Funded Practice-based PhD: Healthy peatland landscapes
Healthy peatland landscapes: a transdisciplinary practice-based enquiry
Funded Practice-based PhD
Deadline for Applications: 3 July
Applications are now invited for a three-year PhD studentship. Open to UK, EU and non-EU students.
Director of Studies: Dr Angela Piccini
2nd Supervisor: Professor Ralph Fyfe
3rd Supervisor: Dr Ben Gearey, University College Cork
Other supervisor: Dr Maureen O’Connor, University College Cork
Peatlands occupy a critical position within current climate change policy debates. They are part of interlinked systems of landscape health.
These ecosystems are spaces in which arts, humanities, and science research practices entangle. In Ireland and southwest England, transdisciplinary responses to peatlands address their intersecting social, political, cultural, and ecological narratives and materialities. They are more than just receptacles for carbon: as O’Connor and Gearey (2021) suggest, the ‘cracked and wounded’ bodies of peat and human offer opportunities for us to approach unknowable futures in ways that demand human and non-human solidarities and reciprocities.
This practice-based art & media PhD will investigate and respond to the institutional, disciplinary and societal challenges of co-creating transformational knowledge across and through sectoral boundaries, using the particular case of peatlands. The successful candidate will have a strong background in science-art collaboration, with a particular focus on ecological methods and approaches, including fieldwork.
The project will be based at University of Plymouth, on the southwest coast of England, and take a site-based approach to asking:
How might systems thinking and artistic practice-as-research offer transdisciplinary policy solutions for sustainable healthy landscapes?
How might artistic practice extend, complicate and contribute to peatland research, with a particular focus on reciprocal ethics of care?
How might a collaboration between creative practice, scientific research, and diverse publics in peatland settings offer opportunities for engagement in and impact on understandings of ‘healthy landscapes’?
How might paleoecology and environmental archaeology methods, techniques and data transform artistic practice-as-research?
How might interdisciplinary approaches to site-based and community- involved/co-produced research impact on discipline-specific knowledge?
The successful candidate will be awarded a studentship for 3 years which covers fees, stipend (non-taxable £16,062 per year – increasing in-line with UKRI) and funding to cover research costs (£1,500 per year). A discrete annual travel/collaboration budget between UCC-UoP will also be available.
For an informal conversation about the project, please contact Angela Piccini (angela.piccini@plymouth.ac.uk)