Dr Samantha Kitchener

I contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, focusing on practice-based research, visual methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

My approach to teaching transmedia storytelling is rooted in transdisciplinarity and thinking-through-making. I encourage students to explore the immersive and interactive potential of emerging technologies, while critically questioning their cultural, ethical, and perceptual implications. The emphasis is not on technical mastery, but on cultivating a mindset that reveals hidden narratives and expands how we see and experience the world, beyond human capability.

I value working with technological tools outside their conventional contexts, particularly in collaboration with students and practitioners from non-technical backgrounds. My teaching invites students to engage with advanced technologies in ways that reflect their lived experience, personal perspective, and individual modes of working. This fosters innovation through accessibility and positions technology as a mediator for inquiry, a means to reimagine interaction and spatial design within visual communication, centring emotion, aura, and the biography of diverse cultures and communities.

Qualifications

• Fellowship - Advance HE (FHEA)

Courses taught

• Illustration MA
• Graphic Design MA
• Illustration Animation BA (Hons)
• Animation MA
• Interaction Design BA (Hons)

My research practice explores how emerging technologies, including AI, spatial capture, and transmedia storytelling, can mediate collective memory, heritage loss, and lived experience. Through tools such as photogrammetry, LiDAR, 3D scanning, and virtual reconstruction, I investigate the politics of place and perception, developing experimental methods that challenge dominant narratives in heritage digitisation and cultural representation.

My practice-based doctoral research, British Steel: Rebuilding Industrial Heritage Through the Technological Lens, responds to the erasure of the Redcar Steelworks in Northeast England between 2020–2022, a symbol of wider post-industrial decline in the UK. Through spatial-critical methods combining remote sensing, found-footage reconstruction, and community memory, the project reimagines these rapidly disappearing landscapes. This included co-creating a 3D model of the Redcar Blast Furnace core with former steelworkers and assembling over 100,000 crowd-sourced image points to reconstruct the experience of loss from multiple community perspectives virtually.

Emerging from a moment of national uncertainty around steel deindustrialisation, this work offers inclusive, affective ways of visualising landscape transformation. It foregrounds human connection to place, and highlights the need for more democratic approaches to heritage representation. The project has contributed to national conversations on industrial heritage retention, with coverage by major media outlets including the BBC.

I have experience as Principal Investigator on funded research projects combining interdisciplinary research across machine learning, gamification, performance, and immersive technologies to bring the past to life. Working in collaboration with communities, rural museums, and heritage sites in the South East, these projects explore immersive storytelling as a method for engaging public audiences with medieval society and archival material through speculative and sensorial encounters.

PhD Primary Supervision – Xingchun Mao, Entry year 2024/25 FT – The Feasibility of Digital Cemeteries: Emotionally Assisted Support for Those Mourning the Loss of a Companion Animal.

I am a member of the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network, DACP (Design Arts and Creative Practice), KERI (Knowledge Exchange and Research Institute).

Specialisms

• Cultural Heritage
• Volumetric Capture
• Interaction Design
• Community Engagement
• Participatory Practice