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Small research projects: Award-holders workshop June 2006
(Revised 27 July)
The programme runs for five years from January 2005 with a budget of over £6 million (over €8 million).
AHRC strategic initiatives
The AHRC added strategic programmes to its other research funding modes in 2004. The first two autonomous programmes began to be developed in 2004, and were launched in April 2005 and January 2006 respectively.
The purpose of such programmes is “to invest in areas where there is a sense of intellectual urgency and where a concentrated stream of funding may be needed in order rapidly to advance the field”.
The Programme: Themes, schemes and other activities
Interdisciplinary research themes
The programme covers the full range of arts and humanities disciplines. Its themes are, • • • • • • migration, settlement and diaspora: modes, stages and forms; representation, performance and discourse; languages and linguistic change; subjectivity, emotion and identity; objects, practices and places; beliefs, values and laws.
Schemes of research within the programme
The programme schemes are, • Workshop and Network grants (workshops for one year, and networks for two years); • Small research grants, either individual or collaborative (one year duration); • Large collaborative research grants (with full economic costs up to £600,000 (€875,000), up to a maximum of three years).
Other programme activities
Other programme activities include, • • • • • • • Programme database and email updates; Programme website, www.diasporas.ac.uk
; Workshops for award-holders; Two postgraduate conferences, 2006 and 2008; A series of open seminars in various locations, in 2007/08; Stakeholder events; A final conference.
Commissioning projects within the programme
• In October 2005, we commissioned 20 small research projects • 14 workshops and networks Total £370,000 (about €540,000).
• November 2005 – July 2006 Call for outline bids for large research grants. By the closing date we had received 157 applications which were then shortlisted to 25 by the Commissioning Panel. Applicants submitted their full applications in early May, peer-reviewed in June, with final decisions to be made in July (total £5-6 million; expect to fund 12-15 projects)
Networks and Workshops
• The Comparative Study of Jews and Muslims in Britain, Europe and North America • Early Cinema and the Diasporic Imagination: the Irish in America 1890-1930 • Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe • Toleration and the Public Sphere • Performance and Asylum: Embodiment, Ethics, Community • Migration and Diaspora Cultural Studies Network • Migration in the First Millennium • Language, Religion and Print Cultures in the Welsh Diaspora • Viking Identities Network • From Diaspora to Multi-Locality: Writing British-Asian Cities • Making the Connections: The Arts, Migration and Diaspora • Mobility and Identity Formation: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the 'Italian Case‘ • Migration: Emotions and Human Mobility • Dress and the African Diaspora
Networks and workshops: examples 1 Judith Jesch, University of Nottingham Viking Identities Network
The Scandinavian migrations of the Viking Age left a lasting linguistic, material and genetic mark on Britain, Ireland and their North Atlantic neighbours. The Viking Identities Network will stimulate both academic and popular discussions about the creation of ‘Viking’, ‘Norse’ and ‘hybrid’ identities in the Viking Age, and their 21st-century legacy. The project will explore (1) the role of women and gender in language and material culture and (2) the memorialising of Viking identities from pagan times to the present.
Networks and workshops: examples 2 Gideon Calder, University of Wales Newport Toleration and the Public Sphere
These workshops will focus on issues of toleration that raise tensions at the legal and political level of the community, and pose questions of citizenship and belonging. The overall theme is whether Britain can embrace cultural difference in its political and legal structures, and so become a genuinely plural community. Five workshops will be held throughout Britain, addressing different but related themes: (1) Cultural Identity and Freedom of Expression; (2) Immigration and Citizenship; (3) Gender Equality and Cultural Justice; (4) Toleration and Multiculturalism; (5) Division, Democracy and the Public Sphere. The workshops will be aimed at academics, officials, lobbyists, and members of cultural minority groups, and the speakers will reflect that aim.
Small research projects
On a variety of subjects including, Afghan music in London migrating foods and sensual experience memory and identity among Palestinian women refugees Risorgimento in exile Sudanese refugees dealing with displacement Migrant club cultures and queer diasporic identifications Black British drama Artefacts and narratives of migration, The making of gypsy diasporas.
Small research projects: examples 1 Tanya Kaiser, SOAS Answering Exile: how Sudanese refugees deal with displacement
This project sets out to develop recent thinking on the socio-cultural construction of place in the context of debates about human displacement and emplacement. Its ethnographic focus is some of the multiply displaced Southern Sudanese groups currently resident in Uganda and in Sudan. The project investigates relationships between place and the social and ritual activity performed there, and raises questions about the construction of identity and of social value in this context. It considers both social memories of the past and imagined futures, the latter having particular relevance at a time when repatriation to the ‘homeland’ is under active consideration.
Small research projects: examples 2 Ben Highmore, University of the West of England, Bristol The Spice of Life: migrating foods and the sensual experience of diasporic culture.
When your body moves into a different cultural environment its sensual environment is altered. You are faced with new sights, smells, tastes, sounds and forms of contact. On the one hand your senses are awakened as you experience new sensations; on the other hand anxiety often accompanies new physical and cultural experiences (am I doing this correctly? what am I eating?). Over time our bodies attune themselves to new sensual worlds: habit and routine are the signs of successful accommodation to new practices and sensations. At the same time, though, when we migrate we bring with us a sensual world that is already fashioned: not just memories of sights and sounds, but also a repertoire of material practices that orchestrate sensual experiences.
AHRC Research programmes: Key priorities
Key priorities
• • • • • • Research quality, range and coherence; Research engagement and dissemination (including knowledge transfer); Collaboration and interdisciplinarity; Improving public awareness of arts and humanities research; Embedding research in medium to long term agenda; Monitoring and evaluation of research.
Quality, range and coherence
Both research quality and range of disciplines and themes are considered to be important in an interdisciplinary strategic programme.
Furthermore, the programme has to have coherence, with links made between different projects and activities, and mechanisms put in place to ensure programme targets and priorities are understood, shared and met by participants.
Research engagement and dissemination
AHRC stresses the importance of, (i) research collaboration with the cultural sector (e.g. ‘Moving Here’, National Archive; regional and national museums and galleries); (ii) engagement with public, voluntary or community bodies to share knowledge and develop outcomes of mutual interest and benefit (e.g. CRE, interfaith bodies, community arts projects); (iii) the development of outputs directed at a wide non academic audience (e.g. web pages, exhibitions, theatre, music, installations, public lectures or presentations).
Collaboration and interdisciplinarity
It is important for the programme to, • • • • Break down disciplinary boundaries through research networks and collaborative projects; Develop links with research programmes and centres within AHRC (e.g. Landscape and Environment, Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Religion and Society; Develop links with research programmes and centres outside AHRC, e.g. ESRC Identities and Social Action, COMPAS); Develop links with emerging programmes in Europe and beyond on related themes such as migration and cultural diversity.
Seeking to improve public awareness of Arts and Humanities research
• • • • • The programme seeks to, promote research on DMI through the website; engage with the interests of a diverse range of stakeholders beyond the academy; raise the profile of the programme and its projects in the media; link up with other related research programmes in public events; increase the impact of the programme on public awareness and, as appropriate, policy.
Embedding diasporas and migration research in future agenda
• • • • • It is important that, by the end of the programme, research on diasporas, migration and identities is embedded in the intellectual agenda of the arts and humanities; It is expected that the programme will stimulate interest beyond its 5-year duration in applications to AHRC responsive-mode schemes; One of the programme aims is to contribute to developing the research agenda of funding bodies beyond the UK; It will be important to show that funding in this area has had a substantial and long-term impact in and beyond the academy; Through its website, publications and other outcomes, research associated with the programme should continue to have an impact beyond 2009.
Monitoring and evaluation of research 1
• AHRC has responsibility for requesting and assessing final project reports within the programme, but the programme director is responsible for other aspects of monitoring and evaluation.
• The programme director will request annual progress reports from project award holders. These will be read and any outstanding or problematic issues followed up. Some information from reports will be used as evidence that the programme (as well as the particular project) is meeting its targets.
Monitoring and evaluation of research 2
• The programme director will prepare an annual report with information about attainments and evaluation of progress towards programme goals. This will be monitored by the programme Steering Committee and sent to AHRC Strategic Advisory Group.
• • In these annual reports the director will consider the success of the programme in meeting goals of quality, range and coherence, engagement and dissemination, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, in raising the public profile of arts and humanities research, and embedding diasporas and migration research in longer-term agenda.
The director will write a final programme report.