Inclusive PhD Scholarships Programme

Funding Details

Funding Minimum

Fees and stipend at UKRI rate up to 4 years of funding. Plus Research Training and Support Grant in line with the mean grant provided across the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (£1300).

Funding Maximum

Fees and stipend at UKRI rate up to 4 years of funding. Internship opportunities are also available to support students in gaining valuable employability skills, with an additional £2000 available to support uptake of an any unpaid/modestly paid internship.

In order to accelerate support, and enhance opportunities for under-represented groups, the Cardiff University College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences has recently announced its Inclusive PhD Scholarships Programme. The studentships are aimed at applicants who identify as Black, Asian, or minority ethnic heritage, including people of mixed race/ethnic background who are British nationals and domiciled in the UK. The programme includes a number of predetermined projects as well as an open competition where applicants can determine their own projects.

The School of English, Communication and Philosophy is offering two pre-determined projects as part of the inclusive scholarship programme: 

The Loss of Innocence: Resistance and Rebellion in the Multimedia Poetry of Caleb Femi and William Blake supervised by Dr Jane Moore and Dr Alix Beeston.

And

Injustices in Mental Health Diagnoses and Treatment supervised by Dr Anneli Jefferson and Dr Lucy Osler

If you fulfil the eligibility criteria and are interested in either of these projects, please contact the relevant supervisors in the first instance.

The application deadline is Thursday 28 March 2024. For information on the open competition and how to apply please see Inclusive PhD Scholarships Programme.

1. The Loss of Innocence: Resistance and Rebellion in the Multimedia Poetry of Caleb Femi and William Blake

This project offers you an opportunity to explore the multimedia work of one of the most important contemporary Black British poets—and to reimagine the canon of Romantic poetry for artists, readers and students today.

Summary

How does the revelatory poetry of childhood by the London British-Nigerian poet, photographer, film director and musician Caleb Femi (born 1990) resituate Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789 and 1794) by the radical visionary poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827)?

London poets both, Blake saw his first vision while walking on Peckham-Rye at the age of 8—while Femi, aged 7, left his grandmother’s home in Nigeria to join his parents on the North Peckham Estate. A former London laureate for young people, Femi’s first poetry collection, Poor (2020), with illustrations, echoes the form of Blake’s ‘illuminated books’ and shares Blake’s defiant questioning of, in Femi’s words, ‘how innocence works and what the loss of innocence does’. As the contemporary poet has said: ‘I was trying to contribute to the work of the Romantics.’

Involving the study of poetry, film, book illustration and photography, this project will allow you to develop your interest in any or all of these art forms as you research the experience of being young and disenfranchised in 21st century Britain. You’ll contribute to current efforts to diversify the curriculum and to establish the relevance of literary Romanticism in our cultural moment.

Aims

This project aims to contribute to current attempts in Romanticist studies to diversify the curriculum and to embrace material from texts past and present on representations of childhood innocence and experience. It seeks to demonstrate the relevance of Blake’s Romanticism to contemporary poetry, visual illustration, photography, film and music, focussing on, but not necessarily limited to, Femi’s metropolitan poetics of resistance.

Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, Blake’s iconoclastic approach to poetry, music and art has parallels in the poetry, music and art of Caleb Femi. You will produce the first sustained comparative analysis of these two poets of rebellion and resistance, who share a facility in working across media and genres, a close connection to Peckham, and signal interests in youth, innocence and experience.

Working across two distinct and important moments in the history of politically engaged, multimodal poetry, you’ll develop historically sensitive and creative methods for bridging the divides of time and media. You’ll position yourself at the cutting edge of efforts to diversify the canon of British poetry, establishing the value of scholarship that reinterprets the past and provides new avenues for understanding the present.

Not only that, but this project will offer you opportunities to make poetry relevant and alive for a diverse range of people inside and outside of the university, especially young people. You’ll engage with archival and other research materials in a manner that is accessible and appealing to wide audiences, and you’ll develop links with local arts organisations and secondary schools in Cardiff and beyond to share your work. The supervisory team will guide you to connect and visit with schools and other organisations. They’ll also draw on their experience of public engagement in supporting you to invite Caleb Femi to the university and to host him at one or more public poetry and music events.

Fostering your career development and leadership skills will be a key priority of the supervisory team, who will ensure that you develop diverse work and academic experience. You’ll also have access to training offered by Cardiff University’s Doctoral Academy.

Research questions

• How does bringing together the work of Caleb Femi and William Blake develop current critical approaches to contemporary and Romantic poetry?
• What does it mean to create a decolonised interpretation of Romantic-period literature and how is this achieved through a multimedia approach?
• How does an integrated approach to Femi and Blake allow for a reconceptualisation of the relevance of Romanticism in contemporary culture?
• What is the relationship between the printed word and the visual text?
• How is lyricism and music (or lyricism within music) conceptualised as beauty and resistance to power?
• How does Femi’s representation of Peckham ‘road culture’ relate to Blake’s representation of London?
• How do constructions of blackness as a colour and blackness as a localised community identity relate to concepts of Englishness/Britishness?
• What features characterise the representation of childhood (e.g., social class, gender, ethnicity) and the possibilities for resistance and rebellion when the texts in question are by artists of different cultural heritages from different historical periods?

Sources

• William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789 and 1794)
• Caleb Femi, Poor (2020)
• William Blake, The William Blake Archive (https://www.blakearchive.org/)
• Caleb Femi, short videos on social media, e.g. And They Knew Light (2017), Wishbone (2018), Secret Life of Gs (2019), and Survivor’s Guilt (2020)
• Caleb Femi, TED talk for TEDxPeckham: Roadman or Man on the Road
• Caleb Femi, ‘MAKING IT’ series with @Shure and @Mixcloud on Facebook 

2. Injustices in Mental Health Diagnoses and Treatment

Mental health diagnoses are not equally distributed across the population, let alone across different countries and cultures.

For example, in the UK there is a higher rate of psychosis diagnoses in young black men than in white men, a higher suicide risk among older South East Asian women, and young white women are most likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder.

In this project, you'll explore how ethnic minorities can suffer stigmatisation both for their race and for their mental health condition.

Summary

There is increasing recognition that race and ethnicity can affect the diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions, and whether people seek out and are able to access treatment. On the one hand, stereotypes, stigmatisation, and lack of cultural understanding can lead to misdiagnosis, lack of understanding, or non-recognition of a mental health condition. On the other hand, cultural factors can shape how a mental health condition is experienced and expressed. In this way, race, ethnicity, and culture play a role in who is diagnosed with a mental health condition and what diagnosis and treatment they receive.

The 5th Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health’s Text Revision now explicitly points to the importance of avoiding any misdiagnosis which may result from lack of sensitivity to the way cultural factors affect both the expression of mental health issues and how behaviour is categorised by clinicians. While this is an important corrective that acknowledges the challenges and biases that affect diagnosis and treatment, we are left with a host of questions regarding the underlying reasons for diagnostic differences, the impact of such differences on individuals and communities, and how they might be addressed.

In this philosophical project, you’ll investigate how cultural, class, and systemic factors shape, influence, and even mask how mental health conditions manifest, are experienced, diagnosed, and treated.

Aims

The aims of this project are to:

• investigate the role cultural, class, and systemic factors play in mental health diagnosis and healthcare
• explore how stereotypes and stigmatisation linked to ethnicity and race impact diagnosis
• show how cultural factors influence how symptoms of mental health conditions manifest and are expressed
• analyse how perceptions and preconceptions concerning mental health that are prevalent within a community can affect an individual’s willingness and ability to seek medical help
• improve our understanding of how diagnostic differences arise out of and result in injustice
• consider the impact of injustices in mental health condition diagnosis both for individuals and communities

Based on your research interests, you could pursue these aims through the lens of a specific issue (e.g., misdiagnosis), a specific group (e.g, young Black men in the UK), and/or a specific mental health condition (e.g., schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa), or take a broader, more general approach.

Research questions

The project could include addressing some of the following questions, though there is scope for tailoring them to your own research interests within the overall remit of the project.

• How does the perception of mental ill health within an ethnic group affect the presentation of mental health problems?
• How do cultural factors and preconceptions about specific mental health interact to create situations of epistemic injustice?
• What are the cultural factors that lead to the high incidence of psychosis diagnosis in young black men?
• When does being diagnosed more commonly constitute an injustice and when do less frequent diagnoses constitute the injustice?

Sources and materials

This project is primarily philosophical and will involve drawing on philosophical work on topics such as mental health, stigma and recognition, and epistemic injustice, as well as work from psychiatry and sociology. You’ll also be encouraged and supported in engaging with relevant mental health charities and providers.

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