What is PAHC?

The Postgraduate Arts and Humanities Centre (PAHC) is far more than a physical or administrative space for PhD students, it is a working and constantly evolving ‘community of practice’. To this end, the PAHC team is committed to ensuring that your PhD experience extends way beyond the confines of an isolated project but is more about sharing the experience and taking advantage of opportunities to realise that the challenges you face are common challenges that can be overcome and, in fact, relished.

Our vision of PAHC is as a community that reimagines postgraduate culture, one that transcends disciplinary boundaries not just through the research culture already evident in the faculty, but via PhDs where an interdisciplinary mindset is a natural port of call, and where PhD research is committed to the potential benefits of their research to the local, regional, national and international communities.

PAHC is about seeing postgraduate research as being the shining light of our faculty’s underpinning philosophy: a philosophy that is in turn outward-facing and which seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about old research problems. Finding points of connection with our own specialisms across the broad spectrum of research that spans the Faculty is thus essential. The point of the symposium is not to simply listen to people’s presentations and to find out about their projects, but to reflect on how to face a research challenge creatively: how to think out of the box and to challenge conventional ways of thinking that may present more of a barrier to, than a facilitator of, original knowledge.