Dr Erinma Ochu

Qualifications:

PhD; BSc; FHEA; PGCERT

Position:

Wallscourt Associate Professor in Immersive Media

Department:

College of Arts, Technology and EnvironmentFaculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)

Email:

Erinma.Ochu@uwe.ac.uk

Social media:

About me

I am Wallscourt Associate Professor of Immersive Media and Watershed's inaugural Researcher in Residence at Pervasive Media Studios. Based in the School of Arts, and the College of Art, Technology and the Environment, I joined UWE Bristol in September 2022 and am a member of the leadership team of the Digital Cultures Research Centre. As Researcher in Residence at a cultural organisation, I take a transdisciplinary approach to research and creative technology development grounded in equity, relationality and environmental justice.

Research Interests

My research explores how collective consciousness—shared beliefs, values, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge—takes shape through participatory research, creative technology, and storytelling as a form of earthmaking. Through practice-based and collaborative storytelling experiments, I examine how consciousness, memory, and environmental conditions connect to personal and collective action, while also considering the creative and ethical possibilities of art-led inquiry for imagining how we live and coexist in a warming world. This transdisciplinary work spans storytelling, biology, immersive and emerging technologies, and is guided by three intersecting lenses: self-love, queering metabolism, and epistemic justice.

My PhD students
Tosin Olufon: Preserving African Folktale Heritage through Virtual Reality and Animation: An Immersive Practice-Based Approach to Cultural Preservation. 

Cairi Jacks: Connecting with the more-than-human world through digital art. Read Cairi's paper, Listening to the Land.

Lena Dobrowolska: Co-creating an anti-colonial documentary toolkit for reflecting non-economic loss and damage. Check out Lena's work considering Ways of Repair.

Amanda Egbe: Black and Forth: Understanding Innovation in Black British Artists' Film and Photographic Work. An Autoethnographic Study of Interventions in Film and Media History Through Practice. Check out Amanda's work here.

Completed:

Dr Iyun S Yemi-ShodimuI: The Black Impossible - Afrofuturism and Science Fictionality as mode. Listen to Iyun's debut album, Seduction of a Hunter as part of duo, GOMID.

Dr Holly Broadhurst: Investigating the Efficiency of Environmental DNA (eDNA) for Detecting Terrestrial and Semi-aquatic Mammals. Check out Holly's landmark review on eDNA for monitoring mammals and citizen science paper on volunteers' motivations to get involved in eDNA mammal monitoring.

Dr Ave Kotze: An interpretative phenomenological inquiry into older adults’ experience of nature through Virtual Reality and its effect on their perceived well-being. Read Ave's publication produced from her PhD research.

My Background

Following a PhD in Applied Neuroscience, a 2-year NESTA fellowship allowed me to work at the intersection of art, science and participatory storytelling via digital media. I then worked in the creative industries as a commissioner, filmmaker, scriptwriter, executive producer and curator. This included 5 years establishing and guest curating DocFest Exchange, Sheffield International Documentary Festival’s public programme and 5 years at B3 Media as executive producer and as Creative Director of cultural enterprise, Squirrel Nation through which I create moving image works and installations. As Wellcome Engagement Fellow I was in residence at the Science Museum Group, conceptualising digital participation initiatives, such as #HookedonMusic with Dutch scientists, following the success of Turing’s Sunflowers.

Prior to joining UWE Bristol in 2022, I was Senior Lecturer in Digital Media & Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University and Senior Digital Society Fellow at The University of Reading, funded by Wellcome.

Additional Research Affiliations:

·      Associate Member of UWE's Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environment 

·      Stuart Hall Scholars & Fellows Peer Network,

·      Breaking Barriers in STEM network

·      Global majority collective, Liberatory Archives Memory which published 'We, the living archives' a collection of essays that consider just practices that reimagine archives, as living, collective spaces of resistance, solidarity, and liberation.

Esteems

·      Black Professoriate, UWE Bristol affinity group addressing anti-racism and progression barriers for black staff and students in Higher Education

·      Royal Academy of Engineering Steering group, Technology Pathways & Meaningful Innovation

·      Co-editor 'Digital Materialities & Sustainable Futures' book series with Emerald Press. The first book in the series is Platforms & the Planet: Big Tech, Digital Platforms and Environmental Responsibility.

Area of expertise

My research is focused on experimenting with how collective consciousness (shared beliefs, values, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge) materialises in participatory research and creative technology practices as a form of earthmaking. My practice based research uses storytelling and collaborative storytelling experiments to realise and articulate how consciousness, memory and environmental conditions connect to personal and collective action. By way of example, I am currently facilitating a mutual learning circle around podcasting as a research practice, with creative practitioners and researchers who have or are currently developing a research podcast. This work will inform a podcast commissioning brief for my NetDRIVE storytelling work.

This work is underpinned by epistemic justice, including the value of the arts in generating insights from practice, and the value of minoritised scholarship (crip, queer, indigenous knowledge).

My research is currently supported by three intersecting research grants focused on storytelling for systems change and collective action in sustainable research computing (UKRI), mutual learning (Watershed) and rethinking energy (queering metabolism) (Dr Simon Chaplin).

I am academic consultant on Marcin Gawin's immersive arts funded project, Hermaphrogenesis.

I welcome PhD students committed to centring epistemic justice within their immersive arts and digital media practice and the social worlds/ earths that these technologies bring about or foreclose. Potential PhD applicants could consider applying to the South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

A UWE Bristol School of Arts PhD studentship focused on low-carbon immersive futures, is currently available for a start date of October 2026. The deadline for submission is 22nd May 2026.

My PhD students
Tosin Olufon: Preserving African Folktale Heritage through Virtual Reality and Animation: An Immersive Practice-Based Approach to Cultural Preservation. 

Cairi Jacks: Connecting with the more-than-human world through digital art. Read Cairi's paper, Listening to the Land.

Lena Dobrowolska: Co-creating an anti-colonial documentary toolkit for reflecting non-economic loss and damage. Check out Lena's work considering Ways of Repair.

Iyun S Yemi-ShodimuI: The Black Impossible - Afrofuturism and Science Fictionality as mode. Listen to Iyun's debut album, Seduction of a Hunter as part of duo, GOMID.

Amanda Egbe: Black and Forth: Understanding Innovation in Black British Artists' Film and Photographic Work. An Autoethnographic Study of Interventions in Film and Media History Through Practice. Check out Amanda's work here.

Completed:
Dr Holly Broadhurst: Investigating the Efficiency of Environmental DNA (eDNA) for Detecting Terrestrial and Semi-aquatic Mammals. Check out Holly's landmark review on eDNA for monitoring mammals and citizen science paper on volunteers' motivations to get involved in eDNA mammal monitoring.

Dr Ave Kotze: An interpretative phenomenological inquiry into older adults’ experience of nature through Virtual Reality and its effect on their perceived well-being. Read Ave's publication arising from her PhD research.

Publications

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