The AHRC-funded ‘Crafting Care for People, Place and Planet’ Doctoral Focal College will fund and train 30 PhD researchers between 2026 and 2029.
The college is a consortium of three universities in the North West of England:
The college will equip a new and inclusive generation of researchers, deeply versed in interdisciplinary approaches and multi-sectoral skills, to tackle urgent challenges that do not fit one discipline or perspective. As climate change and environmental hazards are reframing health as a multispecies concern, our college envisions care as co-produced across diverse human/more-than-human collectives and craft as encompassing broad-ranging expertise, practices and artistry to shape and fulfil interdisciplinary research agendas for transformative, evidenced societal impact.
The college is rooted in the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Health, Arts, Society & Environment (CHASE), an interdisciplinary space enhancing collaborative research, fostering critical-creative inquiry, and responding to complex emergent challenges. CHASE’s programme for researchers and non-HEI collaborators, first established in 2012, runs alongside its innovative MA in Health, Cultures and Societies.
The AHRC ‘Crafting Care’ Doctoral Focal College is shaped around four interdisciplinary themes:
- Care-as-Craft: Understanding traditions of medical and indigenous care practices, and care for ecosystems (histories/philosophies of environmental protection, ethics, activism) central to human/more-than-human health.
- Ecologies of Care: Using place-led approaches to explore the health-environment nexus, from impacts of ecosystem change on chronic/infectious disease, to effects of community groups on human/more-than-human health.
- Creativity and Care: Exploring how artistic modes of attention shape behaviour and understanding, alongside interrogating phenomenological experiences of care and environments.
- Curating the Future: Addressing socio-environmental inequalities by drawing on our world-leading (medical-history/science-fiction) collections, and co-curating artistic initiatives that re-examine the past to reimagine possible futures, widening access/contribution to health-environmental care.
The AHRC ‘Crafting Care’ Doctoral Focal College key objectives are to:
- Position arts-and-humanities as diverse pluralistic models of practice, enhancing conceptualisations of healthcare as a relational and multispecies concern.
- Draw on and further key conceptual innovations through postcolonial, indigenous, feminist, queer, crip, and posthuman perspectives.
- Nurture cross-disciplinary research including identifying skills gaps, to drive creative methodological innovation and inform policy.
- Disseminate innovative-creative methods pioneered by CHASE and co-crafts new methodologies with practitioners across disciplines.
- Use arts-and-humanities’ creative/emancipatory potentials to dissolve boundaries between practitioner, professional, academic and public, recognising expert marginalised or excluded voices.
- Employ collaborative/participatory approaches for modelling inclusive, ethical, sustainable solutions for the health of planet, place and people.
- Create future research leaders in academic and non-academic sectors, through placements, professional development and collaboration with non-HEI partners.
The AHRC ‘Crafting Care’ Doctoral Focal College is an interdisciplinary and diverse initiative with Equity, Diversity and Inclusion integrated into all key areas of activity.
Building on the exemplary work of our partners, both HEI and non-HEI, the college strives to actively break down barriers related to race, gender, age, socio-economic, and health-related status (e.g. ableism and neuro-normativity).
We prioritise expertise-by-experience, whether that is living with illness, encountering exclusion, or working as an established professional or practitioner. Our partners are united in their commitment to forging non-traditional pathways to PhD study, vitally enriching a research culture with care at its centre.
Our EDI priorities are to:
- Increase access to doctoral studies for underrepresented groups and communities.
- Ensure recruitment across a broad spectrum of prospective PGRs irrespective of age, gender, race, socio-economic status, and disability.
- Promote positive and EDI-friendly working practices, including pluralistic and bespoke employability support for our PGRs in collaboration with non-HEI partners.
- Encourage diverse and supportive supervision and supervisory teams, that are equipped to prioritise PGRs’ mental health and wellbeing.
AHRC 'Crafting Care for People, Place and Planet' Doctoral Focal College 