SONIC MEDIALITIES, ANCESTRAL SOCIALITIES: accessing anti-colonial resistance through sound archives, orality, music, performance and listening practices
AHRC/CHASE Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD studentship in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London, UK and Abotcha - Mediateca Onshore, Malafo, Guinea Bissau – ‘SONIC MEDIALITIES, ANCESTRAL SOCIALITIES: accessing anti-colonial resistance through sound archives, orality, music, performance and listening practices’
Qualification type: PhD
Location: London, UK and Malafo, Guinea-Bissau
Funding for: UK Students / International Students
Funding amount: fees and stipend at AHRC rates (for the current academic year 2024-25, the stipend rate is £21,837 with London weighting). This includes enhanced stipend to cover additional travel costs relating to the project. Please note: this funding amount typically increases with inflation each academic year.
Closes: Monday 17 February 2025, 12 noon
Watch a recording of the webinar for this Collaborative Doctoral Award project, held 20th November 2024, to find out more from the project team:
SONIC MEDIALITIES, ANCESTRAL SOCIALITIES: accessing anti-colonial resistance through sound archives, orality, music, performance and listening practices
The Art Research Programme and the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths, and the Abotcha - Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, Guinea Bissau, invite applications for a fully-funded doctoral studentship on ‘SONIC MEDIALITIES, ANCESTRAL SOCIALITIES: accessing anti-colonial resistance through sound archives, orality, music, performance and listening practices’.
The successful candidate will be hosted at the Mediateca for extended research periods with full access to the archive, studio and office space, production facilities and local collaborators and mentors. At Goldsmiths, they have full access to studio space (if FT), production facilities and specialist academic and artistic expertise.
Supervisors are Dr Edgar Schmitz (Art) and Dr Francisco Carballo (Politics) at Goldsmiths and Prof. Filipa César at Abotcha - Mediateca Onshore.
Applicants should have postgraduate qualifications in related fields or commensurate professional experience and will need to be fluent in English and Portuguese.
The studentship
This collaboration is set up to develop active forms and formats for engagement with the Sound Archive of militant Guinean cinema, and its social, institutional and cultural frames in Malafo, a rural community in the geographical centre of Guinea Bissau.
Malafo is a socially and ecologically sensitive place with a rural economy based on rice and cashew production. The Mediateca functions as a platform to creatively respond to the existing and imminent conflicts between technological development and tradition, promoting active participation in the inevitable process of transformation and technological evolution through creative and critical tools. Based in the history of the films and sounds of the anti-colonial struggle in Guinea-Bissau the Mediateca and Sonoteca Archives are crucial resources for negotiating this transition. They are both a precarious archival deposit of and a dynamic resource for forms of anti-colonial resistance within a broader intergenerational diasporic space.
At the site of the Mediateca, the researcher will research the holdings of the sound and film archives and help shape the ways in which they will be formatted, activated and disseminated. They will research orality and the sonic as carriers of cultural form and practice, how they have enabled and operated as resistance against colonial oppression and imposed hegemonic epistemological frameworks, and how active forms of engagement and dissemination can sustain their emancipatory capacities.
The researcher will have unmediated and unlimited access to the archive and its infrastructural and institutional conditions and will be able to work with local practitioners, members of the Malafo community and key protagonists of militant filmmaking in Guinea’s independence struggle; two of the founding members of Geba Filmes, the filmmakers Sana na N'Hada and Flora Gomes, pioneers of Guinea-Bissau's moving image and the founders of INCA - National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual in 1978, will act as mentors to the project among others in order to develop performative, speculative and experimental modes of knowledge acquisition and dissemination in relationship to the archive as an active resource.
At Abotcha - Mediateca Onshore, the researcher will be supervised by filmmaker, educator and community organiser Filipa César, one of the co-founders of the Mediateca. César is interested in the fluid borders between cinema and its reception, the politics and poetics of the moving image and archival practices. Since 2011, César has been collectively researching the militant cinema practice of the African Liberation Movement in Guinea Bissau, through the production of workshops, archives, films, performances, publications and community gatherings.
Both the partners at Abotcha - Mediateca Onshore and the affiliated partner programs at Goldsmith believe that it will be important to activate the material so it can enable dynamic forms of exchange and learning processes, instead of simply being consolidated into a historically stable deposit scholarly resource. It seems important to the partners that this requires a researcher (and a set of research methodologies) that can meaningfully explore and engage embodied, collective and multi-sensorial forms of knowledge production and dissemination.
As a leading programme for critically committed, innovative practice research, the Art Research Programme at Goldsmiths is uniquely placed to support the research through its expertise in co-productive formats both as areas of study and modes of research; through its strong track record of work in decoloniality, non-hegemonic epistemologies and particularly the somatic as area of heightened interest across a number of recent projects; and a long history of truly innovative research at the intersection of aesthetic, social, political forms and emancipatory educational formats. Film and sound practices are an important area within this field with colleagues in the department who are leading experts on film and anti-colonial resistance as well as militancy at the intersection of agricultural and filmmaking practice. The programme is also closely connected to the Research Centre for Art and Ecologies with its focus on climate justice and migration, and has active co-supervisory relationships with the Music, Anthropology, Politics and Visual Cultures departments at Goldsmiths.
The successful researcher will be embedded in the programme context and its peer-to-peer dialogues, will have the opportunity to develop and test their research through research presentation seminars and public facing installations of their practice as well as further discussions outside the supervisory context with external guests through the so-called ad-hoc tutorial provision and invited guests on the programme’s workshop and presentation series. They will have full access to the Art Department’s world class range of production facilities and the Art Research Programme’s project space for public facing installations, as well as the broader research and academic communities at Goldsmiths at large.
The designated primary supervisor, Dr Edgar Schmitz, is Director of the Art Research Programme, has extensive supervisory experience and is an expert on collaborative and co-productive research formats and critical engagements with institutional form. He was the co-lead on the AHRC funded Animate Assembly research cluster on animation, animism and animacy, is the founding director of the CHOREOGAPHIC research project examining the expanded material registers of composite productions, (dis-)articulations of movement and the dispersal of animacy, and is a co-lead of the British Art Network research collective ‘The Ignorant Art School’, exploring forms of collective curatorial agency in Global Majority contexts in dialogue with alternative forms of art pedagogy in a late Modern European framework.
The research will be further supported by a partnership with the Goldsmiths Centre for Postcolonial Studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations, with its track record of facilitating ambitious research into a broad range of colonial and postcolonial conditions, often through the prism of cultural and aesthetic practices. Across a range of these projects, participatory research methods are of particular relevance and the centre can draw on ample experience and expertise in this regard.
The Centre’s co-director Francisco Carballo is designated as second institutional supervisor to the project and anchors it firmly within the context of the Centre’s remit and expertise. His research is organised around politics from below, mainly in the South-American context, decolonial and post-colonial theory, and what he calls rough politics.
The successful Candidate will be based across both institutions, the Mediateca in Guinea Bissau and Goldsmiths. They will be hosted by the Mediateca for up to three months for each of the academic years of the research with full access to the archives, communities, production facilities, as well as mentorship in order to develop their research on site responsively and collaboratively. At Goldsmiths they will be supported, stimulated and tested by drawing on the programme context and peer resources of an ambitious multi-disciplinary research environment with specialist expert supervision of the highest calibre. We expect the successful candidate to spend the equivalent of one term per year in Malafo, Guinea Bissau, and the equivalent of two terms in London, UK.
The candidate:
The Collaborative Doctoral Award “SONIC MEDIALITIES, ANCESTRAL SOCIALITIES: accessing anti-colonial resistance through sound archives, orality, music, performance and listening practices” provides a unique opportunity for an outstanding practice researcher to work at the intersection of, and across, artistic, sonic, archival and activist modes. The award can be developed through the ‘PhD by Practice with Critical Account’ or ‘PhD by Practice and Dissertation’ pathways.
Essential skills/attributes:
The successful applicant will have postgraduate qualifications in relevant fields of practice and/or commensurate professional experience. They can demonstrate a body of practice from which to work ambitiously to the problematics set up by this Collaborative Doctoral Award. They need to be fluent in English and Portuguese.
Desirable skills/attributes:
The research collaboration is committedly post-disciplinary and does not specify required prior training pathways or qualifications. Experience with filmic and sonic material, involvement in collective forms of authorship and a committed engagement with the dynamics of de- and anti-colonial work will be important in activating this research opportunity.
The CDA partners are committed to providing equal opportunities and particularly encourage applications from Global Majority, diasporic, LGBTQIA+ and otherwise minoritised backgrounds and experiences.
How to apply
Applications for this studentship must be made via the Goldsmiths Art Research Programme application form (https://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/mphil-phd-art/)
Terms and conditions
The studentship is subject to UKRI eligibility criteria, and will cover home or EU fees and stipend at UKRI rates for a maximum of four years full-time, or eight years part-time study, subject to institutional regulations.
Informal Enquiries
Informal enquiries about this collaborative project can be sent to Edgar Schmitz on e.schmitz@gold.ac.uk