The Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities hosts an annual Doctoral Research Showcase to illustrate the innovative research being undertaken by arts & humanities doctoral researchers across Scotland.
For 2022, the Showcase was once again an in-person exhibit after a two year hiatus, and we are delighted to share below a digital overview of the five diverse, exciting and pioneering projects that were featured. Access each research project by clicking the profiles below.
RESEARCHERS
How does a community rebuild after a breach of trust? How do individuals displaced from their homes because of abuse, trauma, or shifting values forge new communities where they feel safe and supported? Hear Us Now is part of my doctoral research in developing ways to make portrayals of trauma in literature more empowering for survivors and communities.
Austin is a Visual Developer and VR Researcher based in Scotland with a BA in Media Arts and Animation and MSc in Serious Games and Virtual Reality. He is currently pursuing a PhD in cinematic storytelling in VR and narrative engagement.
My project aims to recover the reading practices and bookish experiences of queer women and gender-nonconforming people in the nineteenth century. I work with the diaries, letters, and book reviews of some key queer figures, such as Anne Lister, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Mary Diana Dods/Walter Sholto Douglas. I draw on queer/trans theory, theories of lifewriting, and the digital humanities in reinterpreting these people’s lives and work.
PRAXIS is a critical reapprehension of the structural dynamics of Western superhero comics, particularly Marvel’s X-Men. Following Grant Morrison’s New X-Men (2012), which interrogates the binary dynamics faced by the previously marginalised mutant community, PRAXIS follows a group of queer ‘expe’ (extraordinary people) students who set out to discover the truth of their world for themselves.
My PhD project Performing Stragismo and Counter-spectacularisation: Italian Terrorism and Its Legacies aims to demonstrate the importance of spectacularity in shaping the collective memory of a traumatic past. Through a practice-led research – which included, so far, 27 hours of interviews with Italian women who were young adults in the Seventies – I investigate the reasons behind Italy’s divided memory (Foot, 2009).