Research Grants

For her faculty research grant, the grantee worked on a book project that explore the longstanding yet complicated relation between the nostos and the polis. The book contains a mix of narrative, art, and theory to explore a political understanding of location, space, and attachment. The book seeks ways to engage in a discussion of human rights, postcolonial subjectivity, and institutions together that is not framed by biopolitics, necropolitics, and other “pathologies” of the oppressed The CHRA faculty research grant enabled the grantee to travel, organize conversations and collaboration, and to seek technical support for the production and presentation of shared knowledges.

When teaching the course “Writing African Futures” with OSUN HUBS for Connected Learning Initiatives, the Borderless Higher Education (BHER) program and Bard College Berlin in Spring 2021, the faculty grantee used the CHRA grant to design a creative writing component for the class. Specifically the funding paid the editor of Warscapes magazine Bhakti Shringarpure to do a workshop for the students on writing flash fiction pieces modeled on the Warscapes Corona Notebooks model. Students then wrote pieces based on the workshop, our course and their experiences in Dadaab (mostly; one student was based in Germany) and at the end of the course Bhakti selected some for editing and publication on the Warscapes website. Read more about the final results of the project here: http://www.warscapes.com/literature/dadaab-corona-notebooks.

And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives examines the inner workings and division of labour within contemporary artists’ collectives, seeking to highlight inequalities, forms of silencing and marginalising of certain participants. Approaching the study of art collectives intersectionality, it critically examines their constitutions, processes and practices, drawing on social reproduction theory, the notion of ‘the disoeuvre’ (Allen, 2016), proposing a wider reading of what constitutes artistic practice and advocating for a more inclusive approach to collectivity. The project highlights tensions between ideological beliefs and praxis, examining how such groups may inadvertently reproduce forms of oppression and silencing (often along gender lines) prevalent in neoliberal capitalist patriarchies that they seek to counter. Such reproduction of oppressive structures not only erases certain subjects, but also writes them into history in particular ways. Shifting the focus from outputs to collectives’ internal operations, the project highlights structural inequalities and tensions, through a close study of selected groups operating within the networks of contemporary art. The CHRA Research Fellowship specifically funded a particular phase of the project between July and December 2022 – a collaborative writing workshops in four groups, followed by four public online panel discussions emerging from these sessions. The grant has enabled the grantee to assemble a peer network in order to test out a new methodology she had devised. The funds have enabled her to bring together a network of 17 researchers to engage in a two month online asynchronous conversation organised into four collaborative writing groups, culminating in four online public panel discussions which are open to all.

This faculty research grant project explored divisions between the fields of arts and law by positioning these questions in the transitional justice scenario in Colombia. Specifically, the project focused on how a specific work of art and a particular case in the Special Peace Tribunal had built a common discourse of what a transition means by using art and law as sites of memorialization and counter memorialization. The research project juxtaposed Doris Salcedo’s work “Fragmentos” and the hearings at the Special Peace Tribunal in Colombia. Through this juxtaposition, the project encourages a new way of seeing the performative actions of the law. “Memory and counter-memory in a transitional scenario” contributes to cultural understandings of how visual art operates in the quest towards peace in Colombia. The CHRA grant enabled the grantee to hire a Doctoral Research Assistant to support archival research for an article that was submitted to an academic journal. The grant also supported an event at Universidad de los Andes where an artist and a judge presented their views about the role of art and law in memory and countermemory within transitional scenarios. The grantee also worked with Professor Helena Alviar from Sciences Po, an OSUN member institution, to strengthen their common research agenda in law and arts.

In partnership with the London International Development Centre’s Migration Leadership Team based at SOAS, Royal Geographical Society, and social enterprise Positive Negatives, the grantee launched the “Migration and Human Rights Comicon,” which aimed to provide a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which artists and researchers may effectively work together to generate new and powerful shared learning about migration and human rights. The CHRA faculty grant supported workshops held between artists and researchers as part of the Comicon. They included a ‘zine-making’ workshop, in which participants considered the human rights implications of why people are displaced, incorporating evidence-based ideas into visual representations, an infographic workshop, which considered ways to capture key research ideas in visual formats, and a workshop ‘sharing migration and human rights research graphically’ – in which artists and researchers will be paired up to discuss their work and to consider how the stories emerging from research could be used for a graphic story or animation. through storyboarding.

The faculty grantee’s research aimed to bridge the gap between artistic practice and academic research in the field of human rights through a case study on Romani communities in central and eastern Europe. Identifying the systematic marginalization and discrimination of the Roma people, the largest ethnic minorities in Europe, the research project reviewed existing scholarly literature of Roma identity and exclusion to map the unexplored ‘invisibilities’ of Roma artists on central and east European theatre stages. The research consisted of literature review, interviews with Romani performers, theatre actors and directors, and analyses on interactions between Romani theatres and human rights activists. The CHRA faculty research grant enabled the grantee to publish a peer-reviewed research article, create an interactive website and digital archive, and a podcast series on Romani actors, performers, and directors.

The grantee received a CHRA course release grant to conduct her research on the child trafficking networks of in Francoist Spain operative until the mid 1990s. During this time, more than 300,000 newborns being removed from their biological mothers without consent. The grantee worked on an article that described how affected individuals, who wish to find their biological relatives, created a sui generis mode of life writing by posting content in the Facebook groups created by the two associations, SOS Stolen Babies and the Spanish Association of those Affected by Illegal Adoption. In addition to their written testimonies, they share and comment on forged birth and death certificates, other family and personal records rifled with inconsistencies, and photographs, as well as audiovisual recordings that facilitate physical recognition. The grantee examined how digital life-writing helps affected individuals to unblock avenues to the imagination of past, present, and future, and how it contributes, more generally, to the collective process of breaking with practices of socially inherited silence that have pervaded in democratic Spain. The grantee’s study will be published in the top journal in the field of Hispanism and Cultural Studies.

Identifying a theoretical gap existing in the literature on the admission of the x-rays in international criminal trials, this faculty research grant project investigates the possibilities and challenges in using radiographs in front of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The desk review of the research focused on identifying cases where forensic radiology was admitted. The grantee examined the frequency of the admission of x-rays into international criminal proceedings by mapping the literature review and case law. After the desk review, the grantee adopted art-based research by involving an artist. Together, they examined whether x-ray images can be reconstructed into photographic images, and considered x-rays as photographic images outside of forensic sciences. To enhance the research on the production of visual images as evidence, the grantee conducted comparative analysis between X-rays and photographic images, their production techniques, their interpretation in international courts and ways to archive them. Another aspect of this research was related to the question of representation, reliability and objectivity of x-rays, and how x-rays and photographic images are interpreted and presented in front of the international courts. The grantee published the findings along with visuals in a peer-reviewed article.

“Mahalla” is a project centered around using audio as a tool for youth development. The faculty grantee mentored six participants who are teenagers from the local Roma community aged between 14 and 17. It ran over a period of 12 weeks and included weekly training sessions, a field trip to a radio station and three recording sessions at Radio Aura (the station attached to American University in Bulgaria AUBG). The end product was three 30 minute podcasts. The content was participant-led and covered areas such as social exclusion in schools and workplaces, pressures experienced by young women, unemployment and future hopes. A key element of the project were community based interviews. Following training, the participants conducted interviews with other young people and adults in their community. The CHRA faculty research grant allowed the project leaders to purchase recording equipment, as well as producing high quality audio products. The project also saw the development and nurturing of future leaders. The project helped participants develop hard and soft skills in journalism. Another key outcome was in establishing a link between the University and the local community. Several of the participants have expressed an interest to return as peer instructors should a second generation of the project be launched. This project was extremely time intensive and involved many meetings and visits to the local community. It also required material and transportation made possible by the CHRA grant.

This faculty research project on gender and ideology in Ukraine had two major prongs: one to assess how gender manifested in discourse about children in the Soviet twentieth century in Ukraine, and whether there were specific gendered attributes that intersected with the category of Soviet nationality. The second part focused on the topic of gender and militarization in Ukraine since 2014. The outcome aimed to trace how generational and ideological regimes have shaped discourses and performances of gender in contemporary Ukraine. The grantee worked with researcher Svitlana Shymko, who has previously worked on the ritualization of heteronormativity in Soviet Ukraine. For this project, the grantee and researcher Svitlana Shymko initiated dialogues with other Ukrainian feminist scholars on the topic of militarization and masculinization of Ukrainian society since Russian invasion of 2014 and into the present full-scale war.