Arts, re-localism and the city
The deadline for 2012 Doctoral College Studentships has now passed.
The Brighton Doctoral College is pleased to welcome applications from self-funded or externally sponsored students for programmes of research in this or a closely related area, beginning from September 2012. Applications are welcome from students wishing to study full time or part time, and applications are welcome from students in employment who have the support of their employers.
- Based in the Faculty of Arts
- Supervisors: Professor Steven Miles; Professor Andrew Church; Professor Neil Ravenscroft.
Application deadline
The university cannot guarantee that students can start at their requested date unless deadlines are met.
- UK/EU students: The deadline for the university to receive applications for an entry date of October is the 1 August, for January entry it is the 1 November and for May it is the 1 March.
- International students: The deadline for the university to receive applications for an entry date of October is the 1 June, for January entry it is the 1 September and for May it is the 1 January.
The Faculty of Arts seeks PhD proposals concerned with the relationship between localism and the arts in the framing of the city as a site of social, community connection that has the potential to impact on cultural place-making and the everyday experience of city dwelling.
Noting the increasing propensity of grassroots arts-led interventions into city life and the way in which these interventions often deploy unsanctioned guerilla tactics as a form of participatory activism, we invite proposals that seek to critically engage with what is an increasingly significant phenomena: ‘re-localism’ - the global return to cities as a site of community cohesion via grassroots arts-based socially-orientated initiatives.
In recent years debates around the role of creativity and culture as levers of economic development in cities have tended to focus on the transformative effect of attracting the ‘Creative Classes’ to the city or the regenerative (and some might say) unproven benefits of culture-led regeneration via the ‘Bilbao-effect’. The proposed studentship will provide an antidote to such a macro-approach and as such will provide an opportunity for the successful applicant to explore the role of the arts in forging the post-industrial city at the level of the everyday. The focus here is on the potential of arts-driven ‘re-localism’ projects to act as a catalyst for the re-emergence of a socially committed city.
The city of Brighton arguably provides something of a focal point for the above process. We would welcome proposals that seek to investigate the apparently significant role of the arts in re-localism. We are especially interested in potential projects that incorporate a comparative element in order that the benefits of this research can be applied more broadly. We would anticipate that such proposals would be inter-disciplinary in nature and welcome submissions from a range of disciplines including geographers, sociologists, cultural policy researchers and arts researchers who can demonstrate a critical and creative engagement with the above issues.
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