Visual Culture Documentary Film: The Leverhulme Doctoral Programme

About the Visual Culture Documentary Film

This visual culture documentary film was made for Durham University’s Centre for Visual Arts and Culture (CVAC), marking the completion of the Durham Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme in Visual Culture. It brings together CVAC’s founding director, Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, with three researchers from across the programme’s cohorts, each of whom also has their own full profile film.

An Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme

At the centre of this visual culture documentary film is a scheme built on an unusually open brief. The Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme in Visual Culture ran at Durham across three cohorts, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, with students free to base themselves in any department in the university, as long as their doctorate centred on visual culture. Jordanova explains the thinking behind it.

We were incredibly fortunate at Durham University to receive funding from the Leverhulme Trust for a doctoral programme in visual culture, an interdisciplinary programme. The students could be studying in any part of the university, so long as the focus of their doctorate was on visual culture. The idea behind the programme was to train a cohort of students, or rather three cohorts, who were really adept in their visual literacy and could talk to people across different disciplines, and for us, pretty crucially, had experience of working in an institution outside the university.

Three Researchers, Three Ways of Seeing

What this visual culture documentary film shows most clearly is the range of work the programme produced. Each of the three researchers below has their own full profile film.

A Programme Built on Collaboration

Jordanova is clear that the programme’s real distinctiveness was not just in what each student researched alone, but in how the cohorts worked together, through summer schools, reading groups, joint placements and a shared supervisory structure.

Each student had a supervisory team of three, and ideally these were in three different departments, if possible across more than one faculty. Another key feature of the programme was the placement, where they were able to spend three months outside an institution of higher education. Having students working together from such a wide range of disciplines allowed them to talk to each other and gain ideas and experience they would not have had working in a single department. The programme emphasised collaboration, and we saw this in the summer schools, where the students helped shape the programme, decide what workshops should be offered, and indeed many of them offered workshops themselves.

Looking Back on the Programme

The Leverhulme funding arrived while CVAC itself was still new, and Jordanova credits the doctoral cohorts with shaping the centre as much as the centre shaped them.

The Leverhulme funding was received at a time when the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture was still in its infancy, and having these cohorts of students has been transformative. They have put themselves at the forefront of the centre’s activities, and they’ve identified very closely with it. I’d like to think that we gave the students overall a really positive experience, and it’s lovely for me that I’m still in touch with so many of them, watching their careers with interest and taking pride in their achievements.

This visual culture documentary film exists to mark that, a record of a programme that trained researchers to move confidently between disciplines, and of the visual literacy they took with them into whatever came next.