AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award: Rupununi re-collections: historical photographs, Indigenous knowledge and heritage in Guyana

Applications are invited for a PhD studentship on historical photographs, Indigenous knowledge and heritage in Guyana at Royal Holloway University of London, in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and Kew Gardens. This award is made by the Science Museums & Archives Consortium under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. The project, due to begin in September 2020, will be supervised by Prof Jay Mistry and Prof Felix Driver at Royal Holloway and Dr Catherine Souch at the RGS-IBG, with further support from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

This project aims to reconnect historical photographs documenting Indigenous peoples and practices to contemporary initiatives concerning Indigenous knowledge and heritage development. Working in the Rupununi region of Guyana, the project will explore the use of significant photographic archives as a resource to enrich the understanding of Indigenous knowledge and practices, Indigenous heritage, identity and rights in contemporary Guyana. It will link work on Indigenous knowledge and memory with collections-based research, using methods of visual elicitation and digital repatriation in collaboration with the relevant Indigenous communities. The project combines (a) archival research in UK collections with (b) field-based photo-elicitation in the Rupununi. A participatory action research framework will allow research questions to be refined and addressed with participants in an iterative way to produce tangible benefits. The student will be encouraged to use participatory video as a way of creating new interpretative narratives. The possibility of a small-scale exhibition will also be considered in order to engage with wider audiences in Guyana.

A full project description is available here

Further information on eligibility, funds and how to apply is available here 

The application deadline is 31 March 2020

Interviews will be held at the RGS-IBG, provisionally on 16 April 2020.

Further Information

Details of the project and how to apply:

https://royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/geography/news/gg_ahrc-phd-studentship_2020/

PhD research in Geography at Royal Holloway:

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/geography/studying-here/postgraduate/

RGS-IBG collaborative doctoral research:

https://www.rgs.org/about/our-collections/collaborative-research-on-the-collections/

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships:

https://www.ahrc-cdp.org/