Arts And Humanities Research Council Research Articles

Objects of the Mind: using film to explore the entangled histories of media and mental health

This article presents the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project, Objects of the Mind: engaging publics in the material cultures of media and mental health (AH/W002140/1), which was co-investigated by academics at the University of East Anglia and the University of Manchester and curators from across the Science Museum Group (SMG). Through this co-investigation we sought to tap into public interest in the SMG object collections and the accessibility of popular films (supplied by partners StudioCanal) to engage new audiences for our research on the interactions of psychiatry and cinema. From the museum perspective, we sought to use this research to ask new questions and tell new stories about the SMG objects, and to foster cross-collection dialogue between medicine (Science Museum) and media (National Science and Media Museum) collections. We discuss a range of events, activities and outputs we delivered towards these aims, but focus particularly on three new films we produced that (re)combined museum objects, feature film clips and expert interviews to tell new, enhanced or entangled stories about and across the collections. We will use these three short films to demonstrate three dialogues the project fostered: between museum collections; between histories; and between academic disciplines.

Developing Heritage Preservation on Ilha de Moçambique Using a Historic Urban Landscape Approach

In 2011, a new approach was introduced into the management of heritage on Ilha de Moçambique by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Known as the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach, this seeks to expand current understanding of the island’s historic urban heritage, recognising that ‘heritage’ is not limited solely to monuments or the built environment. Importantly, HUL incorporates urban sustainable development within the scope of heritage preservation. Given this, the adoption of the HUL approach has the potential to contribute to ensuring the authenticity and integrity of the built heritage, as prescribed by the 1972 UNESCO Convention, of Ilha de Moçambique, and effectively maintaining the Outstanding Universal Values that resulted in the declaration of the island as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991. This paper discusses how local communities use the resources and heritage available to them and the central role of commerce, and the marketplace, in the heritage landscape of the island. A critical aspect of this is the sale of antiquities, including archaeological items, to tourists. Perspectives developed within the Rising from the Depths (RftD) network recently supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) UK, with funding from the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), offer positive alternative solutions to overcome this challenging situation. In particular, the network sought to identify how the tangible submerged and coastal Marine Cultural Heritage (MCH) of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar, and its associated intangible aspects, can be utilised to stimulate ethical, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth in the region. Our paper demonstrates how the implementation of the RftD initiative when combined with the HUL approach can help to increase awareness among communities on Ilha de Moçambique about the relevance of their heritage and the need for preserving it while meeting everyday needs.

The Functional Grammar of Dance applied to ELAN annotation: meaning beyond the naked eye

Abstract The main purpose of this article is to show how Functional Grammar of Dance (FGD) can be applied to dance discourse analysis to reveal the discursive strategies that underlie choreographies and support movement-based communication. In recent years, studies in Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) have benefited from the development of several models of analysis, and from the emergence of a new focus on the materiality of semiotic modes. The Functional Grammar of Dance is a recently developed model of analysis that draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics theory and focuses on movement-based communication starting from dance (particularly ballet as a starting point). The Functional Grammar of Dance has been adopted as a central theory in an international collaborative project funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) in the UK and the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, ‘German Research Foundation’) in Germany, The Kinesemiotic Body, where it has been used with the ELAN annotation system. ELAN annotation based on the Functional Grammar of Dance was used for both live-collected data from dance rehearsals and for dance videos and revealed aspects of dance performances that are not necessarily captured by the naked eye. This paper proposes three case studies where we show that our ELAN annotation with the FGD provides an effective and very flexible interface for the grammaticalization of movement-based communication and the study of movement-based discursive strategies.

Research in Languages, Cultures and Societies: Voices of Researchers in the UK

In 2022 a survey of the languages research community in the UK was undertaken, with 536 responses (150 PhD students, 386 post-PhD researchers), complemented by 29 interviews across all career stages, as part of a Future of Languages Research Fellowship funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This article reports findings from that survey, presenting data on research expertise, funding applications and successes, engagement with government and other stakeholders, and future directions and areas for development. Presenting the perspective of researchers themselves, our study adds to our understanding of the current state of languages research in UK Higher Education, complementing other sources including the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the British Academy & University Council of Modern Languages (UCML) 2022 report on trends in language learning in Higher Education, and providing useful data for international comparisons. The article concludes with recommendations for action.

COVID-19 IMPACTS ON THE MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING OF RESEARCHERS, PARTNERS, AND RESEARCH COMMUNITIES

BackgroundIn the United Kingdom, over five years, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have made more than to 300 awards under the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the Newton portfolios. These awards have drawn on AHRC’s research base to address development challenges that are ultimately global challenges, including poverty reduction, global health, climate change, resilience, conflict, displacement, inclusive education, and rapid urbanization. ObjectiveThis paper focuses on data from a selection of projects from both the GCRF and Newton portfolios in order to evaluate the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has on the mental health and wellbeing of individuals and communities.  A focus of the study is on researchers and their families, on research partners and other affiliates as well as within the communities where these projects take place. A particular attention is paid on the impact of COVID-19 on different aspects of life and social practices as well as changes in the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of researchers as part of and during the research process. MethodsThe data in this project comes from PRAXIS, a £1m research project from the University of Leeds, which covers four main areas of research; namely those of Heritage, Conflict and Displacement, COVID-19 and Climate Change, and Youth Engagement. In this paper, the data presented is only from the COVID-19 Strand that examined 248 projects from both the GCRF and Newton portfolios. The data was gathered via a desk-based assessment, two surveys, twenty-one interviews, as well as twelve case studies. ResultsThe COVID-19 pandemic increased pressure on already strained research systems highlighting some key challenges and issues.  With the pandemic impacts, the sense of isolation and loneliness increased as well as the need for additional mental health support. Mental health concerns were often reported in the context of deteriorating mental health for academics and practitioners involved in the projects. The trauma of the pandemic and its effects led to reports of frustration, disempowerment, lack of agency, sadness, depression, and even symptoms associated with PTSD.   Respondents also described the impact of the lockdowns on productivity and mental health, with many more work hours required to attain a similar level of pre-Covid quality.  For communities, the main impacts of the pandemic were also the lockdowns and their subsequent impact on mental health.  ConclusionAmidst the chaos of the pandemic, there were valuable lessons learned about the need and the method of preserving vulnerable communities as well as maintaining the health of researchers, partners, and communities by balancing the home and work life.

Religious accommodation, agonism, agnosticism in healthcare: A commentary on Joshua Hordern, 'Accommodating religion and belief in healthcare: Political threats, agonistic democracy and established religion'.

Religious accommodation, agonism, agnosticism in healthcare: A commentary on Joshua Hordern, 'Accommodating religion and belief in healthcare: Political threats, agonistic democracy and established religion'.

DiSSCo UK: A new partnership to unlock the potential of 137 million UK-based specimens

Between September 2021 and March 2022, a consortium across the twelve nations and regions of the United Kingdom (UK), led by the Natural History Museum (NHM), London, participated in a study to develop the business case and plan to support a national programme of natural science collections digitisation. This work, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), sought to understand the size and diversity of UK natural science collections; establish the readiness of UK institutions to undertake digitisation; and develop training materials to pilot regional digitisation, building on prior investments in digitisation and informatics by the NHM. This presentation sets out the key findings from this work and is presented as a “blueprint” to scale up digitisation and cooperation through a national infrastructure programme: DiSSCo UK. This programme is part of the UK’s contribution to DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, a partnership of institutions who share a vision to empower science and society, in balance with nature, to make reliable knowledge and evidence about the natural world available to all. Through the Francis Crick Institute and the Turing Institute, the UK has successfully created world-leading medical research and data science collaborations. DiSSCo UK is crafting a business case to do the same for bio- and geodiversity. Our data shows that the UK holds some of the world’s most important natural science collections, with more than 137 million specimens collected from across the globe and stored in more than 90 institutions throughout the country. Firstly, advances in molecular, genetic, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies are enabling new scientific discoveries and new commercial opportunities to be extracted by digitising these collections and making the data available to scientific researchers and commercial venture partners. Secondly, UK collections play a critical and culturally sensitive role in supporting a range of arts and humanities research. These collections continue to shape our culture, our view of ourselves and our place in the world, addressing issues of inclusivity and relevance. Lastly, data from these collections underpin local, regional and national policy-making, providing information not only central to monitoring change in the environment, but also for testing predictions of future change, to ensure UK policies are ‘nature positive’ and evidence-led. Recent work commissioned by the NHM has confirmed an economic value of at least £2 billion with a 7–10 times return on investment from UK collections digitisation with economic opportunities across biodiversity conservation, control of invasive species, medicine discovery, agricultural research and development, and mineral exploitation (Popov et al. 2021). Over time, we propose to build DiSSCo UK out to not only digitise our national collection but to create a national infrastructure that supports real-time integration between biological, human health, meteorological, geographic (e.g., land use) and geological data. It will provide a dynamic view of the state of the world’s biodiversity, its threats and human well-being; facilities to support large-scale genomic and chemical analysis of the UK natural science collections, including an on-demand bio-sample service, promoting legal and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) access to genetic resources for the benefit of research and society; a coordination office to support the activities of a distributed network of UK organisations holding, generating and analysing natural science data; and an adequate annual budget to support core staffing, workshops, outreach, scholarships, sabbaticals, training activities and other running costs.

Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP): creating art-based communication structures between young people and policy-makers from local to national levels

ABSTRACT This article will provide an overview of how the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) has attempted to explore the use of interdisciplinary art-based practices for peacebuilding in Rwanda. In particular, we will detail how performance has been used to create a two-way system of communication between young people and policy-makers based on the issues that young people face towards developing an approach to teaching and learning informed by and with young people.

Introducing the Digital Humanities in Ireland Landscape Report Dataset

The UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Network was jointly funded in July 2020 by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under the ground-breaking Collaboration in Digital Humanities Networking Grant Scheme. The joint aims of the Network were to: a) undertake research and consultation towards the implementation of a permanent UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association; and b) to develop a clear roadmap for collaboration in the field between the two countries. An ancillary objective of the Irish Network members is to provide an up-to-date evaluation of the role and scope of Digital Humanities in Ireland, both past and present, to facilitate longer-term thinking about Digital Humanities so that we might optimise future developments in the field, including the nascent UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association. To that end, the respective partners are developing a Digital Humanities in Ireland Landscape Report. The research informing the Landscape Report will be delivered in two phases. The initial phase took place between March and September 2021 and comprised the identification via desk research, collection and collation of data pertaining to Digital Humanities entities in Ireland. The second phase of the data gathering/collection exercise entails the presentation of the preliminary dataset to the wider Digital Humanities community for input and suggestions. To that end, we have created an Open Science Framework (OSF) repository. This contribution introduces the Digital Humanities in Ireland Landscape Report dataset, its methodology and primary sources and offers some preliminary observations and analysis. It concludes with some suggestions for potential use cases and further directions for the dataset.

“Bloody amazing really”: voices from Scotland’s public libraries in lockdown

PurposeThe research examined Scottish public libraries and the libraries' response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020–2021. The research focussed particularly around the way that the libraries helped to support community resilience and cohesion during periods of lockdown. The study considered issues around the closure of services in March 2020, digital services, the loss of physical library spaces and governance models. The research presents the voice of service managers rather than being a user study. The research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UKRI (United Kingdom Research and Innovation), as a part of the council's scheme to provide response to the pandemic of 2020.Design/methodology/approachThis was an exploratory study examining how Scottish public library services responded to the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Three methods were deployed in the investigation. First, the gathering social media and other web-based content from library services over the months March–September 2020 (amounting to over four thousands snips of content) were analysed thematically. Second, 19 semi-structured interviews with service managers across Scotland were conducted. These were recorded, transcribed and analysed. These elements formed the cornerstone of the research but were supported by a short survey distributed to all public library services in Scotland focussed on e-lending during lockdown.FindingsFindings are presented in respect of the lessons to be learnt from the closure of physical services and the migration to digital only provision, the contribution made to supporting communities, health and well-being, the importance of the balance of physical and digital library services around governance models for library services, as well as around the process of reopening services. This research explores how staff responded to this unparalleled situation, how the staff maintained close relationship with the communities the staff serve, what services themselves learnt through lockdown, and how the staff's management practices adapted. The findings present voices from Scottish libraries during 2020.Research limitations/implicationsThe research presents a snapshot of activities during a period of fast-moving change. The research, therefore, presents a snapshot of March–December 2020, which is, however, an extremely important snapshot. The first lockdown was perhaps most interesting to study from a research perspective because the authors witnessed, real-time, how the staff responded and reacted (with lessons learnt and applied in subsequent regional or national lockdowns later in 2020 and in the 2021). The second lockdown and subsequent periods were outside the scope of this research.Practical implicationsRecommendations are offered around the need for a national conversation about digital content provision in public libraries and the exploration of possibilities of a national approach, the role libraries have as digital enablers (in supporting effort to overcome the digital divide in society), the crucial nature of continued strong advocacy for public libraries, the importance of the library as a physical space, and on how to maintain the flexibility, agility and autonomy which emerged during lockdown.Social implicationsThe research presents strong testimony about the social value of public libraries as free, safe and public spaces within communities. It also highlights the continued digital divide which exists in many places and the important role that public libraries have in being digital enablers for many members of the public. The closeness of library service staff to users is strongly evidenced in the testimony from managers as is the need for parent organisation (local authorities or in culture or leisure trusts) to recognise more fully the breadth of services the public library provides and how these are “essential” for many users.Originality/valueThe value and distinctiveness of this research lies in the fact that the research captured the voices, thoughts and perceptions of Scotland’s public libraries during the period of lockdown in 2020. The evidence gathered suggests important conversations are required around equity of e-lending provision, the role of libraries as digital enablers, the balance between physical and digital provision and around the ways libraries are managed (directly by local authorities or in culture trusts). The research affords lessons for public library provision beyond Scotland with many issues being transferable to other contexts.

Anthropocene and the Gothic: An Interview with Justin Edwards


 Justin Edwards is a professor in the Division of Literature and Languages at the University of Stirling. Previously Chair of English at the University of Surrey and professor and head of English at Bangor University, he was elected by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 2005. Between 1995 and 2005, he taught at the University of Montreal and the University of Copenhagen, where he was appointed as an associate professor in 2002. He holds an Affiliate Professorship in U.S. Literature at the University of Copenhagen and in 2016-2017 he was a Fulbright scholar at Elon University, North Carolina. He is also a member of the Peer Review College for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and a Trustee of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA). Justin’s contribution to the study of Gothic literature started with Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic, which examines the development of U.S. Gothic literature alongside 19th-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. In Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature, he continued in the area by examining how collective stories about national identity and belonging tend to be haunted by artifice.

Surveying Healthcare Workers to Improve the Design, Wearer Experience and Sustainability of PPE Isolation Gowns

This protective clothing design project responds to the urgent need for research into the redesign of personal protective equipment (PPE) isolation gowns, to be more fit for purpose and reusable to enhance the experiences of healthcare workers treating patients with COVID-19 and variants. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) the research addresses the engineering question: “What new materials, design and manufacturing approaches should we start to consider in preparation for pandemics e.g. reusable PPE to replace single use?” The article focuses on the online questionnaire/ survey, its main findings and the ‘participatory clothing design’ methodology which prioritises the lived experiences and expressed needs of healthcare workers wearing disposable and reusable PPE in acute care scenarios. Research methods include literature and gown reviews, selected interviews and survey directed at nurses, to acquire first-hand qualitative data about the impact of current gown design and procurement policies on wearers. Selected results and commentary from the ongoing survey are presented and thematically analysed to inform the development of reusable gowns. Semi-structured interviews with clinical leads and caregivers, as well as responses from users, will be important to integrate expertise in fashion, textile and uniform design, clinical practice, and manufacturing. Further design will be based on a complex design brief that balances the needs of wearers and critical care providers while considering regulations, protection, comfort, sustainability, and cost. This research focuses on enhancing an overlooked area of critical care clothing and the people who wear it while reducing its detrimental impact on the planet.

Storying Autobiographical Experiences with Gender-Based Violence

In earlier work1 collaborative autoethnography was identified as a viable methodology for researching stories that drew on lived experiences with domestic abuse. Collaborative autoethnography offers a method of working with women outside of academia who have experienced gender-based violence (GBV) and including them as co-researchers whose writings can and should be valued as academic research. In this article, also a collaborative autoethnography, the authors explore methods for storying autobiographical experiences of GBV as a potential way of reclaiming stories whilst navigating the legal, ethical, and moral dilemmas sometimes associated with autobiographical writing that might help to make these stories less difficult to write, and also read, avoiding stereotypes that have led to critique around battle-weary narratives of GBV2 and bad romance tropes.3 The authors argue that evocative texts drawing on lived experiences but layering the real with the imaginary, the remembered with the fictitious, can be more accessible to read and write. Cook and Fonow4 argue that feminist work is often creative and spontaneous, and this article will detail writing methods that were shared by the authors in creative workshops with survivors of GBV as part of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).5 They also share examples of their own stories that have been inspired by this approach as well as the challenges and motivations of working in this way.

Harris Tweed: A glocal case study

Fast and effectively disposable fashion has seen clothing reduced to transient items, worn for a short period of time then discarded. This has pushed down prices, moving textile and clothing production to low-cost labour countries and decimating the traditional Scottish textile economy. Fast fashion drives consumer demand for newness and uses finite resources that are damaging to the environment. In 2019, the pressure to move towards a more sustainable fashion and textile industry is intense. Traditional textile manufacture using natural, renewable sources that are inherently long-lasting offers a slow fashion alternative, epitomized by the Harris Tweed handweaver community in Scotland. Fashion has embraced digital, with growing online sales and increasing focus on digital content. This presents an opportunity to redress the balance by using technology to shape a sustainable future for traditional textiles. Utilizing an interpretive paradigm and inductive approach, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded networking grant is presented as a qualitative case study, investigating how immersive technologies can be used to safeguard the future of traditional textile products, to educate contemporary, global audiences on the provenance and human hand behind manufacturing processes and to encourage consumption of products with longevity. This explanatory case study finds that fashion brands are using immersive technologies for virtual changing rooms or creative customer experiences but are not exploiting the possibilities of immersive technologies in engendering a sense of place or people behind the product. Findings also reveal that the Harris Tweed Authority and Harris Tweed Hebrides brand successfully use landscape to convey a sense of place, but are under-utilizing the handwoven value and sustainable, slow fashion credentials of Harris Tweed. China is identified as a potential place for Harris Tweed to gain valuable market share, with increasingly wealthy Chinese Generation Z consumers seeking individual exclusivity and sustainability in their clothing purchases, criteria that embody Harris Tweed.

Artists as cultural intermediaries? Remediating practices of production and consumption

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss findings from an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded research project into the heritage culture of British folk tales. The project investigated how such archival source material might be made relevant to contemporary audience via processes of artistic remediation. The research considered artists as “cultural intermediaries”, i.e. as actors occupying the conceptual space between production and consumption in an artistic process.Design/methodology/approachInterview data is drawn from a range of 1‐2‐1 and group interviews with the artists. These interviews took place throughout the duration of the project.FindingsWhen artists are engaged in a process of remediation which has a distinct arts marketing/audience development focus, they begin to intermediate between themselves and the audience/consumer. Artist perceptions of their role as “professionals of qualification” is determined by the subjective disposition required by the market context in operation at the time (in the case of this project, as commissioned artists working to a brief). Artists’ ability (and indeed willingness) to engage in this process is to a great extent proscribed by their “sense-of-self-as-artist” and an engagement with Romantic ideas of artistic autonomy.Originality/valueA consideration of the relationship between cultural intermediation and both cultural policy and arts marketing. The artist-as-intermediary role, undertaking creative processes to mediate how goods are perceived by others, enables value-adding processes to be undertaken at the point of remediation, rather than at the stage of intermediation.

Testing of Priorities in the Research of Cultural Heritage in Slovakia’s Depopulated Regions

Abstract Along with the dynamics of findings of several scientific disciplines of the recent decades, the mechanisms and processes of culture transmission seem to be much more apparent. The knowledge about cultural heritage and the inheritance of culture produced in this way have led to the creation of several platforms of critical cultural heritage. Anthropological and ethnological findings significantly enrich these multi-disciplinary environments where the criterion of a living cultural heritage is becoming generally accepted. In this light, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) created a working group in 2019 with the aim to prepare an innovated Strategic Research Agenda (SRIA) for the submission of European projects in the field of cultural heritage (JPI CH). The working group invited Slovak and Czech researchers to reflect on the knowledge from the Central European research area in order to define the research topics for the priority Cultural Heritage and People. The research on the testing of the priority and clarification of the impacts of the depopulation of cultural regions on cultural heritage was conducted at selected locations of the Hont, Novohrad and Malohont regions. The key indicators for justifying the inclusion of the research topic The impact of the depopulation of EU regions with cultural heritage in SRIA include ethnographic information, historical demographic data and the modelling of the transmission of cultural heritage content to the next generations.

Capuchin Monkeys Individuate Objects Based on Spatio-temporal and Property/Kind Information: Evidence from Looking and Reaching Measures

This paper is an output of the project ‘Rethinking Mind and Meaning: A case study from a co-disciplinary approach’ (Award Nr.: AH/ L015234/1), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), as part of the Science in Culture Theme (http://www.sciculture.ac.uk).

Performing the intermedial across Brazilian cinema

Intermediality as a theoretical and methodological perspective champions impurity. Overall, it is concerned with the interaction, contamination, and mixture between different media, breaking down existing barriers that currently exclude hybrid forms of artistic expression, which also inevitably exposes the limits of media specificity. Musical performance constitutes a privileged space to reflect on intermediality. It brings in not only music, but a mixture which includes literature, theatre, dancing and even painting and architecture. Music performance calls for all these artistic practices and articulates them through the song. Then, when it is filmed by a camera and recorded with microphones to be exhibited on a screen, new layers of meaning are added. This Alphaville issue is concerned with the performance of the intermedial in Brazilian cinema through music performance. It is an output of the project “Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema: Exploring Intermediality as a Historiographic Method”, a shared endeavour by the University of Reading and the Federal University of São Carlos which was developed between 2015 and 2019, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK and the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) in Brazil

Music videos in the British screen industries and screen heritage: From innovation to curation. Introduction

In December 2019, Rolling Stone magazine ran a piece on the best videos of the year which began by asking, “What even counts as a music video now?” (Shaffer). Vevo, Tiktok and Instagram TV have blurred the lines. Videos can be an hour long. They can be events on YouTube Premiere. They can be virtual reality. The idea that the world of the earliest creators of pop promos was simple in comparison to today subtends this dossier. In 2015, I was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant to investigate the history of music videos in Britain since 1966. At the end of the grant, I curated a collection of the most significant of those videos into a limited-edition box set (Power). Selecting them involved very detailed discussions with our interviewees and industry consultants about just what a “music video”—known as a “promo” until the mid 1980s—is. The term “music video” arose in the 1980s. It was used in record labels to describe visual products mastered on physical videotapes for television broadcast. In fact, almost all of those products were shot on celluloid (16mm or 35mm) until digital technologies allowed HD to become the norm in the 2000s. For the purposes of this dossier, I define music videos and pop promos as a type of musical short film for mass audiences commissioned and released by record labels (usually) at the same time as the release of a synchronised audio “single”; the shorts comprise a copyrighted synchronised picture and audio track in which a percentage of the royalties accrue to the recording artist and/or record label. This dossier is a collection of core materials emerging from the AHRC project.

The Quest for Genuinely Participatory and Inclusive Research Approaches: Exploring and Expressing Experience Through Cultural Animation and Transcription Poetry

This paper discusses approaches used in an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) research project across a number of sites in the United Kingdom. The Disability and Community: Dis/engagement, Dis/enfranchisement, Dis/parity, and Dissent (D4D) project explores issues around disability and community, investigating diverse topics related to inclusion/exclusion. The D4D project is distinctive in the combination of academic and nonacademic Co-Investigators. One objective is to contribute to the evolution of a research language that is accessible to a wider public. Using arts-based approaches, the research team also seeks to develop research methods and an ethical framework that will be appropriate for co-constructed community research. This paper focuses on different ways of exploring and expressing participant experience. First, it considers the use of cultural animation (CA) as an alternative to the traditional interview, providing participant and researcher reflections. Cultural animation is a participatory arts-based and embodied methodology of community engagement and knowledge coproduction that draws on everyday experience of participants. Transcription poetry (TP) converts interview transcripts into poems. Short interview extracts and poems are selected here to illustrate the approach. D4D team members believe that CA generates authentic and rich data where there is not only fidelity to participant experience through the TP process but a greater resonance in the words than would have been the case in traditional representations.