Projects Funded in 2021/22

Below you can read about the Project which were funded in 2021/22.

You can also review the report from the projects by clicking the Success Stories image.

Empowering Young Voices

Karen Simacek (Philosophy) , Andrew Cooper (Philosophy) , Fridays & Coventry Boys and Girls Club

Karen and Andrew arranged a poetry performance evening at both local youth centres Fridays and Coventry Boys and Girls club with students at Warwick who write poetry.

This strengthened the relationship with the two partner organisations to support a successful programme. It also improved dissemination of research and wider engagement with youth workers and youth organisations in Coventry and beyond.

Doing Things Differently - Inclusive Leadership Symposium

Vishalakshi Roy (Cultural & Media Policy) & Warwick Arts Centre

Vishalakshi organised a one day symposium on 15 February 2021 in partnership with Warwick Arts Centre to explore inclusion and to show that by investing in people with different and intersectional vantage points and perspectives, one can drive new thinking and innovation in the cultural and heritage sectors.

The symposium included up to 100 attendees including able bodied and disabled creative practitioners, leaders of local cultural venues, academics working in cultural work and leadership and funders such as Arts Council England and Coventry City Council. The symposium included provocations and learning unearthed from the evaluation study for ADVantage.

South Warwickshire Silver Denarii Coin Hoard Project

Paul Grigsby (Classics & Ancient History) & Warwickshire Market Hall Museum

Paul worked in partnership with Warwickshire Museum's Market Hall Museum to showcase two Roman coin hoards and bring out their multi-layered stories to the public. The aim was to create a new exhibition, published research, and form the base and model for future collaborative public-facing research projects. Teaching resources were created for local schools including the creation of “lessons in a box” based on actual artefacts found on display at the Warwickshire Museums.

Mobile Community Pantry

Thijs Van Rens (Economics) & Oyinlola Oyebode (WMS)

Thijs is Academic co-lead of the University's Global Research Priority on Food and theme lead for "Food and Health” he is also the Director of the MSc programme in Economics and International Financial Economics (EIFE). In partnership with Oyinlola Oyebode, Associate Professor at WMS, they developed a “mobile healthy food market” that served neighbourhoods in Coventry where access to healthy food was low. The van was also used as a platform for “field experiments”, to better understand the barriers to healthy diets with the aim of informing similar local interventions elsewhere, as well as national policy.

Pen to Canvas

Gonzalo Ceron Garcia (SCAPVC) & Eduardo Jara (COVert Arts)

Gonzalo worked with COVert Arts, a Coventry-based artists’ collective that champions local and emerging writers and visual artists, on the Pen to Canvas project. The programme connected students from the Creative Writing Department with emerging, Coventry-based visual artists through anonymous correspondence.

This created opportunities where student writers and visual artists associated with the COVert Arts collective were able to ‘meet’ and ‘communicate’ with each other through their respective disciplines, bringing the university and the local artist scene closer together.

Engagement with Warwickshire Young Carers

Michael Wyness (Education Studies) , Fiona MacCallum (Psychology) & Warwickshire Young Carers

Michael and Fiona worked with Warwickshire Young Carers in developing research on young carers and education within the context of Covid-19 and beyond. The work was inter-disciplinary involving a sociologist of education, a psychologist and widening participation officer as well as an anthropologist from Coventry university. We built a relationship between the academics, and a small group of young people from Warwickshire young carers. In fostering a more collaborative research focus and approach, we engaged with the young carers through regular meetings.

Raising Awareness of Contraception and Sexual and Reproductive Services

Abimbola Ayoninde (WMS) , Majel McGranahan (WMS) & Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre

Abi and Majel worked in partnership with Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre to organise sexual and reproductive health workshops. The aim was to understand women’s knowledge/experiences, raise awareness and provide information about contraception options and other sexual health issues. This helped empower individuals who were asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants to understand how to access appropriate information and support for their sexual and reproductive health needs. We shared findings from our previous research in the form of scenarios to aid learning, and we worked with participants to identify further themes that they felt should be developed in future research.

Warwickshire Wildlife Trust Collaboration

Friederike Schlaghecken (Psychology), Lukasz Walasek (Psychology) & Warwickshire Wildlife Trust

The present project set up a summer internship program during which up to five of the most talented Warwick students joined the Trust in one of its five activity streams (health & wellbeing, community organising, nature reserves, living landscapes, and marketing), learned about their specific needs and challenges, and began to generate new ideas for interventions to encourage and engage the local population in sustainable lifestyles and activities. With this program, we began to formalize the partnership between Warwick and WWT, with the long-term goal of establishing the Warwick Centre of Wildlife Protection and contribute towards achieving the WWT’s ten-year strategy goal of having 25% of the population engage with sustainability-related activities.

IDIERI 10: Commissioning Local Artist Engagement for an International Conference

Rachel Turner-King (Education Studies), Jonathan Heron (IATL) & Bobby Smith (School of Theatre and Performance Studies)

This project provided a prestigious platform for artists/companies to connect with a wider international network, which is especially important given Coventry’s continuing commitment to developing and sustaining cultural activity after its year as City of Culture. We fostered more meaningful connections between Warwick postgraduates specialising in Drama and Theatre Education and Applied Theatre and local artists. We used this multi-disciplinary network as a way of reaching out to other related cultural networks working within the interconnections of education, pedagogy, applied performance, youth arts and artist development.

Experiencing Music in Different Ways

Rachel Edwards (Physics) & Oksana Trushkevych (Physics) & Lee Holder (Musicworks)

Oksana and Rachel worked with Lee Holder, who is Disability Lead for the Musicworks, a charity based in Gloucestershire who focus on transforming young peoples' lives through music. The collaboration fund enabled them to jointly design adaptive musical instruments which could be used by young people with disabilities as well as to raise awareness about such disabilities and the possibility of experiencing music beyond sound and listening. The project also helped the Warwick academics and The Musicworks build a long-term relationship to develop the ideas further. Oksana and Rachel were involved in teaching The Science of Music interdisciplinary module for Warwick Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL), and were active in outreach activities within WIE. They used their developments and this collaboration for improving the lives of others, for enhancing experience of Warwick students taking the Science of Music module and for making their outreach activities more engaging and inclusive.

Collaboration with Blast Fest

Sanjay Sharma (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies), Paramjit Gill (WMS) , Sophie Staniszewska (Health Sciences) & Blast Fest

Sanjay, in partnership with Professors Paramjit Gill, Sophie Staniszewska and Theodoros N. Arvanitis, worked with Blast Fest, a team of community organisers, engagement strategists, artists and activists from local communities. Blast Fest is unique in its pursuit of social justice by engaging with issues of science and technology via using forms of creative practice. Our project explores the racaialized impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on healthcare - cardiovascular risk assessment - affecting minoritized groups. We countered exclusionary tendencies in the development of AI by drawing upon ‘data justice’ approaches, which centre the multiple voices and experiences of marginalized groups. We collaborated with Blast Fest to host a community engagement event exploring AI and social harm. The aim was to establish a public group drawn from local communities to assess the development and use of algorithms for improving healthcare

Constellations of Home

Nadine Holdsworth (SCAPVC) , Jennifer Vernon (SCAPVC) & Ben Davenport (Crisis Skylight Coventry)

Nadine worked with Ben Davenport, an arts worker with Crisis Skylight CoventryLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window, the socially engaged artist Anthony Luvera, Jennifer Verson and the Agency Photography Group to co-create a photographic exhibition with people who have experienced homelessness.

Through a series of workshops and the co-curation of an exhibition that took place on the University campus, this project explored what it meant to action the principles and practice of co-production and cultures of inclusion. It tested the ways in which organizations and community groups could work together to enhance understandings of homelessness, as well as developing skills and positive outcomes for people who have experienced homelessness.

Highfields Community Association & Women 4 Change Collaboration

Jayanthi Lingham (Politics and International Studies) , Shirin Rai (Politics and International Studies) , Highfield Community Centre & Women 4 Change

Fellow on the ESRC-funded study, 'Care, Caring and Carers', led by Prof Shirin Rai and working with Research Fellow Dr Shahnaz Akhter, as part of the Consortium on Practices of Wellbeing and Resilience in BAME Families and Communities (Co-POWeR). Shirin, Jayanthi and Shahnaz carried out the research on care and caring during Covid-19 in two Midlands cities, Coventry and Leicester. With the WIE collaboration and co-production funding, Jayanthi worked in partnership with two community organisations in Leicester, Highfields Community Association and Women 4 Change. Together, they facilitated a series of community-based sessions that brought older and younger people from racially minoritised communities in the city together to share life histories and creative skills. This contributed to developing 'intergenerational connections' as communities emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.

RGS-IBS Visit to Warwick

David Lambert (History) & Royal Geographic Society

David worked to strengthen and expand Warwick's relationship with the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), the UK's learned society and professional body for Geography. Its London headquarters holds over two million collection items, which provide an unparalleled resource tracing 500 years of geographical discovery and research across the globe. Along with colleagues in History, the Faculty of Arts, the Centre for Digital Inquiry, the Library and the Modern Records Centre, this developed short- and long-term collaborations around research, education, public engagement and collections.