of arts practice. It would be supervised between the Royal College of Art’s School of Arts and Humanities, the Birth Rites Collection Curator and King’s College London’s Women & Children’s Health department. Alongside Hermione Wiltshire, Senior Tutor in Photography at the RCA, the project will be advised by Helen Knowles BRC’s Curator, Elsa Montgomery, Senior Lecturer, Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care and Jane Sandall, Professor of Social Science and Women’s Health in the Department of Women and Children’s Health in the Faculty of Life Science and Medicine.

• The Cultural Value of the Natural Voice Approach to Group Singing

  Royal College of Music in collaboration with the Natural Voice Network

  photo credit Nick Landells

  

  In this project, the PhD student will analyse the impact and contribution of the Natural Voice Network (NVN) as a complex ‘grass roots’ UK network of singing practitioners. He/she will explore the network’s potential as a resource for ‘healthy publics’ (Hinchliffe et al., 2018) and cultural democracy (Gross et al., 2017), and examine the value of this kind of network as a means for realising the creative capabilities of a broad population, through a comprehensive analysis of its members’ and participants’ experiences.

  The project is conceived as three strands of inquiry. In the first strand, research which the NVN has contributed to will be reviewed and analysed, building a picture of its overall historical contribution. Themes emerging from these data will inform the design of a second strand, where Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods will build a picture of the phenomenon of group singing as experienced by NVN stakeholders, involving NVN members and participants in a workshop process of collaborative inquiry to unearth the knowledge contained in the network’s current practices. In the third strand, case studies of good practice drawn from the previous stages will be developed, and the project findings disseminated broadly across academic and practice networks.

• Creative AI as a medium in artistic and curatorial practice

  King’s College London in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries

  

  Ian Cheng Serpentine Gallery installation view BOB ©2018 Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries.

  Advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence have had a transformational impact on the corporate world, while the cultural sector has been slow to acquire an adequate media literacy. This has become an issue for contemporary art institutions due to the fact that Artificial Intelligence, especially machine learning, has become a creative medium for contemporary artists, while curators and cultural institutions working with contemporary culture also need to fulfil the important role to translate the societal impact this technology into a critical response. To understand the media literacy needed in cultural institutions working with artworks using creative AI, this project will analyse the complex ecology of digital commissions delivered by the Serpentine Galleries through participatory observation from a media and technology studies perspective thereby contributing to art gallery studies. A critical and creative response of artworks using creative AI is needed given the societal impact of this technology. Using the Creative AI lab initiated by the Serpentine Galleries and KCL as a platform to acquire interviews with other cultural institutions, artists, but also technology producers, the outcome of this project will contribute to the understanding of creative AI in media studies and also to deliver guidance and best practice for cultural institutions.

• Meat, masculinity and the marketplace: Smithfield in the late 20th century

  Queen Mary University London in collaboration with the Museum of London

  

  © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0The end of meat is coming, so say various Extinction Rebellion posters around London. In Smithfield, this is undeniably the case as the UK’s largest and longest-running wholesale market edges towards permanent closure. The western end of the so-called ‘Cathedral of Meat’ is being transformed to make space for a new Museum of London while market traders face relocation to the urban fringe. Time is running out and there is a vital history to be written. Smithfield Market is a unique and legendary place: a throwback to a disappearing London. It is a male dominated workplace where jobs still pass from father to son, and women are marginalised by a meaty masculine culture. And yet, the market endured in the post-war era by evolving with the city. It weathered the decline of high street butchers and the rise of supermarkets by supplying large numbers of kebab and chicken shops, accommodating religious preferences around meat, catering to changing demographics and cultural tastes, and upgrading in the 1990s to comply with EU standards. This collaboration will capture the recent history of Smithfield Market before it literally becomes a museum. Using archival material and oral history, it will document the livelihoods and culinary cultures it supported, using the site to understand wider transformations in London’s past and future.

• Liberate Rame: An Archival and Practice-based Revival of the Creative and Political Labour of the Actress, Theatre-maker, and Activist Franca Rame (1929-2013)

  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with State Archive/ MusALab Franca Rame Dario Fo.

  This studentship will re-assess the work of Italian actress, writer, theatre-maker, and political activist Franca Rame (1929-2013), now best known as wife and principal collaborator of Nobel Prize-winning performer and playwright, Dario Fo, by challenging the archival ‘gaps’ where her contributions ought to be found. The student will produce original research that makes visible Rame’s work and her crucial contribution to work attributed solely to Fo within the context of the occluded history of feminist practice and activism in the European theatre. The doctoral student will work with the archive of Rame and Fo’s work in Verona (MusALab) and participate fully in the postgraduate community of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (Central) and its vibrant research culture. Working with the archival team at MusALab and with experts in cultural theory and practice-led research at Central, the student will develop a skill set that enables them to move fluently between HEI contexts, archives, and theatre practice, and which is applicable in the job market beyond the arts or academia. The student will have the opportunity to contribute to the development and promotion of the MusALab archive, through knowledge exchange activity,
  including a dedicated symposium, workshops, and public events.

• From the Shadows: Black, Queer British theatre practitioners and institutional constraints to visibility, 1980-present

  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with The National Theatre (Black Plays Archive)

  From the Shadows critically assesses the presence and contributions of Black Queer British theatre practitioners throughout the last 40 years by piecing together, documenting and disseminating their histories. This project will produce primary research to support its aim of revealing the untold narratives of Black British LGBTQ+ theatre communities while critically evaluating why these lineages have historically lacked visibility. The doctoral student will work in collaboration with the team from the National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive (BPA) while studying as part of the postgraduate community of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and its eclectic research culture. The student will thus gain a thoroughgoing understanding of the research process, supported by Central’s expertise in both theatre theory and practice and the National Theatre’s expertise in archiving. To maximise public engagement and impact in this research, the student will develop digital educational resources for the BPA for use by established and emerging theatre companies. She will work with the National Theatre to address its historical omission of Black Queer theatre history in their programming and archive and, to support the NTs critical self-engagement, will curate exhibitions and talks around the thesis topic thereby disseminating its findings.

2019-20 Collaborative Doctoral Award Projects

• Defining Architectural Typologies Through Structural Topologies and Machine Learning

  Royal College of Art in collaboration with AKT II Consulting Structural and Civil Engineers

  

  Many buildings are in functional terms not defined by formal, but organisational and structural typologies. Especially structural design significantly determines both the external form and internal layout of a building. The potential of topological structural models to define more holistic architectural typologies and their implications for new construction and design processes that work across the scales of the building to that of the room or building element and component has been little researched. In order to undertake this research, however, a continuing divide between architects and structural engineers has to be overcome. Thus, the research asks: Can integrating a structural and architectural design process delineate new architectural building typologies that are defined by structural topologies, and do these provide useful design responses to social and economic needs in the building industry? Are these new architectural/structural models more effective when designing adaptable buildings required by increasingly changing building lifecycles and user demands? And, what are the performance parameters that define these typologies and topologies?

• Complex Cultural Ecologies: capturing value through connections between public, private and not-for-profit organisations in the creative economy

  King’s College London in collaboration with Creative United

  The UK policy framework regulating the publicly funded cultural organisations (PFCOs) has historically been connected but strongly distinct from the one of the creative and cultural industries (CCIs). The project aims to explore the connections existing between PFCOs and CCIs with a specific focus on London and its cultural ecology across public, private and not for profit organisations. Using a complexity science perspective and integrating qualitative methods with social network analysis, the project aims to map the collaborative networks connecting PFCOs and CCIs and reflect on the motivations and benefits behind these interconnections. It also aims to quantify the impact and value – economic, social and cultural – of these exchanges, looking at how public funding for culture channels through key cultural organisations create broader benefits for the private and not for profit sector in the CCIs.  The project will take as initial case studies a selection of major arts and cultural institutions and through snowballing and secondary dataset analysis map their ecologies. It is hoped the findings will help inform public policy towards culture and recognise their interconnections and synergies in a more consistent and transparent way.

• Women’s Ownership of Medical Knowledge in Tudor and Stuart England, 1485-1714

  

  School of Advanced Study in collaboration with Royal College of Physicians

  The work of women as medical practitioners – particularly of ‘domestic’ medicine inside the home – in early modern England has been conventionally underestimated. This is especially the case in Tudor and Stuart England, a 150-year period in which the practice of medicine formalised and transformed from folk medicine into science. Even after the first major hospital in Britain opened during the early Enlightenment in the 1720s, medicine was routinely performed by non-professional (male) medical practitioners and women provided casual medical care in domestic settings. Nuns ran conventual infirmaries and nursing orders, mothers wet-nursed, and women worked as midwives. Women were consumers, collectors, authors, and sharers of printed, manuscript, and oral medical knowledge. This PhD project aims to assess evidence of their knowledge networks, based on the rare books and archives of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) and supported by Institute of English Studies (IES), School of Advanced Study, University of London, the UK’s national centre for humanities research and a leading centre for book history.

  This PhD project will build on research into the history of women’s medical work by exploring evidence of women’s medical knowledge in the holdings of the RCP, supported by the IES’ expertise in book history. Through collections-based research, it will identify and assess provenance evidence of women’s access to or ownership of medical books and manuscripts to map women’s access to this knowledge, including for home cures. Concurrently, it will examine women as authors of medical texts and recipes, based on RCP holdings. This study will then compare medical information in the manuscripts to that in the printed texts, revealing the knowledge exchange between women who practiced medicine and the professional or licensed physicians who used the texts they wrote. This will allow the analysis of the reception history of women’s medical knowledge in early modern/pre-Enlightenment England. Finally, it will assess the RCP’s printed and manuscript corpora for evidence of women as medical practitioners.

• Musicians’ health and wellbeing: A study of health literacy and promotion in higher music education

  Royal College of Music in collaboration with British Association of Performing Arts Medicine

  

  Making music at the highest international levels can be immensely rewarding, but it is also challenging, with recent research highlighting numerous, pernicious ways in which practising and performing can affect musicians’ physical and mental health. A growing body of evidence now points to a need for more (and more effective) health education and promotion initiatives within music educational and professional settings.

  In collaboration with the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine (BAPAM), the project will evaluate sector-wide resources and best practice in health literacy, education and promotion within higher music education. It will consist of three strands:

  1. Mapping health and wellbeing assets and resources for musicians in UK higher education;
  2. Creating case studies of good practice in health literacy, education and promotion within UK higher education, informed by international best practice;
  3. Assessing parallels and differences between music and other performing arts in terms of health literacy, education and promotion, assessing the potential for positive, interdisciplinary exchange in supporting for performers’ health and wellbeing.
• ‘Playing in the Dark’: Interrogating Race, Gender and the Position of Women Playwrights in the Black Plays Archive

  

   

  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive

  This Studentship will re-assess the work of black British women playwrights over the past 60 years by challenging the archival ‘gaps’ that have left them marginalised in histories of modern British theatre.  The doctoral student will work with the National Theatre’s archive team on the Black Plays Archive (BPA) and participate fully in the postgraduate community of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (Central) and its vibrant research culture. The student will produce original research that sheds new light on how the intersections of race, gender and class shaped British theatre through research that makes visible the valuable contribution of black women playwrights to the history of British theatre. They will develop a skill set that enables them to move fluently between HEI contexts and archives, and which will be applicable in the job market beyond the arts or academia. The student will have the opportunity to contribute to the development and promotion of the BPA, through knowledge exchange activity, such as exhibition curation, public workshops and related education events. The student will gain a thoroughgoing understanding of the research process, supported by Central’s expertise in both theatre theory and practice and the National Theatre’s expertise in archiving.

• Hospitality as Intangible Cultural Heritage? Concept and Practice in La Chapelle, Paris

  

  Queen Mary University London in collaboration with PEROU (The Pole for Exploration of Urban Resources)

  Through sustained fieldwork in the northern Paris district of La Chapelle, this PhD will consider the actions and practices of hospitality and will establish whether and how hospitality can be considered to constitute an ‘intangible cultural heritage’ under the UNESCO framework for safe-guarding. The practice of hospitality is commonly held to transcend cultural differences, being recognizable on encounter for those who come from afar. Yet hospitality, like all social forms, is subject to cultural variance. This doctoral project will study the variations in modes of hospitality as it is enacted in an area of super linguistic and cultural diversity, at the hub of contemporary migration to and within Europe. Drawing on practices that traverse generations as well as faith and language groups, it will develop a comparative analysis of cultural representations and practices of welcome, drawing on situations of shared sustenance, narration and shelter. The research will investigate the claim that hospitality is a common and potentially universalisable practice, which, across its linguistic variation, can inform an understanding of intangible cultural heritage. The student will work closely with the PEROU, contributing to their UNESCO-oriented project and learning from their methodology as an embedded and experimental research unit.

• The Bengali Anti-Racist Movement: Mobilisation, institutionalisation and legacies of 1978

  Queen Mary University London in collaboration with Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives & The Bishopsgate Institute.

  

  During the evening of the 4 May 1978, a day of political tension amid local elections, Altab Ali, a 25-year-old Bengali leather garments worker, was brutally stabbed and murdered by three youths in a racially-motivated attack on Adler Street, close to Whitechapel Road in London’s East End. This prompted a summer of protest and political mobilisation where local Bengali organisations formed alliances with other political factions as part of an anti-fascist and anti-racist struggle. The scale of the movement was unprecedented, mobilising and forging alliances with anti-racist struggles across and beyond London and was crucial in its subsequent mainstream political recognition. The energy of the movement by the early 1980s was consolidated by the formation of Federation Bangladeshi Youth Organisations (FBYO), an umbrella body, that spearheaded campaigns for better housing, health, education and against racism. This process of turning inwards also led towards a slow institutionalisation of its key leaders. How to explain such a rapid process of mobilisation and institutionalisation of a movement that laid the basis for Bengali activism in London? Based on qualitative research involving interviews and archive analysis and through a collaboration with the Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives (THLHLA) and the Bishopsgate Institute (BI) the project will not only answer this question but provide a much-needed scholarly record of the political events surrounding 1978.

  With unique access to the people and archives of the era, this project will collaborate with the THLHLA and the BI in order to generate the first sustained attempt to study the mobilisations surrounding May 1978. Working with those who were part of the struggles in 1978 and bringing together disparate archival documentation of the events, this project will cast new light on the history of Bengali political activism and organising at this pivotal moment, documenting the experiences of those involved and seeking to better understand how and why the subsequent anti-racist movement mobilised in East London. The project involves a collaboration with two key metropolitan heritage institutions eager to deepen their engagement with and preserve the histories and struggles of local migrant communities that are currently under-represented in their collections. It will generate new materials to enhance and promote the archive of Bengali activism in East London and provide the resources for an exhibition, a series of public events, and the development of learning materials for schools”.

• The Art, Science and Philosophy of Electronic Music and Sound: The deconstruction of music through Daphne Oram and her contemporaries in the early British electronic music scene

  University College London in collaboration with Science Museum

  This project focuses on the musical aesthetics of Daphne Oram (1925 – 2003).  Oram was a composer, and musical theorist, central to the establishing of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. Although much has been written about her pioneering work in electronic music from an historical perspective, Oram’s philosophical conceptions of sound have been largely neglected. My PhD project sets out to establish a fuller understanding of her approach to composition and her Oramics graphic notation system, which will contribute to a richer scientific understanding of sound and music, both in praxis and in how composers conceive of it. Oram’s unique Oramics notation – a hybridization of graphics and sound – engenders an approach to the very conception of music and musical composition wholly different from standard musical notation.

  The project will give an interdisciplinary account of the philosophical implications of Oram’s work in relation to scientific approaches to sound studies and auditory perception, as well as a critical comparison of Oram’s work with other composer-led music technologies. It will explore how experimental technologies and techniques of electronic music composition, such as Oramics, can engage with current philosophical debates concerning the ontological categorization of sound.

  By combining the science, theory, and practice of electronic music, it is hoped that a more unified conception of composition, performance experience, and musical aesthetics can be achieved.

• The Shrine and the Marketplace: Religious Materiality in London during the Long Fifteenth Century (1370-1530)

  Queen Mary University London in collaboration with Museum of London

  The Museum of London holds one of the world’s leading collections of religious artefacts from late medieval and early modern England, a testimony to the buzzing religious and commercial creativity of the long fifteenth century. Dress accessories, household items, rings, or the ever-present pilgrim badges, gave lay women and men a hitherto unprecedented opportunity to engage with the divine.

  The Shrine and the Market Place is a collaborative doctoral project, joining the Museum of London and Queen Mary University of London. It put these objects centre-stage, combining the examination of their materiality with documentary evidence for their production, dissemination and use. This will be assisted by digital technologies both in the analysis and display of religious objects from late medieval and early modern London, making these little-known artefacts, their uses and histories, available to a wider public.

2018-19 Collaborative Doctoral Award Projects

• Shakespeare and the Stratford-upon-Avon Antiquarians

  University College London in collaboration with Shakespeare birthplace trust

  

  No other town in the United Kingdom boasts a local studies collection as rich and as focussed as Stratford-upon-Avon’s. Shakespeare has proved a catalyst of exceptional power for generating an extraordinary breadth of historical research. Collections of national and international significance have accrued in the archives of The SBT, encompassing both local history and Shakespeare Studies (especially in the areas of literary biography and cultural materialism). These include hundreds of notebooks, letters, transcriptions, maps, sketches, drawings, and other images. As we approach the centenary of the Dugdale Society (named after the pioneer who has some claim to be the first Stratford-upon-Avon antiquarian, Sir William Dugdale 1605-1686), the time seems right for us to propose a fresh overview and critique of the papers and collections relating to the Shakespearian antiquarians who devoted their energies to Stratford-upon-Avon, the better to understand their respective achievements. But the thesis will also identify new directions for research arising out of a deeper understanding of these important and underused archives. University College London, too, houses a cache of papers by the great nineteenth-century Shakespearian and Stratford-upon-Avon antiquarian, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, a resource which will play an underpinning part in this new collaboration between UCL and SBT.

  Remarkably, many of these papers have to date not been systematically explored. It is expected that the proposed research will reveal hitherto unnoticed, or long-forgotten, Shakespearian nuggets in the papers of the individuals themselves, or else will make critical connections between their work that in turn will afford new insights into Shakespeare’s life and that of his home town. The overarching framework of the proposed research is the systematic investigation of the papers, diaries, and publications of the Stratford antiquarians, in search of new information.

• Early Modern Knowledge Networks: Dr Williams’s French Books

  King’s College London in collaboration with Dr Williams’s Library

  

  The library of the Protestant dissenter Dr Daniel Williams (c. 1643-1716) features a substantial number of books and other material deriving from France, Spain and Italy, mostly relating to the early modern period. A catalogue published in 1727 indicates approximately 1,900 French books (books written in French and/or books with a French imprint often in Latin), with a wide variety of subjects including the Americas, European travel, philosophy, aesthetics and theology. There is some existing research, including by Dr Barry Taylor of the British Library, on the Spanish and Italian elements of the collection, but none on the French material.

  The aim of the collaborative PhD is to produce a digital catalogue of the French material in Dr Williams’s library through comparison of the 1727 printed catalogue with the books themselves and other catalogued versions, with details where possible of provenance, annotations, ownership, binding etc.

  Dr Williams’s library will provide training in bibliographic, cataloguing methods and descriptions of historic bookbinding.

  The collaborative PhD is an outstanding opportunity for a postgraduate research project which will be of lasting benefit in terms of the production of a research resource and scholarship on the material itself, which will enhance the profile of modern language knowledge, transmission and learning in the early modern period and beyond.

• Delivering Digital Data: Humanities Data Practices

  University College n collaboration with The National Archives

   

  

  In this new and emerging environment, where data is becoming more ubiquitous and the repositories holding it are proliferating more than ever before, the traditional skills of the curator (trusted stewardship and preservation, selection and interpretation) take on a new significance at the same time as they face challenge and change. This study seeks to map out existing and evolving Humanities data practices with particular emphasis on the changing relationship this implies between researchers and curators. It defines data practices as broadly as possible, including for example;

  • Mechanisms and procedures for gaining access to existing data sets through portals such as the UK Data Archive, the Administrative Data Research Centres, as well as through individual contacts and informal mechanisms.
  • The nature of data sets in use by or created by scholars in the Humanities with regards to size, format etc.
  • The creation of bespoke code and scripts to manipulate and analyse data sets
  • The preservation and provision of access to data sets and the quality of information facilitating their reuse.

  The mapping exercise will inform a work stream involving data delivery services desired by Humanities scholars in respect of those data sets held by The National Archives.