PhD Scholarship - Learning with the Land

More information about this scholarship

The PhD is nested within The Learning with the Land international a/r/tographic project that expands on an international community of practice in eight sites located in Canada and Australia. The broad aim of the project is to study how the arts can challenge Western-centric understandings of land and provoke meaningful dialogue, storytelling, and action towards decolonizing arts education and research.

We seek applications from creative practitioners and artist / designer educators who wish to respond to the urgent need for innovative models of education, learning, teaching, and scholarship that create and examine human-land relationships as collective expression grounded in movement of thought (theory) and body (practices).

The proposed PhD project will investigate:

1. The potentiality of the arts, digital methods, and speculative a/r/tography, for provoking complex conversations about reciprocity, reconciliation, and Indigenous-settler relations in teacher education as they relate to land, culture, and sustainability, and establishing a body of research that documents the possibility of this endeavour; and,
2. Mobilising knowledges including artistic spaces and digital/virtual places.

The successful candidate will work with Dr Kathryn Coleman and Dr Sarah Healy to explore the following questions:

• What critical role can speculative a/r/tography play in reshaping our interactions with the land?
• In what ways might art act as a catalyst for creating a collective imaginary of proactive cultural exchange, relationship building, and nurturing reciprocal relations with the human and more-than-human world?
• How can big data and AI support a speculative a/r/tographic inquiry?
• How can researchers, practitioners and activists contribute to a new ecosystem of learning around issues of climate in/justice, digital in/justice, intergenerational in/justice and meaningful action?
• What do we, as a community, need to do to transform education, policy, and practice for preferrable climate and digital futures?

Our project is organized around the viability of cultural interpretation, socio-technical relations and social experimentation. It encompasses the creation of site-engaged artwork, visual narrative, and writing to (re)map, (re)frame, and (re)document the landscape through speculative a/r/tographic work alongside traditional Indigenous Knowledges and methodologies. The successful candidate’s PhD study will be housed with/in a cutting-edge, international program of research that offers outstanding opportunities for career development and access to digital infrastructures.