Dr Kath Hughes
Find more staff
Role:
Department staff:
- College of Arts, Technology and Environment
- Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)
Research staff:
- Autoethnography
- affect
- Embodiment.
- Sound
- live and digital performance
- Digital Cultures
- critical feminist perspective
- Biopolitics
- Intersectional approaches to health and wellbeing cultures
- Digital Technologies
- bioethics
- Biofeedback
- Arts ＆ Health
- Creative Health
- Digital Health
- trauma-informed practice
- Mental Health
- Qualifications:
- PhD, MA Fine Art, BA (hons) Fine Art, AFHEA
- Position:
- Lecturer in Visual Culture
- Department:
- College of Arts, Technology and EnvironmentFaculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)
- Telephone:
- +441179656261
- Email:
- Kath.Hughes@uwe.ac.uk
- Social media:
-
About me
Kath Hughes is a researcher and Lecturer in Visual Culture in the School of Arts at UWE, who currently leads the Level 6 Independent Research Project undergraduate dissertation module across Art & Design degree programmes.
She is the recent recipient of an XR Network+ (UKRI, EPSRC) funding award, to research-lead a collaborative cross-institutional project titled 'Biometric Bodies Breathe: Exploring Heart Rate Synchrony and Embodied Feedback Loops Using Real-Time Data Capture in Immersive XR Virtual Production', with digital artist Daniel Bacchus, performer and sound artist Joanna Penso, and Professor of Neuropsychology Iain Gilchrist. This 6-month research project is supported by XR Network+, using funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Led by XR Stories at the University of York, XR Network+ is conducted in collaboration with Cardiff University, Edinburgh University, Ulster University, and University of the Arts London. The research will expand upon early-stage prototypes developed by Kath Hughes and Danny Bacchus (supported by DCRC x Immersive Arts Fellowship funding), which explored how the phenomenological and affective affordances of immersive XR technologies could be utilised to shape visually, spatially and sensorially responsive data representations/ avatars of biometric bodies in immersive XR contexts.
Kath’s research and pedagogical interests converge at the junctures of digital-mediation, live performance, embodied and affective research methodologies, autoethnographic writing and research methods, biopolitics, health and wellbeing, trauma-informed practices, and critical theory in praxis. Her doctoral scholarship research (titled ‘Bio-rhythms / Digi-rhythms: Synthesizing the Digitally Mediated Body Through Performative Methodologies'), critiqued the biopolitical implications of popular contemporary self-tracking practices and how our embodied lives have become increasingly entangled in digitally-mediated online cultures through biometric wearable devices. Her research has been published and disseminated in conferences and symposia in the UK and internationally, and developed into a supra-curricular critical theory Arts & Humanities Key Stage 5 pedagogical course titled, 'Self-Surveillance in the Digital Age: Is digital self-tracking good for our health?', for The Brilliant Club university-access education charity.
Kath is a member of the Digital Cultures Research Centre and Visual and Material Practices Research Group at UWE, and the Running Artfully Network beyond (a collaborative network of artists, academics, social-scientists, writers and higher education practitioners, across the UK and Europe, who convene to re-imagine running as embodied, phenomenological, aesthetic and critical research praxis).
Publications
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