Work Package 1: Creative Space

In society and culture, representations of home are limited and undervalued. This is interrelated with experiences of gender and equality like domestic abuse and homelessness where notions of home are contested. This project aims to demonstrate that home is more valuable and complex than presented, to reduce its gendering, and to make home and its experiences more visible and sayable. Ultimately this should increase equality in the home and make home safer. Using photography in practice, curation and participation, this project will legitimise home as a subject in art and academia, validate women’s voices and change wider narratives around home.

Dr Louise Wallace’s art practice spotlights the experiences of mothers and children living in Belfast in the 1970s. This IAA project explores the lack of women’s work in Troubles Art collections. Societies that experience conflict tend to be defined by masculinist discourses, and the work of women becomes marginalised or difficult to “see”. Seeking to address this problem, Dr Wallace met with curators from the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) and Moderna Museet (Stockholm) who are addressing the visibility of women artists in their collections. Their word-leading initiatives can help tell the overlooked stories of the conflict, of lost women artists and their subjects.

This project seeks to raise awareness of the historical significance of Japan’s post-war ceramic figurine industry in order to develop preservation strategies, and explore the contemporary potential of the associated making skills for the generation of new creative approaches and cultural forms. Industrial pottery practices and material culture related to this industry comprise valuable cultural capital, yet inhabit a precarious and endangered position due to a range of socio-economic factors. The project aims to influence approaches to understanding and displaying heritage in Japan, leading to improved preservation practices and the emergence of new forms of cultural practice in the form of exhibitions and practice-based artefacts.

The ‘Enlightenment for All’ project retools the ideals of the past for the twenty-first century. Collaboration with individual writers, reading and writing groups and community activist groups works to investigate ideas, thinkers and texts from the 18th-century Enlightenment. Exploring its potential to inform policy and cultural production, the project celebrates a common heritage of tolerance, pluralism and diversity, while acknowledging difficult issues of exclusion and Eurocentrism.  Emphasising both their local and global significance, the project team work to transform the thought and heritage of the Enlightenment period from historic artefact to catalyst for cultural production and social change.

This interdisciplinary research project united Ulster University research staff from the fields of political science and art for the first time. Doctor Louise Wallace (Lecturer in Fine & Applied Art: Painting) and Professor Fidelma Ashe (Professor of Politics) have identified joint research aims relating to female visibility in Northern Ireland; socially, politically, and culturally. Societies that have experienced conflict often privilege masculine power dynamics at an institutional level, which is then replicated within cultural institutions. This project identified some of the cultural issues underpinning the lack of female visibility in Northern Irish art history.

This project is primarily a double biography of Lawrence Durrell, the celebrated novelist, and his brother Gerald, pioneering conservationist and zoologist. The latter was also a writer and his work ‘My Family and Other Animals’ on the Durrells’ time in Corfu in the 30s was the basis for the numerous tv and film adaptations.

The book will be published by Bloomsbury Caravel in 2025, on Gerald’s centenary. It is comprised of information gathered from privately held archives and unpublished materials. Professor Richard Bradford, Principal Investigator of this project travelled to France and Jersey to visit and consult these private archives.

Dr Ian Miller (School of History) led a team of medical historians for this project, which forged new, lasting collaborations in medical history and heritage across Belfast.

The outputs of this project include: an exhibition of medical objects to mark Clifton House’s 250th anniversary, web-based collaborations with Northern Ireland War Memorial, Eastside Partnership and Shared History Interpretative Project (SHIP), a curated archival collection of audio-visual material on Northern Ireland Screen (Digital Film Archive) and a self-directed medical heritage walking tour in Belfast.

When families separate, going to court can impact parents, grandparents and guardians who need to make childcare arrangements. Those who represent themselves in court without a lawyer often rely on community organisations and specialist services, as well as MLA/MP constituency offices, to help navigate complex court proceedings. These organisations may not have the capacity to provide this support. Online tools were created to assist organisations in helping their clients. The teams website, sponsored by the Department of Justice, provides clear and comprehensive information on family court proceedings to help individuals and organisations understand the legal process and provide support.

Dr Andrew Sneddon (History), Dr Victoria McCollum (Cinematic Arts), and Dr Helen Jackson (Interactive Media) have partnered with Mid&East Antrim Borough Council and Carrickfergus Museum to host the first exhibition dedicated to the history of Irish witchcraft.

This community-based exhibition ran from September to November 2023 and employed traditional curatorial methodologies (labelled artefacts and information panels) along with the unique, innovative, creative, and digital outputs generated by the Islandmagee Witches Project (w1711.org). These outputs include: digitised original trial records, a written and produced animated film, a graphic novel, and a written and designed Virtual Reality (VR) Application.

The Bad Bridget Project tells the stories of Irish women in North America who were involved in criminal or deviant behaviour between 1838 and 1918. The first season of the Bad Bridget podcast was released in December 2020 and proved extremely successful, with over 130,000 listens to date across Apple and Spotify. IAA funding will allow the team to produce a new series of the podcast and to capitalise on the success of the of first series, as well as the publication of Bad Bridget: crime mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women (Penguin, 2023).

This project builds on two previous projects to support language teaching in NI schools. Language Made Fun supported newcomer pupils in primary schools, helping them with their English skills through play-based learning. Language Awareness for Key Stage 3 developed teaching resources for post-primary schools, using insights from comparative and historical linguistics to make language learning easier and more fun. In this project, the team is meeting with primary and post-primary principals and school staff, acquiring feedback and an understanding about the needs of staff and pupils. They are also creating new video resources, which will be piloted in a number of secondary schools in the region.

This project has established a consortium of researchers to deliver outreach activities for parents in Northern Ireland. The 2023 activities include the ESRC Festival of Social Science and the Being Human Festival of the Humanities, while the 2024 activities include the NI Science Festival and the Imagine! Festival. The impact of these activities has been evidenced by feedback from families, with a majority indicating that they would make a change or do something that they wouldn’t otherwise have done as a result of attending the event, and that they would share what they had learned with others.

This project gives agency to the intangible cultural heritage of a marginalised community of subsistence fishers in the Zanzibar archipelago, East Africa in response to globalisation, migration and loss of traditional livelihoods. The Impact Accelerator Award facilitated mobility to bring the production team to the 2023 Zanzibar International Film Festival, where the working draft of the documentary was premiered. The film was also showcased on Pemba Island where two of the particpating communities, Tumbe and Ndagoni, viewed their own people featured in the short documentary. This work stimulated new conversations, aroused the collective memory, built trust and has facilitated appetite for wider engagement.

Drawing on knowledge from sociology and critical heritage studies, this project investigated participatory approaches between individuals, ‘communities’ and those in positions of power as a means of addressing difficult ‘pasts’. The project brought together stakeholders and beneficiaries including victim-survivors, academics, museum professionals, advocacy NGOs, memory activists, heritage organisations, as well as practitioners and policymakers, to explore how participatory co-design approaches to heritage can embrace multiple voices about difficult subjects. There were three interlocking strands which speak to challenging heritage issues in contemporary Northern Ireland: memorialising historical institutional abuse (HIA); multicultural and intercultural heritages; and heritage after the NI conflict

This project aims to work alongside key community and public sector organisations as they recalibrate approaches to managing the past following the signing of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act. The team’s research has found that top-down approaches to legacy have a profound impact not only on those who suffered during the conflict, but on the community and public sector who are often tasked with implementing, or responding to, attempts to deal with the past. The team aims to build on this existing research and use learnings to co-produce best practice principles for managing issues related to legacy.

Professor Siobhan Wills will participate in a national human rights conference in Campinas, screening her AHRC funded research film. Three films will be screened at an event in the Mari Antonia Center, a human rights and memory centre in Sao Paolo, founded during Brazil’s dictatorship, which works with local favela communities on human rights issues. The team will visit the Amazon, meeting the Boa Hora III/Marmorana Quilombola community to share updates regarding the impact of the ecowar on mental health. Professor Wills will also present a report at the International Law Association (ILA) Biannual conference, on the right to the social determinants of mental health.

This project convenes global peers interested in abortion art activism to share developments from their own contexts using Reproductive Citizenship as a shared lens. This will gather existing socially engaged practice to produce an “abortion utopia” toolkit, acknowledging multiple approaches and navigation of social space, infrastructure and discourse across the globe. This project crucially moves the reproducing-abortion-seeking body and abortion advocacy into the frame of reproductive citizenship. In workshops hosted by the team, worldwide activists and academics are invited to think through this conceptual move, which builds on Dr Emma Campbell’s doctoral research and the Shared Islands Reproductive Citizenship project

David Strain was a middle-class linen merchant born in Co. Down in 1897, who wrote a series of diaries that describe gay life in Belfast between the 1920s and 1940s. These detailed diaries offer an incredibly rare insight into gay life in Belfast. The IAA funding, along with IAA funding from QUB will go towards a BBC produced, full-cast dramatization based on the diaries. It will allow a view of Belfast and its gay subculture that has never been presented before and showcase the research from the AHRC funded Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation project.

This project was designed to explore our relationship with non-human animals, and how emerging technologies and experiences provide the opportunity to think differently about the world. Users wear a specially produced headset, which applies immersive technology to help them ‘see like a horse’. This will help users discover different perspectives the world and speculate on being a different species. The headset is designed to promote ‘inter-species kinship’ will help users consider similarities and differences we have with non-human animals. This funding will be used towards an immersive exhibition experience in Belgium, a series of data capture workshops, and redesigning the final headset from earlier stage prototypes (Developed at Lancaster University).

This project involves the digitization of a cultural heritage artefact as creative content, producing a commercially attractive asset for the heritage tourism industry. The artefact is a cobbler boat belonging to the fishing industry and tradition of Northern Ireland, originally produced, and fished from in Portbraddon. The team has joined up with Ulster Transport Museum, which is part of the National Museums for Northern Ireland (NMNI) to produce digital content with historical authenticity. The project hopes that NI can gain commercial success by marketing to the global heritage industry, transcending regional borders and making NMNI collections available via the innovative pathway.