Excitingly, I’m involved in the opportunity to provide a funded PhD position for someone to join our interdisciplinary team at Deakin and support a Digital Ethnography of Children with Vision Impairment.

You can find out more about the research through this video and our website where we are piloting a digital storytelling application.

EOIs are due July 30th, 2021.

The opportunity is a funded PhD position for someone to join our interdisciplinary team at Deakin and support a Digital Ethnography of Children with Vision Impairment project. 

• The deadline for full applications is August 9th, 2021 

The HDR candidate would need to commence in 2021. 

Access to EOI form: Faculty Expression of Interest form 

Candidates please send their initial interest to Rosemary Woodcock and myself so we can arrange a time to talk through the project and your experience.

Instructions on how to apply for HDR candidature here: https://www.deakin.edu.au/research/become-a-research-student/how-to-apply-research-degrees

About the project:

This PhD project involves the development and application of an ethnographic probe to examine the journey children with a vision impairment undertake from first diagnosis through treatment. The project will provide insight into the lived experiences of visually impaired children that will inform educational media for research stakeholders such as Vision Australia. The research will be conducted within the context of an interdisciplinary research team and situated within the disciplines of the Deakin Motion Lab (DML) through its focus on advancing visual methodologies and gamified and playful approaches to engagement. The project will also build upon child-centred methodologies that can engage families remotely and is designed with COVID19 conditions in mind through its use of a digital methodology to allow connectedness. The probe at the heart of the research methodology involves a toybox and an app that are designed to engage young children and provide prompts for journaling and digital story telling.

About the people:

We are an interdisciplinary team from DML (a creative research hub within the School of Communication and Creative Arts), the Social Sciences, Computer Sciences and Optometry.

About the PhD student:

We are looking for someone interested in understanding the relationships between digital data collection, ethnographic practice and an interest in applied research in the area of vision health and engaging children through play.

Activites involved include

1. involvement in the qualitative data collection for the methodological pilot,
2. engagement with families and children,
3. working within interdisciplinary team
4. Engaging in research outputs such as publication and multimedia education outputs
5. Codesign workshops.
6. App development (we have a tech person doing this but the whole team is engaged in how the app works and the user experience.

Please share this opportunity across your networks and if you are interested, email the team our me a.maddox@deakin.edu.au