InterAct is a £4.4 million, Made Smarter Innovation-funded, Economic and Social Research Council-led Network+ that aims to bring together economic and social scientists, UK policy makers and manufacturers, and digital technology providers to address the human issues resulting from the diffusion of new technologies in industry. These human aspects include themes such as:
• Productivity
• Resilience
• Competitiveness
• Sustainability
• Levelling-up/inclusion
• Wellbeing.

As part of the InterAct programme we will be hosting up to 30 Storytelling Fellows from across the network+ at the Storytelling Academy at Loughborough University between May 2022 and April 2023. The Storytelling Fellowship programme aims to build storytelling capacity while also using stories to make insights more accessible to end users, the network and society at large. After receiving training in digital storytelling, Storytelling Fellows will act as advocates in their wider constituencies, facilitating their own workshops and gathering more stories that will be hosted on a dedicated online environment. By the end of the programme, we anticipate having created a living archive of up to 200 digital stories.

We are now inviting applications for a full-time, fully-funded, three-year PhD studentship to work alongside the Storytelling Fellowship programme and to feed findings into the wider InterAct Network+. Whilst the exact detail of the research project will be for the doctoral researcher to design themselves, the expectation is that they will work for a period within the Fellowship programme itself and also with the collection of digital stories as primary data to analyse their content and collective purpose, and evaluate their strategic value.

Candidates will need to be able to register for their PhD at the beginning of October 2022 and supervision will be led by Professor Mike Wilson (Director of the Storytelling Academy) and Professor Jan Godsell (Principal Investigator on the InterAct Network+). Candidates should submit their application, along with a brief project proposal (maximum 2000 words) by 26 August 2022. Interviews will take place early September.

Informal enquiries can be made to Professor Mike Wilson at m.wilson2@lboro.ac.uk.

More information on the InterAct project via this link.

More information on how to apply via this link.