AHRC Doctoral Landscape Award: Language, Place and the Museum

About the Project

Explore the relationship between language, place and museums. Investigate how place is constructed, contested and reimagined through language within museum environments. The project invites candidates to bring together approaches from applied linguistics, critical museology and/or practice-based research. It responds to the growing debates across the museum sector around multilingualism, community participation, belonging and the civic responsibilities of cultural institutions.

Museums are socially situated and linguistically mediated spaces. There the notions of place are reproduced through labels, catalogues, naming practices, translation, oral narration and multilingual community interpretation. Through these practices, museums shape how visitors encounter objects and the places and lives they represent. Often this reinforces colonial spatial logics and epistemologies, naturalising territorial dispossession, obscuring Indigenous and diasporic knowledge systems. At the same time, critical and creative engagement with museum language offers transformative and decolonising potential. This can also help museums reimagine place-based knowledge, support multilingual heritage and generate alternative ways of understanding belonging.

Potential areas for exploration

The successful applicant will shape the project and develop it through their own disciplinary, methodological or creative interests. Possible areas of investigation include, but are not limited to:

• How place is constructed, contested, and reimagined through linguistic practices in museum environments
• How museum labels, catalogues, translation practices and oral or narrative forms frame, reinforce or disrupt colonial spatial logics and language ideologies
• How multilingual and translation practices can reshape museum-based knowledges of place, particularly in relation to diasporic, Indigenous or minoritised communities
• How creative, participatory or language-oriented research methods can intervene in museum place-making to generate alternative interpretations and understandings of belonging

Applicants may propose critical and/or practice-based research, including, but not limited to:

• curatorial practice
• art practice
• creative writing
• multilingual storytelling
• exhibition-based inquiry
• participatory research
• linguistic and institutional ethnography.

We particularly welcome applications from candidates whose lived experience of multilingualism, migration or cultural displacement informs their research or practice.

Project partner

The project will be developed in partnership with Manchester Museum. A key point of engagement is the museum’s Multilingual Museum platform, which invites participants to translate and respond to collection objects in multiple languages. While the platform remains active, its long-term future represents an important institutional question, following the end of its funded phase. The studentship offers an opportunity to explore how multilingual interpretation might be sustained or extended across digital systems, galleries and community-facing museum practice.

Manchester Museum will support the doctoral researcher through access to:

• collections
• digital resources
• staff expertise
• community networks
• practical resources such as desk and meeting space.

The researcher will engage with the museum during the project and to develop public-facing outputs, including events, programming or collaborative activities with the partner organisation.

Supervisors and research at UAL

The PhD will be based at the Decolonising Arts Institute at University of the Arts London. It will link with Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN).

Part-time study is possible. Engagement with Manchester Museum will be arranged flexibly according to the needs of the student and project.

This studentship will be supervised by researchers from UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute (DeAI), and Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), whose complementary expertise provides a strong interdisciplinary foundation.

• Dr Victoria Odeniyi is a critical applied linguist with research practice focusing on linguistic ethnographic methods. Her work aims to understand the role of language ideologies, the coloniality of language and institutionalised knowledge production in contemporary educational inequalities.
• Dr Anjalie Dalal-Clayton is an art historian and museologist. She specialises in race, empire, collections, cataloguing and exhibition histories of Black and Brown artists in Britain. Dr Anjalie has extensive experience of research on bias in museum texts, decolonial interpretation, and community-led knowledge production (Provisional Semantics, 2020-21).
• Prof Paul Goodwin is a curator with expertise on urbanism, migration, and transnational exhibition practices.

Together, the team offers rigorous support across applied linguistics, museum studies, decolonial and transnational art histories as well as creative research methods.

Supervision will be strengthened by the partnership with Manchester Museum with key staff from the Museum acting as mentors to the student.

How to apply

See the application guidance and submit your application on our website.