This year’s rich and exciting programme of training workshops has been announced, with themes ranging from ‘Material and the Body’, ‘Listening, Spaces and the Sounding World’ through to ‘Experiencing the Thermal Dimension of Space’.
Material Witness is an interdisciplinary training programme for the interrogation of physical objects, spaces and environments by humanities researchers. The Material Witness website features posts and discussions from the programme’s participants, and its organisers who are based in MEMS.
The programme’s main aim is to provide training for PhD students and early career researchers in techniques and methods for examining the material world.
We aim to encourage researchers who come from different disciplines and backgrounds and who study diverse time periods, pre-modern and modern, to share ideas about the relationships between materials and meaning. The programme also promotes collaboration across (and beyond) the spectrum of humanities disciplines through the study of materiality. We want to take you on a thought-provoking journey through the sensory, social, economic and emotional aspects of peoples’ past and present interactions with the material world.
Established in 2013, the programme is supported by CHASE, an AHRC funded consortium made up of nine institutions in the South-East (the Universities of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, and Sussex, Birkbeck and SOAS of the University of London, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Goldsmiths, and the Open University).
Applications for the 2016 Material Witness PhD Programme can be made via the CHASE website, or contact Dr Catherine Richardson or Dr Ryan Perry at the University of Kent.