RCUK Roberts Fund (Carole Spary and Nick Vaughan-Williams)
IAS Incubation Grant (Shirin Rai and Janelle Reinelt)
To organize research under the following themes in order to create links social sciences and humanities: Politics of Disruption and Deliberation - how can we analyse performances of disruptive practices in deliberative contexts, such as parliament? What social changes point to the changing dramaturgy of representation in these contexts? Politics of Violence – violence as performance and performance as violence ; link to direct democracy and resurgence of student protest movements, here and internationally. Political space- especially to consider non-verbal aspects; To analyse how art and architecture works with/in politics.To develop an historical approach to this aspect.The grammar of performance and politics in the context of Performance Studies—what are methodologies and framing devices of performance of/and politics? This would allow an inter-disciplinary conversation on methodologies through developing common rhetorical and analytic languages for our collaborative work, coming from both arts and social sciences.
University of Warwick's Research Development Fund (Claire Blencowe)
Christianity and Acts of Citizenship in Sub-Saharan Africa/Uganda: A Scoping Study' Funded by the University of Warwick's Research Development Fund, this scoping study will enable a major research project and interdisciplinary collaboration on the themes of religion, politics and citizenship in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will involve a literature review; an interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Religion and Political Subjectivity’; consultation with world leading scholars; and a six week qualitative study of the political activities of different Christian groups in Uganda. The latter will explore the impact of different Christian organisations, movements and theological convictions on enabling, discouraging and shaping acts of citizenship (claiming or contesting rights). The idea of the scoping study is to identify appropriate case studies and community partners for more in depth field work; produce initial outputs and prepare the ground for a major research project that interrogates the relationship between Christianity, critical agency and citizenship in Sub-Sharan Africa in great depth and elaborates upon wide ranging implications for international politics, political sociology and development; socio-political theory; feminism and performativity studies.
The project will contribute to the Warwick Politics and Performance Network programme of research on Religion and Politics as well as to the Social Theory Centre and CIM.
