Hoppiness: Brewing with care homes

Engaging in life-long leisure pursuits and social activities when living in a care home activities has been shown to have rehabilitating affects, support agency in self-expression and enable meaningful forms of reminiscence and social connection that contribute to wellbeing. The Hoppiness project involves working alongside older adults living in care homes, their carers, and local brewers to explore the histories and cultures of brewing in the South West and build towards the production of a beer through communal hop growing.

Involving Alice Williatt (Education), Martin Preston (Education), Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith (History), Karen Gray (Policy Studies), Camilla Adams (Independent Film Maker), Guy Manchester (Alive Activities), and George Densley (Alive Activities).

Archives as Inclusive Spaces

The project brings together a new multi-disciplinary/sector team of archivists, a historian, and a creative practitioner all with different lived experience of neurodivergence. Together they will investigate how archives can better serve the needs of their neurodivergent users. Working toward developing archival spaces that celebrate neurodiversity, facilitating access to collections and fostering comfortable working environments that can be tailored to the needs of all users.

Involving Angharad Davies (Independent Artist/Computational Designer), Barbara Caddick (Primary Care), and Nicky Sugar (Special Collections).

Wasting Time: Anthropocene Stories and Practices

Waste, in its different forms, requires us to confront Anthropocene temporalities. Historical wastes create environmental injustice in the present; waste created today casts the problem far into the future. The different scales of time and agency can be difficult to parse; this project aims to collectively explore the tensions, contrasts and connections around issues of waste and time in the Anthropocene from Humanities and Earth Science perspectives.

Involving Marianna Dudley (History), Alison Rust (Earth Sciences), and Mathilde Braddock (Steps in Stone).

Prosthetic Futures

Reconstructive facial prosthetics blend creative arts and science by crafting handmade body parts for patients. In Bristol, technologies including 3D printing and augmented/virtual reality are transforming the landscape. This interdisciplinary creative arts project, investigates participatory co-design in Art Laboratories. A diverse cohort will craft novel creations exploring the embodiment and senses of future prostheses and speculate on how reconstructive prosthetics will adapt to future environments.

Including Simon Hall (Primary Care), Ali Cobb (South West Cleft Service), Amy Davey (North Bristol Hospitals Trust), Julia Cadogan (UHBW), and Catherine Lamont-Robinson (Independent Artist)

Using Processional Arts to Explore Irish Diasporic Memory

This project will explore the use of processional arts to create a new set of motifs which better represent the experiences, challenges, and hilarity of Irish migrant experience with a particular focus on the last 50 years, as the Britain’s Irish community emerged from the shadow of the Troubles to be more self-confident in its identity and position in the city. Through community workshops in collaboration with Lamplighters CIC and W.E Irish this project will develop and construct processional arts pieces for the 2024 St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Including Erika Hanna (History), Dee Moxon (Lamplighters CIC), Paula O’Rourke (W.E. Irish), Sian Williams (Theatre Collection), and Julian Warren (Theatre Collection).

Migrating Rocks: Intercultural Research and Exchange around the Use and Repatriation of Rock Samples

The return of natural history and geological specimens (soil, rock, sand, minerals, and fossils) has so far been overlooked or excluded from repatriation discussions or practices in the UK. This project's key research interests are situated in the reconsideration of the cultural, spiritual, and community importance of rocks using a particular example from Aotearoa. It applies creative methods of poetry and artwork to invigorate the research practice and facilitate cross cultural and cross lingual collaboration, inspired by Māori karakia (prayer) to increase the spiritual goodwill of a gathering.

Including Fiona Jordan (Anthropology and Archaeology), Lucy Donkin (History of Art), Claudia Hildebrandt (Earth Sciences), Alyson Hallett (Independent Poet), and Edie Woolf (Independent Poet).

Telling and Re-telling Tales: Caribbean Folklore and the Art of Storytelling

Storytelling is a vital and living practice in the Anglophone Caribbean. Storytelling has not only persisted as a means of connection and entertainment in the Caribbean, but also serves as a methodological tool for unsettling colonialities in the twenty-first century. This projects seeks to explore the history and colonial archival record of the St Lucian folk figure Ti Bolom, how the story of Ti Bolom is told on the island of St Lucia today, and how best the story can be archived in a way that honours storytelling as a living practice.

Involving Leighan Renaud (Humanities), Adom Philogene Heron (Visual Anthropology), Ted Sandiford (Acid Kreationz), Fiona Compton (Know Your Caribbean), and Lovell Cadet (Storyteller and Carnivalist)