This year, the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities are supporting their arts & humanities PhD students (based across 17 Scottish institutions) with residencies for creative practice, working with Cove Park to provide dedicated creative time, space, and freedom to develop their doctoral work within a supportive and inspiring context.

Janine Mitchell is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Stirling.  She received a Master of Research (MRes) in Humanities from the University of Stirling and her dissertation won the Research-Based Learning Prize for English Studies and the Dee Amy Chinn Prize for Gender Studies.  She is currently completing a SGSAH internship with The Likhubula Partnership (Scotland-Malawi Partnership) collecting oral histories from Malawi and Scotland and developing their digital archive.

Her practice-based doctoral research project examines the way in which archival material is selected, analysed and implemented in the creation of biographical narratives, and how this process negotiates the shifting boundaries of fact and fiction.  Her research on the Mackay Archive will inform a biographical fiction novel, Freedom Road, which tells the story of the life and work of Peter Mackay, a journalist, activist, humanitarian and key contributor to the Nationalist movements in the Central African Federation.

This residency is a partnership between Cove Park and the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities (SGSAH). SGSAH brings all of Scotland’s Higher Education Institutions with doctoral provision in the arts and humanities together with a wide range of external partners to identify, develop and share world-leading doctoral training.