‘An End and a Beginning’ - Navigating the PhD Exam Process and Beyond (Techne Alumni Roundtable)

This panel is for all attendees as part of Day 2 of the January Congress. 

Whilst you are welcome to book a space on Inkpath if you would like to formally record your attendance, this is not mandatory as this is a core activity of the overall event.

Session Details:

Following on from the alumni panel at the Summer Congress 2025, this roundtable involves a group of Techne alumni coming together to discuss their experiences of the PhD Exam Process and how they have managed the transition from PhD Researchers into the wider world. There will also be the opportunity to ask questions to the panellists directly.  

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Jo Hutton Langton completed her PhD on the work of electroacoustic experimental composers Beatriz Ferreyra, Éliane Radigue, Delia Derbyshire and Teresa Rampazzi, which focusses on their methods for creating new electronic sound material in the pre-digital analogue studios of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Jo is a regular writer for The Wire and Electronic Sound and contributor for Contemporary Music Review, Organised Sound and Berlin’s ‘Positionen’ journals. Jo has worked as a recording engineer for BBC radio and music since 2000. 

Jo is also a composer/sound designer and her work has been shown at the Museum of London, Tower Bridge exhibition centre, Tate Modern Shorts, and played on BBC Radio 3, Channel 4. Her re-mix track ‘Carbon Cycle’ on Hannah Peel’s ‘Fir Wave’ album contributed to her 2021 Mercury Nomination. Her audio works tell stories about changing environments, abstracting speech and field recordings relating to a particular social or political concept and borrowing audio processing techniques from the experimental composers who worked in pre-digital analogue studios.

Jo regularly teach workshops for PhD candidates in radio broadcasting and podcast making, and is part of the out-reach training team at BBC Radio and Media Operations. She sat on the board of trustees at Resonance FM from 2016 – 2025.

Katie Hall has recently submitted her PhD thesis Writing as Knowing – a creative critical investigation of research by practice through the production of ‘Queer as Friends: a theoretical memoir charting unconventional friendships as feminist activism’

Her poems and short stories have been shortlisted for several national UK writing awards. Her poetry is included in the anthologies Queer Life, Queer Love 3 (November 2025, Muswell Press), and Byways (2024) and Tymes goe by turnes (2020) from Arachne Press. Her sapphic short stories feature in various lesbian and sapphic collections.

Katie is the creator and screenwriter of the first UK queer women’s web series, She’s in London, and producer of the award-winning queer indie feature film Under the Influencer (2024).

Marina Castledine is a lover of hope and hospitality, of generating foundations for new dreams. She is a socially engaged producer of mixed heritage, with twenty years’ experience designing creative programmes, specialising in supporting vulnerable young people and communities. She has worked across the UK in a variety of freelance and permanent roles; including Head of Learning at Towner gallery and National Manager at Tate. On completing a Techné AHRC funded PhD, investigating silence as resistance through living heritage, she is currently seeking work in the creative arts, research and writing sectors. 

After careers in editing, publishing and education and bringing up a family, Kate Ferry-Swainson began her PhD in 2020 and passed her viva in Summer 2025. Her research uncovers overlooked experiences and post-war resonances of deportation, the Holocaust and survival through Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor and writer Charlotte Delbo’s representations of clothing: a raspberry-silk negligee, striped prisoner uniform, mauve silk house-dress and children’s socks. During her time as a Techne student,  Kate did a 3-month placement to the National Theatre, researching in their document and costume archives and writing a learning guide to a play produced at the NT, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, analysing themes and characters through their costumes.