Dr Erinma Ochu

Qualifications:

PhD; BSc; FHEA; PGCERT

Position:

Professor, Collective Futures & Transdisciplinary Practice

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 Professor of Collective Futures and Transdisciplinary practice, and currently Watershed's inaugural Researcher in Residence at Pervasive Media Studios. I joined UWE Bristol in September 2022 from Manchester Metropolitan University as Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Communications. Prior to that I was Senior Research Fellow (Digital Society) funded by Wellcome at The University of Reading.

Research Interests

My research encourages groups of people to reflect on developing collective consciousness - shared ways of understanding the world — the common beliefs, values, ideas, and knowledge that emerge when people think and work together. I am particularly interested in when there are create tensions and divergence within a group - that makes space for different possible futures to emerge.

I am invested in this through three interwoven approaches: artistic inquiry, community-led research and storytelling that critiques and imagines the earth making potential of new and emerging creative technologies. I use the term "earthmaking" to describe how research practices actively build and shape the world from local, grounded ways of knowing to a broader planetary perspective that acknowledges that how we live, relate, and create together, has consequences for the living planet.

My work spans — storytelling, biology, and creative technology — and is guided by three core ideas to consider how people collectively create meaning and shape their world through collaborative, creative, and just practices:

• Self-love: valuing oneself and one's community as foundational to how knowledge is produced and shared.
• Queering metabolism: challenging conventional, fixed ideas about how living systems, including bodies, technologies and societies, function.
• Epistemic justice: I acknowledge and foreground the value of different ways of knowing, including the value of the arts in generating insights from practice, and the value of minoritised scholarship (crip, queer, indigenous knowledge).

My Background

Following a PhD in Applied Neuroscience, a 2-year NESTA fellowship allowed Erinma to work at the intersection of art, science and participatory storytelling via digital media. Erinma subsequently 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 an Executive Producer and as Creative Director of cultural enterprise, Squirrel Nation which creates moving image works and installations. Previously as Wellcome Engagement Fellow Erinma 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.

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

·     Academic consultant on Marcin Gawin's immersive arts funded project, Hermaphrogenesis.

Area of expertise

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. 

My research is currently supported by research grants focused on storytelling for systems change and collective action in sustainable research computing (UKRI) and mutual learning (Watershed).

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, as well as considering decomputing approaches, that limit extraction from minoritised people and places.

Potential PhD for 2027 could consider applying to the South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

Publications

Publications loading...