Why the Celtic Crescent?
Celtic Crescent directly addresses gaps in creative economy research and innovation beyond the UK’s urban centres. The creative economy is often viewed through an urban lens which overlooks the unique interdependencies of non-urban microclusters that are vital to the health and wealth of our nations and regions. Our research indicates that:
- Talent Gaps: Creative businesses in non-urban areas struggle to develop innovation capabilities and lack access to local research talent.
- Marginalised Geographies: Researchers from rural and multilingual backgrounds are currently underrepresented in the doctoral community of creative economy research and innovation.
- Regional Innovation: HEI campuses in peripheral regions are vital innovation ecosystems that break down barriers for non-traditional students.
WHO ARE WE?
Celtic Crescent is a consortium of 7 Higher Education Institutions: Aberdeen University, Aberystwyth University, Bangor University, Falmouth University, Glasgow School of Art, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and University of South Wales. We are supported by a team of more than 20 partners in the creative economy plus major stakeholders such as Bòrd na Gàidhlig, Creative Wales and Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol. We focus particularly on creative economy microclusters marked by inequality, under-representation, and marginalisation arising from geographic, socio-economic, and linguistic factors.
Research Areas We Address
Celtic Crescent research is multidisciplinary and anchored in a deep sense of place. It has transformative potential to generate more diverse creative outputs, more innovation-ready SMEs, and more skilled innovators so we can help you sustain longer-term careers in our rural, coastal, and post-industrial creative economies. This vision underpins every aspect of Celtic Crescent’s work.
We use multi-method approaches to research these five core areas:
- Multilingual Microclusters: Creative configurations in rural and post-industrial settings across our three UK nations.
- Cross-Sector Capacity: Innovation that bridges creative arts, industries, heritage, and associated sectors to develop novel insights, content or experiences.
- Practice-Based Research: Novel creative methodologies in crafts, publishing, music, theatre, and screen (Film/TV/XR).
- Linguistic Diversity: Multilingual research (including Welsh, Gaelic, Doric, Cornish, and English) that connects minority language creative economies to the global stage.
- Policy and Industry: Deep-dive research into the lived experience of microclusters to inform government and business thinking.
The Celtic Crescent comprises seven Higher Education Institutions and 27 creative economy partners:
The Celtic Crescent comprises seven Higher Education Institutions and 27 creative economy partners:
Our Projects And How To Apply
Celtic Crescent is recruiting its first cohort of fully-funded PhDs to begin in October 2026:
Project: Adrift: performing cultural translation
This practice-based project seeks to develop a new creative work in Gaelic that will explore the links between culture, music, belief and languages in Scotland, and to do this in comparison with one other distinctive community. The motivation for the project is the Zeitgeist of cultural ambiguity stemming from the contemporary fracturing of conventional familial and social links: the feeling of being culturally ‘adrift’.
Project: Negotiating the local and the global: a blueprint for screen cultures in minoritised languages
This project will explore how Welsh-language modes of producing, exhibiting and distributing films can reveal possibilities for minoritised language cultures. Globalised streaming has blurred cultural borders, destabilising ideas of ‘nation’ and ‘cinema’. Welsh-language filmmaking is well placed to provide alternative models which negotiate the local, national and global. This project will explore alternative platforms for Welsh-language film and identify principles that may be transferable to other minoritised language communities.
Project: Digital Content Creation for Celtic Language Revitalisation
This project explores how digital content creators can contribute to reshaping the future of Welsh and other Celtic languages within platform-based media ecosystems such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. While promising examples exist, minority-language digital creation remains limited and under-researched, particularly in relation to its cultural, linguistic and economic impact. This project addresses that gap by examining minority-language digital creation as contemporary cultural production, creative labour and place-based economic activity.
Project: Listening to Kernow’s Trees: Arboreal Economies, Ecologies and Sonic Commons
This project explores how listening to trees in Kernow can reconfigure relations between humans and trees as vital, co-constitutive relations within Cornish ecologies and economies. These interrelationships are situated in a rural/coastal creative microcluster marked by linguistic, social, cultural and geographic marginalisation. In this sense, listening to Kernow’s trees requires the Cornish language to sound-out and explore the representation and meaning of trees as it relates to Cornish landscape and Celtic-Cornish identity, particularly with respect to unheard, marginalised, ordinarily inaudible sound.
Project: Heritage as a creative future: towards a sustainable and inclusive heritage-based design practice in Scotland
This project will conduct an in-depth investigation of heritage-based design practices within Scottish textile microclusters. Design plays a critical role in translating archival and vernacular knowledge into contemporary cultural and economic value. Yet within heritage-rich regions of Scotland textile practices have often relied on the commodification of cultural identity, reinforcing stereotypes or disconnecting heritage from the communities to which it belongs. These tensions point to the need for critically informed design research capable of supporting ethical and sustainable creative economies.
Project: The Establishment and Impact Evaluation of a Digital-First, Multi-Site, National Poetry Library of Wales
Wales remains the only nation in the UK without a National Poetry Library. However, a traditional monolithic model is ill-suited to Wales’s bilingual, geographically dispersed creative economy. This project draws on the experience of the Scottish Poetry Library and the Manchester Poetry Library, synthesising these models to design, deploy, and evaluate a digital-first, multi-site infrastructure. This will ensure a library that exists not as a static building, but as a distributed network of digital interfaces and physical nodes across Wales.
Webinar
Celtic Crescent will hold a webinar for anyone interested in applying to be part of Cohort 1 on Friday 13 March, 9-10am (UK time). You can register here: Celtic Crescent Webinar Registration. We will send you a link to the webinar once you have registered.
Funding and Training
Studentships provide an annual tax-free living stipend (currently £21,805 for full-time study 2026-27) plus we pay UK home fees tuition fees. We welcome applications from both full and part-time students.
International students are eligible to apply. The terms of our award from the Arts and Humanities Council means that a maximum 30% of each cohort may be international students.
We use a Development Needs Analysis (DNA) to tailor your training and to support your professional development.
Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI)
Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) are fundamental to the delivery of exceptional Higher Education and research. We welcome students from every background, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds. Our goal is to understand your learning style and help you create environments where you can thrive. Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) can provide you with funding for extra study-related costs due to mental or physical health conditions, learning differences or any other disabilities.
