CCVA PhD Forum 2025

Call for Papers

Date: Friday 27 June 2025

Venue: School of Art, Birmingham City University, UK (In-person only event)

The Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA) at Birmingham City University aims to foster new understandings and perspectives of Chinese contemporary arts, design, and visual culture through interdisciplinary practices and theoretical studies. Following the 17-year success of our CCVA Annual Conference, which invites researchers, curators, artists, designers, and practitioners at all stages of their careers to share the latest research development on the theme proposed each year, we inaugurated the first CCVA PhD Forum on June 30th, 2023. This new forum provided a platform for scholars and doctoral students from the UK, China, and Austria, among other locations, to present and engage in dialogue about their doctoral research. In the past two forums (2023 and 2024), we have welcomed nearly 30 PhD students and newly awarded PhDs from universities from the UK, the mainland Europe and Asia, to give presentations. The universities include University of Oxford, the Glasgow School of Art, University of the Arts London, University of Vienna, University of Amsterdam, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, etc. Now, the third CCVA PhD Forum is calling for papers.

In response to the increase of doctoral projects in the field of Chinese arts, design, media, and visual culture, this CCVA PhD Forum is designed as a UK-wide platform to support PhD students further, enhance intellectual exchanges of ideas and critical debates, expand participation of young generation scholars, and celebrate our achievement of up-to-date doctoral research. As a summer event to complement our winter conference, the CCVA PhD Forum aims to provide a unique space for all students within and beyond the UK, who are conducting doctoral research, new PhDs (awarded after June 2024), as well as for supervisors, advisors, and examiners, and those who are interested in pursuing a PhD in the future, to share, debate and innovate. 

Unlike our Annual Conference, the CCVA PhD Forum will not be themed. It welcomes proposals to present their PhD projects in any subject area of the arts and design but in relation to China and its dramatic transformations in the social, political, and cultural contexts. We see China as a method to encourage and foster cross-disciplinary discussion, new understanding, and knowledge production, and at the same time, as a focus to bring us closer to each other. 

Presentations should last no more than 20 minutes. Forum fee: £40. Please note that this Forum will be in person only.

To apply, please include all the following information in one file and send it to: 

Yining.He@mail.bcu.ac.uk 

and copy to ccva@bcu.ac.uk  

The email subject should be ‘CCVA PhD Forum 3’, and the application deadline is 31 March 2025. 

Information to be included in the application file:

1. Name
2. Email address
3. University and Department
4. PhD topic
5. PhD start year
6. Short biography (not extending 100 words)
7. Abstract (not extending 300 words) 

Submitted proposals will be reviewed by CCVA PhD Forum Panel. Successful proposals will be notified within two weeks after the deadline.