Dr Alan Hook

Overview

Life before Ulster

Alan’s background is in Media Arts and before joining Ulster he exhibited interactive and immersive artworks internationally in Galleries, Museums and Media Arts Festivals. He has worked at Manchester Met University, and Salford University teaching modules on the BSc Computer Video Games, MA Creative Technology, and MSc Creative Games. While living in Manchester he co-ran a film cooperative designed to bring scholarship in Critical Theory and Philosophy to wider audiences using digital platforms through the early 00’s. Though his work across arts practice, digital culture and experimental media he held the post of Artistic Editor for the Deleuze Studies Journal A/V Actual Virtual which sought to challenge routes in traditional scholarship. He joined the Interactive Media Arts team in Ulster University in 2010.

Teaching

Alan is Course Director of the BSc Interactive Media and the BA Digital Media Production at Ulster. His teaching helps students develop creative, technical and critical skills focusing on immersive and emerging technologies. He teaches modules which mix critical understanding(s) of media and culture, with creative enquiry to explore how media works aesthetically and rhetorically. Where there is still space, he employs a critical feminist pedagogy in his teaching as a way to build understanding with students and the classroom as a shared site of discovery. In 2024 he won the Excellence Award for his work in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), and in 2022 was appointed as one of the universities Senior Distinguished Educational Excellence Fellows for his leadership in progressive curriculum design.

He has worked on a large number of inclusive pedagogy projects for Ulster University and Advance HE including courses in EDI, Neuroinclusive Pedagogies, EDI in the classroom, the Inclusive Pedagogies Toolkit, Allyship and the NeuroIlluminate project (lead by Dr Aideen Hunter).

Alan has worked as a training and curriculum consultant for partners in Industry helping them deliver innovative approaches to learning, and has worked for academic institutions such as the Royal College of Art, Advance HE a number of Institutes of Technology in Ireland to help them establish and develop innovative curricula in Media, Communication, Art, Design and the Humanities.

Research

Alan’s Research has always focused on play as a means of audience engagement across games, immersive and experimental media practices. This has spanned Alternate Reality Games, Transmedia Experiences, App Development, Immersive Experience Design, Museum Exhibits, and Interactive Artworks. He is interested in how immersive experiences can help us shape our understanding of the world and build new ways to know and connect. He is most interested in ways that we can promote more equal, kind and balanced relationships to the planet, and how shared immersive experiences could help (re)shape our connection(s) to the world.

He has previously worked as Co-I on the £13m FutureScreens NI AHRC Creative Cluster which explores emerging technology, the creative industries and economic growth (PI Prof Paul Moore), the €2m Northern Periphery and Arctic Program (PI Dr Helen Jackson) Digi2Market and the UKRI project Museums, Crisis and Covid-19: Vitality and Vulnerabilities (PI Prof Elizabeth Crooke).