PhD Studentship - People and Place: Immersive Storytelling in Culture and Heritage

The University of Greenwich invites applications for a fully funded PhD scholarship to undertake practice-based research into new ways to animate overlapping narratives of place via immersive audiovisual storytelling technologies: making visible, audible and tangible narratives and experiences that may have been overlooked, unexplored, marginalised or suppressed.

The University of Greenwich is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which has a complicated, layered, and contested history, including its role as a hub of empire and colonial power. It is the ideal site for a studentship that aims to make a distinctive and impactful contribution to decolonising research into cultural heritage and communities. 

The successful candidate should be passionate about cultural heritage and the potential of the latest digital arts to create engaging and affective experiences.  They will define and undertake a project to explore and develop particular applications of immersive audiovisual technologies, to document and narrate sites of cultural significance, bringing into the project both visitors and the people who use that place daily and generating new knowledge through practices of social engagement.

We have a network of existing partners the candidate may work with, as appropriate, and particularly welcome applications that include the UNESCO Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. We actively encourage proposals from researchers from marginalised and underrepresented communities.

The focus of the research should be not only the different pasts, presents of sites of culture and heritage,but also potential futures, including, for example, responding to de-colonisation, climate change, migration, sustainability and other evolving urban realities.

It will: 

A) prototype immersive audiovisual technology applications and narratives, which contribute to visitors’ and daily inhabitants’ experiences of place.

B) promote cultural relevance, sense of ownership and responsibility towards places of specific significance to culture and heritage

C) create tools for evaluation and assessment of applications for new immersive technologies

D) develop strategies for engagement and critique to ensure broader cultural narratives and access. 

Applied outputs of the research might include immersive audiovisual experiences, 360º films, locative media and augmented reality projects, site specific installations in public spaces.

The candidate will access immersive technologies afforded by the Creative Futures and Sound and Image Research Centres and the Shared Hub for Immersive Future Technologies (SHIFT), our AHRC funded practice led research facility. These include a spatial audio studio, digital immersive theatre, a virtual production film studio, as well as spatial modelling, 360º filmmaking and other VR and AR technologies.

Proposals should address: 

• Any conceptual approaches you’d like to explore and their articulation through practice
• Potential cultural partners or sites you’d like to work with.
• Possible outputs from the project (creative works and/or written)
• The experience and skills you will bring to the project

The successful candidate will be supervised and supported by Dr Rosamund Davies, Dr Brona Martin and Professor Misha Myers, alongside a community of researchers who have a track record in world leading practice-led research that investigates and employs creative technologies, models and platforms in a way that is equitable, inclusive and socially engaged. This includes location-specific performance game for smartphone Nobody’s Ocean; EU Social Fund II project Designing Landscape Narrative Experience with Locative Media; locative narrative fiction project Story Cities: a city guide for the imagination; sonic heritage project Sonic Palimpsest, and ethnographic and community based oral histories research project The Record Store & Black Music, A UK History.

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