PhD co-Supervision on ARCS: I Don't Want to Go to Heaven: A (Living) Archival Study of Scotland's Girl Bands and Associated DIO Cultures

Description

Co-supervisor (50%) of SGSAH-funded ARCS PhD started in October 2025 with University of West of Scotland as Lead HEI, University of Dundee as Partner HEI and Scottish Music Centre as Industry Partner with Carla J. Easton as PhD researcher.

Summary: The role of women in pop music is greatly under-represented in cultural memory. This practice-led research project addresses that gender gap as it relates to collecting, preserving and developing awareness of the music created by Scottish girl bands since 1960. The research draws upon newly uncovered private collections to generate a communal ‘living archive’; a performative body of work created with practitioners past and present and made accessible through the Scottish Music Centre. Crucially, this work will explore the development of arts-based research methods in bridging gaps between archival collections and the kinds of marginalised groups previously excluded from them.

The ‘Creative Media Academy’ at the University of West of Scotland and the ‘Centre for
Practice Research’ at Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design share strategic priorities in innovative practice research in the arts and promoting best practice in participatory or community-based contexts where equality, diversity and inclusion is a priority. Given the alignment of these priorities developed in crucially differing contexts (an art-school vs an industry-focused post-92 academic institutional context), and the opportunity to partner with the SMC, the project has great capacity for knowledge exchange within and beyond academia, particularly with relation to our cross-institutional clusters of research that focus on arts-based participatory approaches to public engagement with issues of societal importance. The applicant’s research will complement the research environments at both HEIs, developed through multiple major AHRC-funded research projects - at DJCAD in curating/archives, and at UWS in songwriting-as-research. UWS sits in the central belt, close to Scotland’s main music scenes, and its strong applied industry focus brought by a large cohort of academic practitioners in music will benefit from research that focuses on what industry currently overlooks/erases.

Period	Oct 2025 → Mar 2029
Degree of Recognition	National