Project Areas for 2026 Recruitment

The ‘Crafting Care’ Doctoral Focal College is dedicated to fostering a new and inclusive generation of PhD researchers to tackle urgent challenges that do not fit one discipline or perspective. We sought input from across our constituent universities and non-university partners to identify four key Project Areas, around which recruitment for the 2026 cohort of students will be based. Every prospective student who applies to the college must be proposing a research project that fits within one of the following four Project Areas:

1. Catalysing Care through Creative Arts/Practices

This theme invites expressions of interest that engage with the capacity of arts and creative practices to catalyse, at individual and structural/systemic levels, new experience and innovative thinking in relation to health and wellbeing, by: transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries; fostering community and meaningful relational connection; representing and redressing social injustices and health inequalities; giving voice and expression to the lived experience of marginalised or under-represented groups.

Projects might include, but are not limited to, how arts-based initiatives or approaches can: create networks of care beyond social service models which sustain wellbeing across human and more than human worlds;  empower migrant and refugee groups to communicate health needs and access resources; constitute a form of activism by illuminating and intervening in care injustices (such as gendered violence, disability, abortion); narrate (verbal and non-verbal) experiences of place (of people living with dementia or other groups whose perceptions of the environment are rarely considered in planning) to help shape landscapes of care.

 

2. Communicating and Curating Care

We are looking for expressions of interest that engage with the institutions, collections, concepts, aesthetics and methods that are central to communicating the past, present and future of care. Curation is itself, etymologically, a form of care: implying both careful protection and selection (of, for example, artefacts, events, data and methodologies). We welcome projects that explore how we can curate and communicate care more carefully and effectively. These proposals might, for example, enquire how the emergent discourses around decolonisation, or the environmental humanities, or crip theory, change the way that we approach particular archives, databases, and collections. Alternatively, they might explore practices of curation (e.g. historic and emergent forms of anthologisation, exhibitions and taxonomy) and in doing so ask how we can draw out hidden histories of health and medicine from the past or imagine possible environmental futures.

Likewise, we are interested in ideas of how we can (re)design the systems and institutions that shape our conceptual and affective responses to care. How might we redesign aspects of pedagogy to ensure inclusive practices of care within education, and how do we educate about care (of people, place or planet) across different periods and contexts? How can students of the history of health, educators, gallerists and archivists design their services in response to people with different needs and lived experiences, or different political moments/movements?

 

3. Nourishing Care

We are looking for expressions of interest that engage with novel concepts, methods and practices of nourishing care and which explore the complex interplay between physical sustenance, cultural traditions, and ecological systems in our metabolic engagement with the world. We welcome projects which situate nourishment and nutrition at the intersection of biology, ethics, culture and environment to generate transformative insights in relation to the better care of people, place and planet.

Projects might include, but are not limited to: exploration of how nutritional care practices of ancient or contemporary cultures and communities help to craft, for example, individual and societal resilience, cultural identity, environmental sustainability and health equity; investigation of how existing knowledge or evidence (for example, historical, zooarchaeological and bioarchaeological) can be integrated with (for example) state-of-the art nutritional and biological knowledge, and/or activist and lived experience, to build understanding around long-term nourishment strategies for population health; new conceptual, creative and methodological approaches to ingestion and digestion, which might address problems of food insecurity and poverty, or ecological sustainability, and/or which might attend to local or individual biopsychosocial malnutrition, or celebrations and co-creation of nutritional or nourishing care.

 

4. Spaces and Places for Care

This theme invites expressions of interest that engage with the capacity of spaces and places (where space is given meaning through history, cultural memory, and connections to cultural or personal identity) to foster health and wellbeing of both people and planet.

We are interested in ideas that utilise an interdisciplinary approach to explore how we can shape spaces and places for care, redressing social injustices and reducing health inequalities, working with communities and protecting the planet. We anticipate that projects may explore the capacity of heritage landscapes (like canals, waterways, and forests), and their associated traditions, to foster attachment to place, cultural identity, and wellbeing; how arts and creative practices may ‘unlock’ some of the health and wellbeing benefits of natural or semi-natural places and spaces; how arts, creativity and leisure participation can support emotional well-being and a sense of self, particularly for marginalised or under-represented groups, including those experiencing life-changing conditions or injuries; and how nurturing a culture of trees, woods, waterways, coast and other habitats can improve social, physical and mental health and well-being and imagine environmental futures that protect planetary health.