Wellcome Trust PhD Studentship opportunity: Co-creating augmentative communication futures

The Wellcome Trust are funding a PhD at the University of Dundee as part of an interdisciplinary Collaborative Award in Medical Humanities and Social Science: ‘Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures’ research project (itDf) - itdfproject.org

https://www.dundee.ac.uk/stories/changing-relationship-between-disability-and-technology

https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/people-and-projects/grants-awarded/imagining-technologies-disability-futures

itDf is a 5-year interdisciplinary research project involving scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, design, disability studies, engineering, robotics and philosophy. It spans the Universities of Leeds, Exeter, Dundee and Sheffield. itDf explores how we imagine future encounters between disability and technology, and the shapes these technologies might take. The main aims of the project are to investigate the ideas of body and personhood that arise through contemporary developments in literature and film, philosophy, assistive technology and robotics; for example, the imagining and making of, prosthetic limbs, augmentative communication and care and telepresence robots.

The Dundee-led workstream, 'prototyping everyday communication futures' will focus on people with complex communication needs and their – and their conversational partners' – shared use of augmentative and alternative communication (or AAC).

Our opening stance is that we wish to challenge futures that imagine a disabled body being 'fixed'. We will instead start from a perspective of AAC being about designing interactions between people and supporting their co-created conversations. In this, we are as much if not more interested in everyday improvisations as we are in the dominant predictions of seamless brain-to-speech interfaces, for example. We will try to prototype something of the experience of these alternative futures, even if it is unlikely that we will build fully-working systems. And we will be led by the experiences of disabled people and their stances towards their own disability - particularly those who are interested in joining us in imagining alternative futures.

Within DJCAD, the project will be situated within Studio Ordinary: an interdisciplinary research centre co-founded by Professor Graham Pullin as Chair in Design and Disability and Professor Fiona Kumari Campbell as Chair in Disability and Ableism Studies. Our manifesto is 'Super normal design for extra ordinary bodies'. Our previous projects include Hands of X in the field of prosthetics and Six Speaking Chairs in the area of AAC.

The successful applicant will be a part of a cohort of researchers due to join the project team in Spring 2021 and will be based in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) at the University of Dundee. The anticipated start date for the research is between 1 April and 1 June 2021. 

First Supervisor – Graham Pullin, Professor of Design and Disability

Second Supervisor – Fiona Kumari Campbell, Professor of Disability and Ableism Studies

Framing your PhD

Our workstream has at its heart a meeting of:

disability studies;

augmentative and alternative communication;

designing interactions.

Other researchers on our workstream (a Co-Investigator, Post Doctoral Research Assistant and Research Assistants) are providing expertise in participatory research; speculative/design fiction; speech and non-speech technologies. Any applicant should be interested or intrigued about the other aspects too; because itDf is an interdisciplinary project that incorporates philosophy, design, engineering, robotics and literary studies, the successful applicant will demonstrate commitment to and enthusiasm for interdisciplinary collaboration.

We would particularly welcome applicants with a lived and/or professional experience or involvement in AAC, or other assistive technology, or specific aspects of interpersonal communication.

We are particularly interested in applicants identifying as disabled, but welcome applications from non-disabled as well (Studio Ordinary includes disabled and non-disabled researchers and mentors).

We would invite you to draft an outline proposal, your own perspective on this interdisciplinary and participatory endeavour. Again, we wouldn't expect any PhD to give equal weight to all those aspects. It would be illuminating to hear which you might focus on and what you think the relationship might be between them. Which will also require you to suggest a research methodology and methods that might connect them.

We would expect to work with you in framing this were your application to progress, so this is to hear what strikes you as initially interesting; what your own instinct is as to what would be most rewarding to explore for three years, in connection with our project.