Infrastructures of colonial circulation

The Department of Archaeology invites applications for a PhD studentship linked to a Leverhulme International Professorship (awarded to Professor Emma Waterton). The successful applicant will be based in the soon-to-be-launched Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre, where they will become part of a collaborative team working on six dynamic and interrelated ‘axes’ of research: (1) Inclusions/Exclusions; (2) Colonial Legacies; (3) Mobilities and Materialities; (4) Anthropocene Encounters; (5) Cultures of Disaster and (6) Society-Nature Relations.

The advertised PhD studentship will connect with Axis 2, “Colonial Legacies”, which is a collaboration between Professor Emma Waterton and Professor Jason Dittmer, who is based at UCL. Axis 2 positions British colonial heritage at the centre of current international debates by asking how that history is navigated, mobilised, repurposed, and resisted within the context of UNESCO’s World Heritage and revolves around the following research questions:

1) How is the affective and emotive heritage of the British Empire ‘engineered’ (by which we mean actively curated, orchestrated, or planned) and subsequently embodied at UNESCO World Heritage Sites that explicitly focus on colonial heritage?

2) How does embodied difference (e.g., nationality, race, gender, age, and disability) among visitors and local community members refract and splinter this attempted engineering?

3) How do three distinct ‘types’ of UNESCO World Heritage Sites associated with the British Empire differ and/or overlap in their affective engineering and subsequent embodiment?

Eight World Heritage Sites have been identified for this research, all of which foreground the British imperial ‘footprint’ around the world and are divided into three categories based on the elements of colonial history being conserved: (1) military technologies of Empire; (2) infrastructures of colonial circulation; and (3) colonial urban planning.

PhD Project Description

Tasked with making significant scholarly contributions to Axis 2, the advertised PhD project will focus on the theme of “infrastructures of colonial circulation” and will home in on how British colonial heritage is encountered in the immediacy of experience at two World Heritage Sites: the Mountain Railways of India and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (India). The project’s principal objectives are to:

1) Reconsider British colonial heritage through the lense of affect, emotion, and materiality;

2) Highlight transnational heritages produced through material infrastructures; and

3) Provide insight about public engagements with British colonial heritage.

To address these objectives, the PhD project will draw on the following qualitative research methods:

1.    Semi-structured interviews with site managers and key employees to discuss curatorial decisions and design, as well as site histories, interpretation, and reception.

2.    Focus group discussions with interested local community stakeholders. Inspired by Project History (Brusius et al. 2020), the purpose of these focus groups will be to give community members the opportunity to present their own stories, connections, practices, and responses to the British colonial heritage that lies within their neighbourhoods. As a counterpoint to official interpretation, these reflections will shed light on the diversity of alternative narratives and flows of knowledge that are connected to each individual case study location.

3.    A survey of visitors that is stratified to ensure it is representative of the visitor profile. The survey will be designed to produce both quantitative and qualitative data focusing on visitors’ embodied experiences.

4.    An autoethnographic account of the researcher’s own experiences at each heritage site, conducted over extended periods of participant observation and immersed engagement.

The successful candidate’s primary task will be researching, writing, and defending of their thesis. Additional outcomes will include academic publications and presentations, such as the co-delivery of papers at international conferences, the co-convening of at least one conference session and resultant publication/s, and the co-authoring of peer-reviewed journal articles.