Dr Spencer Roberts

My research explores the way in which animation, through its relationship with abstraction, vitality, transformation, and becoming, performatively addresses a number of process philosophical concerns. I am especially interested in the way in which animation engages with transformative aspects of subjectivity and how 'animate thinking' can be applied to a broader set of conceptual, socio-political, and therapeutic issues.

My work on practice-oriented research repositions the traditional textual exegesis as a long-durational, aesthetic process, which is concerned with the cultivation of a body of inter-textual, affective and material relations. It likewise explores the abductive power of artistic practice in the context of the non-traditional, practice-oriented thesis.

My published work includes articles for Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Digital Creativity and Plymouth University's Message Journal. I have a chapter in the anthology Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research, and I am currently working on an extended monograph, which comparatively explored the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida in the context of artistic research.

I am open to applications from PhD students interested variously, in process philosophical approaches to animation/art/design; the application of 'animate thinking' to both practical and conceptual problems; the territory of experimental, expanded, and pervasive forms of animation and design; histories of immersive and electronic media; Deleuzian, Bergsonian and Derridean thought in the context of animation, film, and the visual arts; affects and affectivity in the context of practice-oriented research; the tension between language and sensation, and the potential for discipline-specific, methodological inflection in the context of research in the visual arts.

PhD supervisions:

• First Supervisor for Jason Payne (Inner and Outer Worlds: Encounters with the Invisible), University of Huddersfield, 2023.
• First Supervisor for Sean Crumlish (Access to the Aesthetic: Exploring the Roles of the Functional, the Cultural and the Aesthetic With Respect to the Production of Tactile Images), University of Huddersfield, 2023.
• First Supervisor for Stephen Hibbert (Exploring the Role of Lived Time and Co-presence in Culturally Consumptive Mixed Reality Environments), University of Huddersfield, 2022.
• First Supervisor for Ryan Wilkinson (Pedadgogic Responses to the Marketisation of Arts Education: Can an Understanding of the Values of Creative Educators Enable More Effective Strategies for the Adoption of E-learning Tools), University of Huddersfield, 2019.
• Second Supervisor for Anneke Pettican (Shadow Play: How Is a Concern With the Uncanny Made Manifest in the Artistic Practice of Brass Art?), University of Huddersfield, 2018.
• Second Supervisor for James Dyer (Through the Optic of Design: Self-Tracking and the Permanence of Change), University of Huddersfield, 2018.