NM McEwen

This collaborative PhD scholarship between the University of Sydney and the University of Glasgow offers an innovative research opportunity focused on designing policy with lived experience. The project investigates how design-led approaches can reshape the epistemic foundations of policymaking, enabling lived experience to become a more active, legitimate, and generative form of policy knowledge. Despite growing recognition of the importance of reflecting the experiences of those impacted by policy, lived experience is often incorporated in limited or extractive ways. Policymaking increasingly relies on data practices that privilege abstraction, marginalising experiential, relational, and situated forms of knowing. The research aims to prototype novel approaches to policy design, embedding design-led interventions within existing research initiatives with explicit policy aims and strong community engagement. At the Sydney Policy Lab (SPL), projects will be selected from four core programs: Communities and Universities, Good Childhood, Inequalities and Poverty, and Australia's Relational Economy. Each program explores the interaction between policy, institutions, and everyday life. At the Centre for Public Policy (CPP) at the University of Glasgow, policy labs will build upon work on poverty and inequality, examining how fragmented policy systems shape social outcomes and employing composite story methodology grounded in lived experience. Design is positioned as a mediating practice capable of producing new policy spaces where different forms of knowledge can meet, be negotiated, and shape policy together. Drawing on the expertise of the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, the project will employ visual mapping, storytelling, and co-design to examine how lived experience is articulated, visualised, legitimised, and translated within policy systems. The research brings together scholarship on public engagement, policy design, participatory governance, design ethnography, data visualisation, and narrative theory, considering visual storytelling and design as epistemic and political drivers that shape what is seen, valued, and acted upon in policy. The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning hosts a dynamic community of research groups, including the Civic and Social Design Research Group, who explore how design shapes equitable, inclusive, and participatory futures. The Sydney Policy Lab is a multidisciplinary institute that brings community members and academics together to set the agenda for transformative public policy. The Centre for Public Policy at the University of Glasgow, based in the College of Social Sciences, connects research, policy, and practice to address complex policy challenges such as climate change, economy, poverty and inequality, migration, public administration, multi-level governance, and intergovernmental relations. Eligibility criteria include a First Class Honours degree or a Master's by Research with outstanding results (at least 80% or overseas equivalent), full-time study, demonstrable interest in the research topic, and the ability to enroll/register on PhD programmes at both institutions simultaneously. The successful candidate will spend year one and three at the University of Sydney and year two at the University of Glasgow, commencing the collaborative PhD physically based at USYD. Funding is provided by USYD and includes an annual stipend of $AUD 42,754 (2026 rate), tuition fees covered by RTP fee offset for domestic students or University of Sydney Tuition fee scholarship for international students, and a one-off Sydney Global Mobility Joint PhD Travel Scholarship ($5000 AUD). Additionally, the UofG's College of Social Sciences will provide a Fee Waiver to cover the tuition fees for the UofG PhD programme. Applications must be submitted by April 21, 2026. For further details and to apply, visit the project link provided.