DEADLINE 22 March 2013

 

The ICA: A History of the Contemporary

This Collaborative Doctoral Award is supported by the partnership between Middlesex University and the ICA. The purpose is to construct a narrative around the 60 year history of the Institute, based on archives held at Tate and at the ICA. The project also includes the opportunity to undertake an oral history of this important cultural organisation.

Supervisors: Professor Anne Massey, Professor Hilary Robinson and Matt Williams (ICA)

Telling Tales: Architecture and Narrative

This interdisciplinary studentship offers the opportunity to work across interior design practice alongside creative writing. Exploring the spaces and places of the interior through the lens of unfolding narratives, the project considers the theory and practice of design writing and asks, how can the practice of fiction writing support the practice of architectural design?

Supervisors: Dr Maggie Butt and Naomi House

Biographies and Space: Placing the Subject in Design and Architecture

Working between life writing and designed space, this project investigates the biographical traces within architecture, its taxonomies and histories. How can specific subjects be used to explain sets of cultural, social and spatial relationships?

Supervisors: Professor Dana Arnold; Professor Anne Massey and Graeme Brooker

Photography as a Mode of Enquiry

Photography practice often reflects or responds to research undertaken to inform it. Practice-led photography research provides a contribution to our understanding of the medium itself. However, photography practice is a mode of enquiry itself, leading to embodied knowledge and understanding as a contribution used by researchers in other fields and disciplines. We are seeking studentship project proposals that explore the contribution made by practice enquiry to the research problems normally explored through other modes (such as historiography, ethnography, art and communication theory, philosophy).

Supervisors: Professor Damian Sutton; Professor Richard Billingham; Dr Anne Burke

Animation Performance, Exhibition and Installation

This interdisciplinary studentship explores theory and practice of animation as a central component in performance, museum exhibitions and installation art. Themes and related disciplines include public art, dance, opera and theatre, curatorship and visual narrative.

Supervisor: Professor Suzanne Buchan

Animation as Document: Science, History and Technology

Animated sequences in moving image productions often provide visual explanations of abstract concepts, natural phenomena, scientific knowledge, cultural and historical events and the workings of technology. This studentship investigates how animation enhances knowledge in a range of disciplines and cultural products.

Supervisor: Professor Suzanne Buchan

Feminism – Art – Theory – Practice

The intersection between feminism, art, and theory is rich with possibilities for either mixed-mode or historically and theoretically based PhD research. This studentship engages either contemporary practice, or art history since the start of the modern women’s movement in the 1960s. Projects which engage feminist thinking with issues of class, race, decolonisation, and other forms of activism are also encouraged, as are projects that focus upon major thinkers and makers (Pollock, Lippard, Kelly, Schneemann, etc). Projects that focus on the history of the British and Irish women’s art movements, as distinct from the American movement, are of interest.

Supervisor: Professor Hilary Robinson

Critical creative practices informed by archives, histories, theories of postcolonialism, afro-modernism, diaspora, migration, and globalisation

Critical creative practices informed by ideas and discourses around archives, histories, and theories of postcolonialism, afro-modernism, diaspora, migration, and globalisation, are central to an understanding of the contemporary visual arts environment. This Studentship offers an opportunity to undertake a period of detailed practice-research that engages with some of the above issues, leading to a mixed mode PhD or Arts Doctorate. Proposals from artists working across a range of disciplines are particularly welcome.

Supervisors: Professor Sonia Boyce, Dr susan pui san lok and Keith Piper