Art and Design

Research in Art and Design is focused around a series of distinct areas of expertise with research clusters embedded within and across a number of academic schools. Our lively community of doctoral researchers is engaged in projects that are practice-based, practice-led, theoretical and/or historical. 

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Your doctoral research will be supported by supervisors who are experts in their field and active researchers who practice, exhibit, perform and publish. You will join one or more of our research clusters and be able to participate in cluster seminars, projects and events as well as accessing specialist facilities and workshops.

You will be hosted by one of the four colleges in art and design: the College of Jewellery, Fashion and Textiles, the College of Art and Design, the College of Digital Arts and the College of Architecture.

We welcome PhD applications that relate to our interdisciplinary research clusters:

Art Activisms 

The increasingly political dimension of contemporary art has given rise to a number of important questions about the role it plays in today’s society. We focus on the political dimensions of cultural production and, specifically, the extent to which art as a form of activism reflects upon, intersects with and, invariably, seeks to define debates within civil society, political movements and social practices. In short, researchers in the cluster at Birmingham School of Art aim to challenge and extend the potential of contemporary art to change the world. 

Supervisors: Anthony Downey, Becky Shaw, Lisa Metherell, Theo Reeves-Evison, Sian Vaughan, Gavin Wade, Stuart Whipps, Esther Windsor.

Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA)

As a leading research cluster in the UK, the CCVA aims to foster new understandings and perspectives of Chinese contemporary art, design, media and visual culture through exhibitions, publications, conferences, and doctoral studies. While our extensive partnerships, regional to international, bring together artists, designers, curators and researchers to share expertise, critiques and ideas of innovation, we pioneer transcultural dialogues, with ‘China’ as a method, and renovate theoretical discussions and interdisciplinary practices in the field. We welcome research proposals, either theoretical or practice-based, engaging with contemporary arts and culture in Greater China and the Sinophone sphere, to develop new ways of thinking and modes of knowledge production in relation to today’s global situation. 

Supervisors: Joshua Jiang, Jieling Xiao. 

Centre for Printing History and Culture

The Centre for Printing History and Culture is a joint initiative between Birmingham City University and the University of Birmingham. It encourages research into all aspects and periods of printing history and culture, as well as providing education and training into the art and practice of printing. The Centre aims to provide a means of exchanging information, skills and expertise in printing history and culture, to engage in ground-breaking interdisciplinary research, forge partnerships in order to encourage the investigation and understanding of printing history and culture, and promote the transfer and exchange of knowledge of the subject among individuals, as well as within communities and institutions.

Supervisors: Caroline Archer, David Osbaldestin and Ann-Marie Carey

Lifeworlds

Lifeworlds explores how art and design research can generate new modes of reckoning with environmental crisis and its uneven consequences across varied scales of loss and change. The ubiquitous nature of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion requires new ways of bridging planetary processes and the intimate effects these changes have upon daily life. 

Supervisors: Theo Reeves-Evison, Becky Shaw, Kathryn Moore, Sandra Costa

Made and Worn

Made and Worn researchers explore and investigate the myriad ways in which crafted, manufactured and worn artefacts operate as vehicles of meaning.  The themes of crafting and making with materials are infused with the actions of the body, in both the making and the wearing of artefacts themselves, and these twin notions inform all aspects of the cluster’s work.  The disciplinary focus of this research cluster is broadly themed, and sits at the intersection of craft/material cultures and the study of fashion and dress, drawing on the perspectives of both.  

Supervisors: Sian Hindle, Ann-Marie Carey, Nazli Alimen, Sabine Lettmann, Sophie Wood, Beth White

Material Encounters in Art and Design

Exploring how art and design practice functions as research is tied deeply into an understanding of materiality. Material Encounters in Art and Design provides an inclusive space for practitioners, researchers and all those in-between to explore aspects of materiality across the following broad themes: tangibility, touch, digital materiality, language and form, uncertainty, temporality, movement, health, death and grief, medium specificity, image, objectivity and subjectivity. 

Supervisors: Dean Hughes, Brian Bishop, Jacqueline Taylor, Becky Shaw, Catherine Baker 

Urban Cultures

Urban Cultures is an interdisciplinary group of researchers from architecture, landscape architecture, conservation, design management, and inclusive design specialists that share an interest in the designed and natural environments around us, their impact on our health and wellbeing as well as the impact that we might have on them. Our research explores urban environments from the scale of the home and street, right through to towns, and cities. Our research methods include design and practice-led methods, design based archival research, collaborative and co-design approaches, design pedagogies and cultural theory, engineering and fabrication, and action-based research and activism in order to critique, challenge and disrupt traditional thinking and develop radical alternatives to current and future conditions.

Supervisors: Mersha Aftab, Ana Arujo, Katriona Byrne, Hocine Bougdah, Jemma Browne, Sandra Costa, Michael Dring, Yazid Khemri, Rui Lebre, Kathryn Moore, Senem Sadri, Rachel Sara, Panchalingam SuntharalingamNuno Pereira Jose, Jieling Xiao.