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A postgraduate researcher from Â鶹ƵµÀ Leicester (DMU) has won a place in the semi-finals of a national competition for PhD students.

Critical heritage scholar Arunima Ghoshal will represent the university in the 2024 Three Minute Thesis contest. It challenges postgraduates from universities around the UK to explain their thesis in just three minutes to an audience of non-academics - for comparison, the average 80,000 word thesis would take nine hours to present.

Arunima’s research is looks at the heritage conflicts that are transforming the  urban development processes of post colonial cities in south Asia and how it is shaped and used as a political and cultural tool.

Some nine DMU PhD students recorded themselves presenting on their research for three minutes, and they were judged by a panel including Professor David Proverbs, Associate Pro Vice Chancellor Business and Innovation, Helen Donnellan, Director of Research, Business and Innovation and Lee Paxman-Clarke, owner of award-winning health tech company Heal-Med.

Arunima received a prize of a £100 voucher and will go through to represent the university at the UK quarter finals hosted by Vitae in June.

She said: “I was really surprised to win because my work is qualitative research, and it may be difficult to express ‘impact’ of such research within 3 minutes. but I’m excited to go through to the semi-finals. I took the metaphor of visualising time to show in my presentation and used a real example of an interesting building in Kolkata, India to highlight the specifics of heritage contestationss and power dynamics, so that we can develop more inclusive ways for diverse communities to identify with heritage in post-colonial conditions.”

Runner-up was sports history student Greer Aylece-Robinson of Arts, Design and Humanities who is researching the experiences of Black women in football.

DMU students and staff can view all the presentations

Jimi O’Callaghan, researcher development administrator at DMU Doctoral College said: “The quality of research that our PhD students were able to showcase was inspiring, and speaks to the talented community of researchers that we have here at DMU.

“It was a difficult choice to choose just one from the nine shortlisted but Arunima’s stood out for its clever use of visuals and well communicated topic.”

The 3MT ® was developed by The University of Queensland to develop PhD students’ academic, presentation and research communication skills. Official competitions are held in more than 200 universities around the world.