This AHRC commissioned review is the first release from the Warwick UK Cities of Culture Project and will be followed by a series of publications and roundtable events later in the year.

The focus of the Warwick UK Cities of Culture Project series is on the distinctive role that arts, humanities and social science researchers, in collaboration with other disciplines, can play in place shaping and in the success of the UK City of Culture programme.

When artists, researchers and project management team members celebrated Coventry Creates during Resonate Festival April 2022, we took the opportunity to create two short new videos capturing ‘Artist Perspectives on Coventry Creates’ and ‘Exploring Research Together.’

You can hear directly from those involved about the impact the project has had on them and on their work. We also created a Coventry Cathedral mosaic (below) which features an array of images from the event and artworks.

The experiences of care (and caring) for families and communities during the Covid-19 pandemic lies at the heart of Dr Shahnaz Akhter’s recent Coventry Creates project. The research moves away from applying a theoretical lens to issues faced by participants. Instead, it works with communities to understand the challenges that they’ve encountered.

Read a new blog by Professor Jackie Hodgson and Dr Rachel Lewis on their project researching the partnership between the West Midlands Police and Coventry City of Culture Trust, including how arts and culture can be used to help increase public confidence in policing and improve police-community relations.

£172.6m of investment has been secured by Coventry after being awarded UK City of Culture, new research involving the University of Warwick has found.

Detailed in the Performance Measurement and Evaluation Interim Report, the awarding of UK City of Culture to Coventry has also led to £500m city regeneration activity linked directly to the secured investment and over £5m being invested into the local arts sector – with cultural activities taking place in each of Coventry’s 18 local wards and participations from all 42 neighbourhoods.

The political participation and civic engagement of women from minority backgrounds has often featured prominently in the work of Dr Khursheed Wadia, so when Coventry Creates presented an opportunity to collaborate with a local artist to profile her research through dance, Khursheed knew this would be an invaluable chance to reach new audiences.

This has been an amazing few weeks, during which we have showcased a huge variety of artist-researcher collaborations inspired by our research and engagement around City of Culture – in our major digital exhibition Coventry Creates 2021; through our collaboration with Warwick Arts Centre’s Feelings of Freedom festival; and our ongoing support for researchers working with artists in the Coventry Biennial.

Read the full blog by Professor Jackie Hodgson.

September in the Resonate Festival is all about Words and Voices.

Through events on 5 and 19 September, we’ll be exploring the power of words - spoken, written and sung. We’ll be taking up residency in the Assembly Festival Gardens in Coventry this September, with events curated by the Connecting Cultures GRP.