Glitching Gender

Creative/Critical Interrogations of Technology and Identity

This Research & Knowledge Exchange Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: Glitching Gender: Creative/Critical Interrogations of Technology and Identity

We welcome all research degree applications aligned with and in response to this brief.

Project brief details

This doctoral project will open up new critical and creative ways of thinking about the ways in which technology can be used as a mechanism to dismantle or reinforce existing gender ideologies. As new forms of, for example, AI and immersive technologies emerge so too do the fears of how they can negatively impact our relationships with others and with ourselves, as well as how they can strengthen dominant notions of gender leading to abuses of power and violence. However, there are other possibilities at play here too, as technology has the capacity to help us look aslant at gender dynamics, facilitate new understandings of identities, and provide new ways of relating to and interacting with each other. Technology has the power to, both positively and negatively, challenge how we conceive and enact gender.

We are seeking ground-breaking and innovative creative and critical interventions into the various ways in which real world and imaginative/speculative technologies can mediate, manipulate, and transform gender realities.

Using theoretical perspectives from, for example, feminist technoscience, Glitch Feminism, postphenomenology, as well as gender, body, and sexuality studies more broadly, a candidate might like, but does not need, to consider questions such as, how is gender performed through/within technology? What happens in the spaces, elisions, and glitches between technology and our sense of ourselves as gendered beings? How can it enable us to imagine new futures and new gender ideologies?

Interdisciplinary proposals are most welcome as are desk-based, creative, and experimental practice-based approaches.

Strategic alignment

Projects deriving from this brief are expected to sit within the Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy and the following Department.

Centre	Centre for Blended Realities
Department	School of Communication

All successful research degree project proposals must emphasise a clear alignment between the project idea and our Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy.

Project brief leads

Project supervisor: Dr Jo Parsons

Dr Jo Parsons has been a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Falmouth University since 2019. Originally a Victorian Literature specialist with interests in masculinity, the body, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Sensation Fiction, Jo is now leading Falmouth’s move into the area of Erotica and Romantic Fictions and is currently working on a new project on popular women’s writing from 1970–2000, with a particular focus on the Bonkbuster. Her research, both Victorian and contemporary, is grounded in gender and cultural studies. Jo is also a co-editor (with Ruth Heholt) of both the Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture and Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures book series with Edinburgh University Press, as well as assistant editor of Revenant and editor of the Wilkie Collins Journal. Jo is also a creative writer, who also has a successful freelance business as a professional editor and ghost-writer. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

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