Celtic Crescent Doctoral Focal Award

Programme overview

The Glasgow School of Art is offering a fully funded PhD studentship commencing in October 2026. The studentship is part of the Celtic Crescent Doctoral Fund Award, one of ten Doctoral Focal Awards funded by AHRC across the UK.

Celtic Crescent is a multilingual consortium of seven Higher Education Institutions across Cornwall, Scotland and Wales. Working with non-academic creative economy partners, the consortium aims to help grow the next generation of research and innovation talent in the creative economy. We focus particularly on creative economy microclusters marked by inequality, under-representation, and marginalisation arising from geographic, socio-economic, and linguistic factors. Studentships may be full-time or part-time, discipline-spanning, and may include practice-based, interdisciplinary, industry-led or minority-language research.

Doctoral research anchored in a sense of place has transformative potential to generate more diverse creative outputs, more innovation-ready SMEs, and more skilled innovators, thereby helping to sustain longer-term careers in our rural, coastal, and post-industrial creative economies. This vision underpins every aspect of Celtic Crescent’s work.

Key Research Themes

This practice-led PhD project will investigate how Scottish textile heritage, particularly within the Highlands and Islands, is translated into contemporary design practice, and how heritage-based making can support culturally sustainable innovation within Scotland’s creative economy. With a strong emphasis on Gàidhlig and Scottish cultural contexts, the project will explore how language, place, craft knowledge, and community identity are embedded in textile production and design.

Focusing on Highland textile microclusters, the research will examine how vernacular skills, patterns, and material traditions are interpreted by contemporary designers and producers. It will address questions of authenticity, cultural ownership, and responsible innovation, asking how heritage can be mobilised in ways that sustain both local economies and cultural integrity.

The methodology will combine practice-led research, material experimentation, archival and object-based study, and qualitative engagement with makers and heritage stakeholders. The successful candidate will undertake an internship with the Harris Tweed Authority, including engagement with independent Harris Tweed weavers, to gain first-hand experience of heritage governance, protected status regulation, and the lived realities of island-based textile production. There will also be an opportunityto work with the National Museums Scotland textile collections, supporting object-based research into historical Scottish dress and material culture.

The project offers a unique opportunity to develop a materially grounded research practice embedded within Highland textile communities, contributing directly to Scotland’s heritage-based creative economy.

You will be based at The Glasgow School of Art, and will be part of a connected cohort of Celtic Crescent researchers sharing training and experiences. You will take part in at least one three-day residential Crucible Lab bringing the entire cohort together in one of our Celtic nations. It is not possible to study remotely.