Research topic

Cultural citizenship and participatory creative practice as alternative media

Rob's doctoral research investigates voice and recognition (Couldry, 2010; Honneth, 1992) in participatory art projects, considered as alternative media, with those without formal citizenship rights. Using a mixture of action research, participatory pedagogic and digital storytelling methodologies, he worked across two sites, the Oasis Centre in Cardiff and the Comfrey Project in Gateshead in the summer of 2019. 

Employing a highly flexible, participant-led approach, participants produced a mixture of visual, written, documentary and fictive material analysed using multimodal discourse analysis alongside an ethnography. Work from the Cardiff site was exhibited at G39 gallery in Cardiff in November 2019 and from Gateshead at NewBridge Project’s In Solidarity exhibition in October 2019, who also supported the work alongside the BALTIC Centre of Contemporary Art and an LSE KEI Fund. Work from Gateshead also fed into a participatory video/animation process produced by the LSE which you can view here. He is attending the NYLON working group seminars in 20/21. Read a Q&A about his work. 

Supervisors: Professor Myria Georgiou and Professor Shani Orgad

Biography

Rob is a Lecturer at the University of Sussex and a former staff journalist for The Independent and Observer newspapers in London. Now freelance, he has written for The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Prospect, openDemocracy, frieze and Amnesty International.  He has studied at Cambridge University, Royal Holloway and the University of the Arts, London and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.