PhD Curious?

Are you curious about postgraduate doctoral study? Are you interest in supervising PhD doctoral research?

You are warmly invited to join ‘PhD Curious?’ Thursday 11 March, 6-8pm in room E002 (LVMH Lecture Theatre)

‘PhD Curious?’ is an opportunity to learn more about undertaking a PhD and supervising doctoral research at CSM/UAL from three PhD candidates and their supervision teams, and a celebration of postgraduate research across CSM three Schools of Thought.

Together they reflect on the joys, opportunities, and challenges of doctoral research, their work as team, on the insights gained through the respective research projects and their engagement and sharing with broader research and professional communities.

There will be a roundtable conversation followed by Q&A.

Conveners: Matt Malpass and Caterina Albano

Schedule:

6 -6.15pm: Welcome
6.15-7.15pm: Supervision teams presentations/conversations
7.15-7.50: Q&A
7.50-9pm: Drinks, Platform Bar

Participants:

Jenny Maxwell, UAL PhD candidate, Central Saint Martins, UAL

Research Project: ÁGUA VIVA and the curious incident of the jellyfish in the compost heap or Life, in process (A practice research creation story).

Jenny taught Art & Design for 10 years before becoming a professional musician. She then found herself gradually moving from song writing to creative writing as she studied Philosophy, pushing her practice into more experimental, fragmentary essays, poetry and prose.

Seeking to unsettle the hegemony of Western, sovereign-centric, binary driven thinking, her practice shifts from the personal to the collective via themes of loss and renewal, examining broader narratives of interconnected socio-political human and more-than-human encounters through practice-research-creation.

Her PhD is a verb that seeks to expand Autotheory as an embodied mode of performative art-writing, pushing at the boundaries of form to expand the metaphor of the rhizome, into what she calls 'an ecology of the heap'.

Christopher Kul-Want, MReS Art Course and Pathway Leader, Central Saint Martins

Rachel Marsden, Senior Lecturer in Creative Education

Christina Skarpari, PhD candidate, Central Saint Martins, UAL

Research Project: Tangible Changes in Intangible Cultural Heritage: sympraxis and the rejuvenation of endangered crafts in Cyprus.

I am an interdisciplinary artist, designer, curator and researcher working across socially engaged art/design, documentary photography and filmmaking, and curatorial practice. My work combines experimental methods to create participatory experiences that engage audiences, alongside community storytelling and poetic documentary. I hold an MA in Communication Design (CSM) and am a PhD candidate with an AHRC Techne Scholarship. My research focuses on collaborative and ethnographic methods, filmmaking, photography, and co-design practices with endangered craft heritage communities. Since 2016, I have taught in higher education, including CSM, LCC, Westminster University, and European University Cyprus.

I am the founder and artistic director of Xarkis NGO and Xarkis Festival, which have delivered over 30 projects fostering community participation and cultural innovation in Cyprus and beyond since 2013. I also serve as Vice-President of the Visual Artists and Art Theorists Association (phytorio), which is the largest association for self-employed artists and theorists in Cyprus, and part of a team representing Cypriot design and visual art NGOs, where I advocate for cultural workers’ rights on a governmental and parliamentary level.

Matt Malpass, Reader in Critical Design Practice, Central Saint Martis

Beth Cullen, Research Fellow, Westminster University

Ellen Rogers, PhD candidate, Central Saint Martins, UAL

Research project: Printing Melancholy; The Material History of Deborah Turbeville’s Darkroom Work.

Ellen Jane Rogers is a fashion and fine art photographer and printer, and Senior Lecturer in Photography at Ravensbourne University, London. She works primarily with analogue processes, including traditional darkroom printing and intaglio printmaking, with a practice grounded in material research, collaboration, the emotional register of photographic work, and an interest in the uncredited labour behind fashion images.

Her commercial and editorial clients include Vogue Italia, Harper’s Bazaar China, Vice, Tank, i-D, Alice Temperley, and Charlotte Olympia. She has led campaigns and produced commissioned work for institutions including the Ashmolean Museum and the Smithsonian.

Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory, Central Saint Martins,