Co-Creating Collections for Priority and Future Audiences: Socially Engaged Photography and Small to Medium Sized Public Organisations is a new Collaborative Doctoral Award between the photography department at Birmingham City University and the Open Eye Gallery Liverpool with support from Coventry University.
The CDA is a unique opportunity for a practice-based researcher to work in the context of a live national partnership project supported by an internationally recognized, cross institutional supervisory team within the context of the UK’s leading socially engaged public photography programme. Based at the Open Eye Gallery, with access to two additional national collections housed at museums across Aberdeenshire local authority, Scotland and Armagh local authority, Northern Ireland, this CDA invites candidates to think through the challenges faced by small-to-medium art organisations in how they use and build meaningful and accessible collections through socially engaged processes.
We invite candidates to explore, test and develop new methods and strategies for creatively and critically responding to and expanding upon the indicative enquiry of how artists and curators may reactivate and develop collections for new and emerging communities within the context of a smallmedium sized organisation. Located within an interdisciplinary framework of social practice, photography, and archiving, it is expected that the successful candidate will be driven to develop new knowledge within the methodological and theoretical aspects of socially engaged photography, archival research and more broadly, museology. Applicants should have knowledge or a willingness to develop/acquire skills in these fields as well as autoethnographic approaches to fieldwork and sitewriting ethnographies through a method best suited to the candidate and environments, as well as typical methodological approaches to community-engagement, such as photovoice and photo/image elicitation. Findings and outcomes that could be realised are exhibition planning/delivery, community engagement strategies and/or archival practice.
Candidates will be expected to work with the Head of Social Practice at Open Eye Gallery (OEG), Elizabeth Wewiora as well as Dr Gary Bratchford (BCU) and Anthony Luvera (Coventry). Working onsite at the gallery and supported by their supervisory team (university-based), and site-specific and remote supervisions, candidates will have relevant training on archival access and ethics (OEG) and peer support via the galleries national programme and the Socially Engaged Photography Network (SEPN). BCU will provide relevant study-skills support and automatically enrol the candidate in the Art Activisms research cluster to further underpin the peer-support framework. The co-design of the project will ensure the candidate will be supported by internationally recognised scholars within the project’s related disciplines to ensure maximum impact and value for the candidate to realise their potential within a project of national significance. OEG will also commit to employing the successful CDA candidate, post CDA completion for 1-day a week for the following 12 months.
Candidates will be expected to have an MA in a relevant field/discipline such as photography, art, social practice, archiving and collection-management (both analogue and digital), curatorial practice, visual sociology, or visual anthropology and/or relevant experience working in these sectors. Candidates should also have a grasp of research methods as appropriate to the project, with specific emphasis on participatory approaches and be comfortable working with a range of community groups. Whilst based at Birmingham City University, a proportion of time will be spent in Liverpool, and if applicable, Scotland and Northern Ireland. A willingness to travel and spend time in these locations is necessary, though the candidate does not have to be based in any of these locations. The focus of the project can be exclusively on this tri-national partnership and the work that unfolds as a result or can be on a set of specific site/case studies informed by this CDA.
Please email the lead university supervisor if you want to find out more about this CDA project: Gary.bratchford@bcu.ac.uk.
All information about the M4C offer and application process (including guidelines for applicants) can be found at midlands4cities.ac.uk.
Prospective applicants interested in applying for an award with BCU as their home institution should read and follow the guidance at bcu.ac.uk.
BCU will be co-ordinating potential applications through an Expression of Interest system. The deadline for EOIs is 15 November 2024. Applications are due 13 January 2025, with shortlisting and interviews taking place in mid/late February.
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