PhD Studentship

Applications are invited for a 3-year full-time PhD studentship to be held at University College London in the field of Museum Studies / Museum Anthropology / Digital Heritage. The studentship is associated with a large project funded under the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s ‘Beyond Text’ programme, which is concerned with innovating ‘digital curatorship’ in relation to Sierra Leonean collections dispersed in the global museumscape. The project considers how objects that have become isolated from the oral and performative contexts that originally animated them can be reanimated in digital space alongside associated images, video clips, sounds, texts and other media. In partnership with the Department of Informatics at Sussex University, as well as the British Museum, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Glasgow Museums and collaborating institutions in Sierra Leone, a digital heritage resource will be created that utilizes social networking technologies to reconnect objects with disparate communities and foster reciprocal knowledge exchange across boundaries. Whereas the practice of ‘digital repatriation’ has become increasingly popular with museums, the reception of such initiatives by source communities has not been critically assessed. Thus, a crucial part of the project will be to employ innovative participatory methods to pilot and evaluate the digital resource in Sierra Leone. ...more