It’s been quite a while since I
last posted an update on what I’m doing professionally – not really since my
post on Blast Theory back in December, where I volunteered after finishing my
Masters degree.
Since December, I’ve been in the
process of applying to do a PhD at Royal Holloway University in London.
Full-time PhDs are typically three years long, and require you to carry out a
full-length research project followed by a written thesis. It’s a big
commitment in terms of time, effort, and money, so I needed to have a clear idea
and plan of what I wanted to research, and how I was going to go about it.
During my Masters degree I’d
heard about practice-based PhDs, which means that the project is based on
producing a practical work of some sort (e.g. an artwork, event, performance,
etc.), and then writing a discussion of that work – shorter than the usual
length of PhD theses – in relation to other academic and practical developments
in the field. As it has long been an aim of mine to enter the art world through
academia, connecting the two together, the practice-based approach appealed to
me as a way of getting experience in undertaking an art project from start to
finish, while also continuing to nurture my academic interests and knowledge within
cultural geography.
My project idea centres on making
a mixed-reality game that uses environmental storytelling – the telling of
stories through, and in relation to, your surroundings – to investigate the
ways in which places become meaningful to people. The design of the game would
invoke a kind of treasure hunt format using geolocation. People would have to find
certain locations that, when reached, would trigger media (e.g. text, audio,
images) to be communicated by a device to tell stories about the places you’re
exploring. By walking their own paths between the locations, and potentially
contributing their own stories, players would be able to perform into being
their own relationships with the places they journey though. To keep it within a
manageable scale, I anticipated that the game would be set in one parish within
the Canterbury district, or potentially throughout the whole district,
depending on what form the game ends up taking. This setting also draws on the
theme of pilgrimage – as a way of using walking to emotionally connect with
places – and the history/mythology of storytelling from Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales.
To complete a PhD, you need
funding to cover not only three years of tuition fees, but three years of
maintenance to cover living costs, and sometimes costs involved in doing the
research itself. Most students apply to funding bodies to get this, such as
research councils or doctoral training partnerships/centres. Originally, I
intended to apply for funding from the TECHNE Doctoral Training Partnership,
which is funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), whose
deadline was at the end of January. This funding was particularly well-suited
to my project, as it is intended for experimental, interdisciplinary research projects
that will ensure the significance of arts and humanities research in the
future.
However, after making initial
contact with my prospective supervisor, it became clear that it would be
impossible to complete everything that was required for the TECHNE funding by
the deadline, especially as he thought that the project would require a
supervisor from the university’s Media Arts department, as well as Geography.
Fortunately, my supervisor pointed me towards a different funding source with a
much more achievable deadline in April. This was the Leverhulme Trust’s Magna
Carta Doctoral Centre, which funds projects related to ‘freedom and the rights
of the individual in the digital age’.
From February onwards, my
supervisor began talking to the Media Arts department to see if anyone there
would be interested in co-supervising my project. Happily, my project generated
a lot of interest in the department, and by mid-April both my Geography and
Media Arts supervisors were on board and ready to complete the Leverhulme
application. This consisted of writing two sides of A4 outlining the project,
supervisory team, relation of the project to the theme of the Magna Carta
centre, and the impact the research would have. Yet unlike the TECHNE funding,
the application had to come from the supervisors, not the student. As I had
devised the project, I was still able to give lots of input on the details of
what I’d be doing, and ideas of how we could relate it to the theme of ‘freedom’.
How else did I occupy myself
during this time? Well, for starters I worked on the university PhD application,
which is separate from funding applications, and needs to be completed to
ensure that you can get a place to study at the institution. Once supervisors
have agreed to supervise your project, this is more or less a formality to
ensure you have the required grades/experience and so on, and to gather all
your details into one place. It still required a fair amount of work, though, including
a 2,000-word research proposal and supporting statement, as well as numerous
form-filling exercises.
Alongside this, I’ve been building
on the skills I’ll need for the PhD project. Firstly, I’ve been learning to
code using Harvard’s free ‘Introduction to Computer Science’ course called
CS50, as well as other resources. Depending on what form the game ends up
taking, the project could involve making my own app, or working with an app
developer, so some programming knowledge would be essential. I’ve also been
practicing and improving my creative writing, a skill I’ll need to make the stories
I tell through the game engaging. As well as writing pieces for this blog, I’ve
been reading an excellent book called The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to develop
their creative writing skills. It’s a hefty tome but is remarkably digestible,
which often isn’t the case with books aimed at ‘teaching’ you something.
Then there’s also been plenty of
activities unrelated to my PhD plans. I wrote an article on the regulation of
busking and public space for the Manifesto Club, which I also posted on this blog.
In April, I attended a three-day ‘Living Freedom’ school in London, which was a
series of lectures and discussions hosted by the Institute of Ideas on
different concepts and issues around freedom, followed by lively debates and panel
sessions. It was an engrossing experience that taught me lots about
philosophies of freedom, which I’d been keen to know more about as my work on
the regulation of public space intersects with many of these debates. And then,
as you’ll know if you’ve seen my last couple of blog posts, I travelled to
California for two weeks with my Mum to visit my brother, who lives over there.
All these events bring us up to
mid-May, when I was due to hear the outcome of the Leverhulme application. The
result: revise and resubmit. The Magna Carta Centre listed some elements of the
project they wanted us to elaborate on, and asked us to address these in a new
submission for a deadline in June. It was a frustrating outcome, given how long
I’d already been waiting for a resolution on my future for the coming academic
year. It also gave my supervisors extra workload during a busy period of
marking in exam season. And by the time we had addressed all the Centre’s
concerns as best as possible, I was a little uncomfortable with the way my
proposed project had been pulled away from the initial vision I had.
In the meantime, I received an
unconditional offer to study for my PhD at Royal Holloway, which meant that my
place at the university was secure - I just needed to get the funding to pay my fees and support myself. I also used this time
to continue improving my coding and creative writing skills.
We heard the final outcome at the
beginning of July, when I found out our application was unsuccessful. By this point,
though, I wasn’t worried about the result either way. I knew I could probably defer acceptance of my offer until next year if necessary, and realised that another
year would give me the opportunity to complete an application for the TECHNE
funding, which was a much better fit for my project. It would provide me with
more opportunities for training, forming connections with people/organisations
across the cultural sector, and has more funds available for research costs.
Additionally, this funding source would give me much more leeway to plan the
project in line with my own ideas, as it is specifically intended for
experimental projects, and doesn’t force me into the intellectual
straightjacket of relating the project to ‘freedom’. Finally, it meant I could
use the extra year I have before starting to get more valuable experience working in the arts, which I could
take forward into my PhD and beyond.
Now that the PhD process is on
hold for the time being, my main task is preparing to present my research on
walking simulator video games at the Royal Geographical Society International
Conference at the end of August. I have to give a 15-minute presentation
followed by 5 minutes for questions, as one of 10 speakers talking over two
sessions on Geographies of Video Games at the conference. It’s quite
challenging to condense a research project for which I wrote a 15,000-word
dissertation into around 1,500 words (assuming roughly 100 words a minute),
while also ensuring that my main points are clearly communicated, and that the
presentation is delivered in an engaging way.
I’m also currently searching and
applying for jobs in the arts that will tide me over until next September,
while giving me the kind of professional experience I’m looking for. Positions
in the arts – particularly paid ones – are incredibly competitive, but my
vision for what I want to create in the coming years is more than enough to
keep me motivated.
So it has been, and remains, a
very busy time for me. It’s still exciting, even though the timescales in which
events have unfolded weren’t always what I was expecting. I’m able to see the
positives in the way things have worked out since the beginning of the year. And,
most importantly, I’m convinced that in twelve months’ time I’ll be in a far
better position to embark on a project that will hopefully be the start of
something much more significant.
