AHRC Impact Award

Hear Soil is an interdisciplinary project building on the successful Hear Water initiatives (2022–24), which used participatory listening to connect young people with nature, support wellbeing, and promote environmental awareness - contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 on quality education for sustainable development. 

Building on this, Hear Soil focuses on the emerging field of soil ecoacoustics - listening to soil to understand its biodiversity and health. With ecoacoustic scientist Sam Bonnett (UWE), the project explores how sound can spark emotional and educational engagement with the environment. 

Through workshops with Sam Bonnett, sound artists Kathy Hinde, Matthew Olden, and educator Jill Parsons, teachers will gain access to a suite of cross-curricular, outdoor learning resources. These tools are designed to boost confidence in delivering interactive lessons that combine science, creativity, wellbeing, and sustainability for primary and secondary school pupils. 

Project lead: Amanda Bayley, School of Music and Performing Arts

Academic team members:

•  Prof Penny Hay
• Dr Sam Bonnett (UWE)
• Dr Verity Jones (UWE)
• Dr Charlotte Lancaster
• Dr Amanda Webber (UWE)

External partners:

• Sarah Lawfull (Forest School Association)
• Rob Driver (Outdoor Learning Officer, National Forest). 

Keith Harrison’s proposed artwork at Witley Court, commissioned by English Heritage, reflects on the complex history between the grand, ruined estate and the working-class communities in Staffordshire whose labour and industry created the wealth behind it. 

Rather than a simple tale of wealth built on exploitation, the work explores a more layered story of progress, decline, and changing historical values. The pithead baths, built in 1937 - the same year Witley Court burned - symbolise improvements in workers' lives. Floating sculptures on the lake reference both fishing trips taken by Staffordshire workers to escape industrial life and the forms of castings once made at Round Oak ironworks. 

As Witley Court declined, so too did the colliery and steelworks - equally monumental, now entirely vanished. Today, we preserve the former and forget the latter. Why? 

Keith’s artwork poses this question - and begins to offer an answer. 

Project lead: Keith Harrison, School of Art, Film and Media

External Partners:

• Penelope Sexton FRSA (English Heritage)
• Suzanne Heath (English Heritage)
• Carl Brown (Preston Field Audio)
• Daniel Wiles (Commissioned Author)
• Jared Schiller (Filmmaker)
• Dom Moore (Photographer)
• Dudley Archives.

The Holders Alliance will provide a space for carers to share their experiences through creative writing, including prose, poetry, autofiction, and personal essays. Co-designed with carers, the platform will also offer peer support, advocacy, and links to trusted resources. 

The initiative builds on earlier work, including a Writing & Wellbeing Day at BSU (2023) and a 2024 public storytelling showcase in London. Feedback from participants highlighted the need for a dedicated space that brings together lived experience, creative expression, and community connection. 

The funding will support website development, creative workshops, editorial guidance, and fair payment for participating carers. Launch content will include creative contributions developed through a series of facilitated sessions. 

This project aims to build a lasting, narrative-driven archive that challenges dominant psychiatric frameworks, highlights the relational nature of care, and in particular, the challenges of caring for someone with psychosis. 

Project lead: Nathan Filer, School of Writing, Publishing and Humanities 

External partners:

• Tanya Frank, (memoirist, mental health advocate, mentor)
• Soteria London CIC
• Safely Held Spaces.

Rae Howard and Vicky Charnock are working together with the aim of improving the environment and the patient’s wellbeing in the Physiotherapy department at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool. This will be achieved by permanently displaying the large-scale textile wall hanging titled “Blue Red Work” in the hospital department corridor and following the installation, Rae will deliver textile design related workshops to the patients, with workshops inspired by the wall hanging.  

Rae will develop art and textile workshop activities suitable for delivering to children on the hospital wards. For children in a compromised or immobilised situation in hospital, expression can be limited as a result. Art can facilitate an outlet of expression providing patients with a new way of communicating and processing their situation, beneficial to children’s well-being and sense of achievement as a result. 

Project lead: Rae Howard, School of Design

External partner:

• Vicky Charnock, (Arts for health manager, Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust) 

Soothing Sound Flow is a creative and commercial application of immersive audio in the wellness industry. It applies immersive music and audio to a massage experience to amplify its relaxing benefits. In contrast to typical massages where background music is played from one speaker, Soothing Sound Flow immerses the massage client in a cocoon of sound playing from an ambisonic array of multiple speakers. The immersive soundscape is intentionally designed to compliment the massage’s movement. For example, listening to the sound of gentle raindrops may relate to a light tapping touch.  

The next stage of commercialising this arts and humanities research project is to expand internationally and develop a research prototype to become market ready. Expert prolific UK and international partners are on board for this next stage including Hans Martin-Buff, Tim Oliver and Stefan Bock from Berlin-based msm-studios. Research testing is also advancing through interdisciplinary collaboration. Psychologists will capture EEG neural activity data of participants to measure the relaxing impact of this new innovative immersive audio massage experience.   

Project lead: Ruth Farrar, School of Art, Film and Media

External partners:

• Hans-Martin Buff (immersive music expert)
• Stefan Bock (msm-studios and IAN Solutions founder)
• Tim Oliver (Music Producer & Engineer)
• Emma Grant (filmmaker & BSU technician)
• Lucy Maraschino (massage & sports therapist)
• Aidy Brooks (graphic/brand designer). 

This project aims to embed the arts directly into a Street Child World Cup, using the voice of the Illustrator to raise awareness and advocate for change in attitudes towards street connected children around the world. It uses drawing to tell stories of how teams emerge from undocumented street children without basic UN human rights, to national representatives at a World Cup in Washington DC USA in September 2026.

This Leading Impact project will work closely with Street Child United, and some of their partner organisations around the world, using creative art practices as a tool for learning and a pathway for development for this group of marginalised young adults. Sport, advocacy and the arts are the 3 pillars on which SCU stands; to ‘build a global platform for street children, so they can demand the protection, support, and opportunities every child deserves’. 

Project lead: Tim Vyner, School of Design

Principle partner: Street Child United  

International partners:

• DRC (Congo): Malaika / BUMI,
• Mexico: Futbol Mas,
• England: Everton In The Community,
• USA Washington DC: Street Child World Cup Summit ‘Identity/gender equality’ 

The project will curate a collection of scores drawn from the CoMA library and beyond to present a resource for musicians, educators, and community arts practitioners that offers pieces suitable for immediate performance. Many open scores still require a lot of preparation, so having a collection of pieces that can be performance-ready in under an hour with participants from a wide range of backgrounds has the potential to encourage and validate more exploratory music making.

The collection will present key examples from CoMA’s archive of work spanning 30 years alongside equivalent scores from other sources, and be made available for use by people interested in finding new ways to make music in groups. 

Project lead: James Saunders, School of Music and Performing Arts

External Partners:

• Tamara Kohler (Chief Executive Officer and Artistic Director, CoMA),
• Emory Southwick (Music Sales and Catalogue Manager, CoMA) 

Anxiety and shame are common feelings for many performers and can form barriers to safety and creativity in rehearsal contexts, particularly in work with politically or culturally sensitive material or performances of violence and intimacy. Current performance and performer training techniques teach us to dismiss these feelings of resistance, or to lean into them for the sake of dramatic effect at the expense of our own wellbeing.

This project poses these feelings as a form of ‘transgressive knowledge’ – of ourselves, our boundaries and our needs – which should be acknowledged and approached in trauma-informed ways (Dollimore, 1991; Bennett, 1996).  

In this collaboration we will develop our skills in recognising, examining and holding space for our own and others embodied resistance in performance practice and training. Drawing on social care and justice tools and creating our own, we will build our capacities for embedding and sharing trauma-informed approaches to ‘transgressive knowledge’ in the roles of responsibility we inhabit as instructors, facilitators, directors, and policy-shapers within cultural organisations.

By promoting more effective safeguarding and wellbeing measures for artists, we can begin to challenge harmful economies of emotional labour within and beyond arts industries. 

• Project lead: CJ Turner-McMullan
• Director of Studies: Dr Roger Apfelbaum
• Second supervisor: Dr Laura Gates
• External partners: Theatre-makers Russell Eccleston, Saili Katebe, Ri Baroche, Amy Harris

This project responds to growing challenges to the value of the humanities by exploring their unique role in impact-driven research and innovation. Rather than positioning the humanities as a support for other disciplines, it asks what distinct contributions they can make, and how best practices from existing partnership projects can inform a replicable methodology. 

The work builds on collaborations with the National Trust and Fairfield House, aiming to: 

• Commercialise successful pilot projects, 
• Evaluate impact through partner perspectives, 
• Develop ‘In the Making’ - a humanities-focused impact methodology and innovation lab. 

The long-term goal is to establish In the Making as a hub for collaborative, values-led humanities research that redefines how impact is understood and delivered, positioning Bath Spa University as a leader in Humanities-for-Impact innovation. 

Project lead: Jenni Lewis

Internal Partner:

• Dr Sarah Morton

External partners:

• National Trust
• Fairfield House

Project team members:

• Caroline Kuhn, School of Education, Bath Spa University
• Dominic Kimani, community leader and conservationist, Kinangop
• Mary Warui, community leader and value chain expert, Kinangop
• Julius Gatune, UNESCO Chair in Futures Literacy for the East Africa Region at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology
• Fisayo Oyewale, UNICEF Foresight Senior Fellow
• Geci Karuni-Sebina, Associate Professor at the Wits School of Governance

This phase of Network Effects explores how emerging filmmakers navigate the international short film festival circuit - and how festivals support their career development. 

Working with at least three UK festivals as testing grounds, the project will design ethical data collection methods, develop visualisation tools, and create case studies that reveal patterns of progression within the industry. Key partners such as BFI Network and Creative Europe: MEDIA will be actively involved to ensure the research aligns with their evaluation needs. 

Building on a global network of over 20 festival partners, the project addresses a critical gap in understanding the role of short film festivals as launchpads for new talent. By making these often-invisible pathways visible, the research will help festivals demonstrate their impact and offer stakeholders more nuanced ways to assess cultural value. 

Project lead: Rich Warren

Industry partners:

• Encounters Film Festival (Bristol)
• Glasgow Short Film Festival
• London Short Film Festival 

The Literature across Borders pilot will explore how children can play an active role in sharing and discussing multicultural literature across borders. Co-produced with schools as equal partners, the programme uses a knowledge exchange approach to ensure relevance, inclusion, and impact across diverse educational contexts.  

This exploratory phase will inform future expansion, building a strong foundation for a wider roll-out in Year 2 and beyond - supporting global publishing, empathy, and cross-cultural understanding through children’s literature. 

Project leaders:

• Alexia Casale-Katzman, School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities
• Meghaa Gupta

External partners:

• Laura Bridge, (UK, school librarian)
• JoAnne Saldanha, (India, librarian)
• Eileen Lamb, (US, librarian)

This project brings together Haymay, a collaborative learning app, and MoSAIC, a business that integrates creativity into STEM education. Haymay supports real-time collaboration on complex problems in subjects like Maths, History, and Logic. Grounded in design-based research, it builds on evidence that collaborative learning boosts problem-solving, skills, and conceptual understanding. 

 A full-day workshop will explore how Haymay can be integrated into MoSAIC’s creative STEM workshops. MoSAIC will design and pilot bespoke activities within the app, which will be tested with student groups to assess their impact. 

By working closely with educators and learners, the project will provide real-world feedback and insights into the app’s effectiveness, guiding its future development to better meet users’ needs. 

Project lead: Jake Hobbs, School of Design

Partner:

• Gareth Campbell (Gaz Lawrence) - MoSAIC

This project will bring together artist academics with external partners from the NCCH, for meaningful discussions around the value of understanding artists’ behaviours for health and wellbeing. These discussions will build on research arising from Inventory of Behaviours (IoB) - practice-led research into the peripheral activities that support artists’ creativity, productivity and wellbeing (initiated in 2017).

This project will, specifically, focus on the potential of bringing knowledge from IoB into GP waiting rooms. Research shows that GP waiting rooms are an underused resource, and that materials including leaflets, posters and QR code-linked websites have the potential to greatly benefit patients’ health and wellbeing. 

A half-day event will facilitate discussion between researchers and GP partners. Artist researchers will share IoB’s methods and findings, while GPs will offer reflections and ideas for collaborative future research. 

Project leads:

• Jenny Dunseath, School of Art, Film and Media
• Natasha Kidd, School of Art Film and Media

Partners:

• Hannah Sackett (art pedagogy researcher)
• Jo Addison (artist)
• Kelly Large (curator). 

Industry partner:

• National Centre for Creative Health - NCCH (Director Alexandra Coulter). 

The project consists of a 1-day workshop, split into several activities with different stakeholders, which will form the beginning of a larger-scale project exploring and celebrating Romani history, culture and communities in Sedgemoor.  

Seed Sedgemoor have established contact with the acclaimed Romani artist Delaine Le Bas, aiming to develop a project which will culminate in a major installation in 2026. This project would build on previous initiatives with Sedgemoor’s Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities, such as the creation of a Gypsy Cob sculpture by artist blacksmith Jack Bowers.   

The workshop will bring together Delaine, Seed team members, Bath Spa University staff, and local voices to foster early connections and ensure community involvement is embedded in the creative process.  

Project lead: Judith Robinson, Bath Business School

External partner:

• Seed Sedgemoor

A half-day in-person workshop hosted by CCCI at The Studio, bringing together BSU academics and staff who work across arts and culture, education, impact, and evaluation with members of the UK Gov’t’s EPIC team.

The focus of the session will be knowledge exchange, co-design, potential collaboration with communities and opportunities, and aligning BSU policy initiatives with the government’s pillars for growth mission linked to EPIC’s work, as announced in the Autumn 2024 Budget.  

Project lead: Kate Pullinger, Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries

Internal partners:

• Dr Natasha Kidd (CCCI)
• Stacey Pottinger (The Studio/Inclusive Communities Unit)
• Caroline Anstey (The Studio)
• Professor Sarah Earle (BSU)
•  Dr Astrid Breel (BSU) 

External partner:

• EPIC (Education Policy Innovation Centre), Department for Education 

This project brings together academics and regional dance organisations to spark fresh conversations about the relationship between professional dance and academic research. The project recognises that established arts funding systems, financial support for dance research and institutional and academic systems of knowledge production replicate neoliberal market conditions that set dance artists, researchers, and arts producers in competition with one another and perpetuate siloed modes of working. 

The aim of the dialogues is to help establish new relationships with external partners, and to develop existing relationships with Gather Up Dance Collective. 

Through sharing expertise, resources and knowledge across professional and academic domains, the KE dialogue will help researchers and regional partners to develop a more coherent, robust and dialogic dance ecology and infrastructure from which future collaborations can evolve. 

Project lead: Michelle Elliott, School of Music and Performance Arts

Bath Spa researcher:

•  Professor Vicky Hunter, (researcher in site-specific dance and human-place engagement).

External partners:

• Gather Up Dance (Bristol)
• Neon Dance (Swindon)
• Rubicon Dance, (Cardiff).

This project brings together researchers from academia and the creative industries to explore how physical sensation, movement, and space shape our experiences of live and digital performance - including AR and VR. 

By focusing on somatic (body-based) knowledge, the team is investigating how immersive technologies can better reflect the diversity of human experience. They’re asking: How can embodied practices enhance audience engagement? How can they connect people across time and space? And how might this work influence industries embracing more interactive, body-aware digital environments? 

Ultimately, the project aims to expand how we understand and design for embodiment in a digital age. 

Project leads:

• Zhi Xu, School of Music and Performance Arts
• Vicky Hunter, School of Music and Performance Arts

Bath Spa researcher:

•  Professor Vicky Hunter, (researcher in site-specific dance and human-place engagement).

Industry partners:

• Rebecca Evans (Pell Ensemble and  The Studio )
• Lisa May Thomas (ESRC Centre for Socio-Digital Futures (University of Bristol) and resident artist at Pervasive Media Studio)
• Naresh Kaushal (interactive art and moving image artist, Lecturer in Dance, technology and cultural identity)
• The Studio  – Main contact Nik Rawlings. 

This project will bring to life the eighteenth-century letters of the Canning Family Network (which include detailed references to Bath and the Assembly Rooms).

It'll do this  through creative writing and theatrical performance workshops with local creative theatre company Kilter Theatre for public visitors to the Assembly Rooms. 

Project team members:

• Rachel Bynoth, School of Design, Bath Spa University
• Bath Assembly Rooms 

This project will explore the development of an Our Town Corsham Community App intended to make it easier for Corsham’s population to locate the right service, project or community group for their needs, with special relevance for Corsham’s Deaf and Disabled community partners and visitors. 

Project team members:

• Tanvir Bush,  School of Education, Bath Spa University
• Corsham Town Council
• Same Difference
• Corsham Connections
• Praminda Caleb-Solly, Professor of Embodied Intelligence, Nottingham University
• Jason Leake, Smart Metrics Ltd

The Radical Trust project aims to work with Fairfield House to think critically about equitable models for partnership work, drawing on Fairfield House’s experiences to uncover and critique any assumptions and colonising modes of thought.

The project will experiment with different forms of relationship-building and knowledge exchange and develop a radically decolonised framework for engaged research and teaching.

Project team members:

• Sarah Morton, School of Writing Publishing and the Humanities, Bath Spa University
• Jenni Lewis, School of Writing Publishing and the Humanities, Bath Spa University
• Fairfield House

Three ‘listening events’ will be held with young people and families from disadvantaged and minority groups, in community venues in Bristol/Bath, Birmingham and Brighton.

The project will hear and capture individuals’ views on barriers they face and how we might reinvent schooling, education and skills opportunities to better support their employment needs in a postdigital society.

Project team members:

• Sarah Hayes, School of Education, Bath Spa University
• Alex Cole, CEO at TIN Ventures
• Michael Jopling, Professor of Education, University of Brighton
• Richard Watermeyer, Professor of Education, University of Bristol

Pavilion for Plastic Dialogues aims to create a plastic pavilion for public engagement activities in Bristol.

Situated in Knowle West Media Centre, the pavilion will serve as a gathering space for ‘plastic dialogues’ and workshops involving young people, residents, local businesses and creative practitioners, connecting participants with the ongoing UN draft Plastics Treaty negotiations.  

Project team members:

• Ben Parry, Reader in Art, Ecology and Social Practice, Bath Spa University
• Knowle West Media Centre
• Plastics Treaty Analysis Working Group

Objects Without Borders investigates the role of puppetry and object performance in connecting people across borders, boundaries and differences, with a focus on using digital spaces to connect people who would not normally be able to connect.

The project draws on the knowledge and experience of people living on and between the borders and boundaries of society including refugees and people from deprived communities.

This phase of the project includes the development of a mobile app embedded within workshops that will be designed to capture impact data. 

Project team members:

• Laura Purcell-Gates, Reader in Drama, Bath Spa University,
• Seenaryo (a UK NGO working with refugee communities in Jordan)
• Dafa Puppet Theatre (a theatre company that runs workshops with refugees in Europe and the Middle East, based in Prague)
• Theatre Orchard (a theatre company that runs engagement projects with deprived and refugee communities in Weston-super-Mare)

This project aims to empower girls in Nepali schools by supporting them to create collages highlighting gender disparities in Nepal's education system.

These will be used to engage policymakers in gender discussions.

The visual narratives presented in an art gallery setting will foster meaningful dialogue among policymakers about gender issues, ultimately advancing gender equity and societal progress. 

Project team members:

Vandana Singh, School of Education, Bath Spa University

Nangi Village School

This project will develop resources to support Key Stage 2 pupils in consolidating and elaborating science concepts to develop rich, interconnected knowledge.

It brings together primary teachers, primary science experts and BSU research led by Kendra McMahon to ensure that the design is suitable for professionals working in real classrooms and is grounded in research. 

Project team members:

• Kendra McMahon, Reader in Education, Bath Spa University
• Primary Science Quality Mark
• primary school teachers

Working in partnership with a Kenyan team of experts in agriculture, youth development, dairy production, decolonising, and futures literacy, this project will develop two Future Literacy Labs in Kinangop and Ol Kalou.

The aim is to reimagine the future of the dairy industry in Kenya and the roles community members (women farmers in particular) envision having.

Project team members:

• Caroline Kuhn, School of Education, Bath Spa University
• Dominic Kimani, community leader and conservationist, Kinangop
• Mary Warui, community leader and value chain expert, Kinangop
• Julius Gatune, UNESCO Chair in Futures Literacy for the East Africa Region at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology
• Fisayo Oyewale, UNICEF Foresight Senior Fellow
• Geci Karuni-Sebina, Associate Professor at the Wits School of Governance

This collaboration with the National Trust aims to create a KE dialogue on how curatorial and public engagement practice can help us think in an innovative way about women, nature, and well-being, encompassing both past and present.  

We will identify collections that would benefit from further research, as well as consider how these objects might be curated to improve public engagement. 

We will hold a one-day roundtable bringing together academics, creative practitioners, and heritage professionals, drawing on expertise from environmental humanities, the heritage industry, arts education, and feminist cultural history. 

Project team members:

• Dr Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi, School of Wrting, Publishing, and the Humanities, Bath Spa University
• Barbara Wood, South-West Regional Curator for the National Trust.

This project is based on Jenni’s research, which looks at how we enable inclusive cultures to develop in our university classrooms but also in the workplaces our students move into. 

It is a partnership between the National Trust team at Bath Assembly Rooms, an undergraduate student at BSU (who will act as a conduit to her peers), and an academic. 

Together they plan to create and pilot a set of materials for the Bath Assembly Room team that will enable them to engage with the wider community in a more inclusive way, and generate and support more sustainable, inclusive practices in their own work culture.

Project team members:

• Dr Jenni Lewis, School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities, Bath Spa University
• Andie-Marie Keough (BSU 2nd year UG student)
• National Trust Bath Assembly Rooms Team. 

Finding Commons provides collective space and sanctity for people challenged by the rising cost and pressure of living in today’s world. By coming together to share and discuss our inner and practical struggles, we work against the privatisation and personalisation of hardship and failure that characterise life in contemporary capitalist societies.  

Bristol and Bath are two of the UK’s most cramped and expensive cities to live in outside London. Each has a worsening lack of affordable or public space to exist in. Private housing is small and expensive to rent. Issues of gentrification, homelessness, and the forced clearance of informally tenanted public land are rife in both cities.    

This project invites those active and organising in support of the growing precariat from each city, whatever the nature of challenges they face, to participate in two large community-level workshops in Bath and Bristol. Creating space to find the commons.

Project team members:

• Dr Rupert Alcock, School of Writing, Publishing, and Humanities, Bath Spa University
• Nadia Idle, Communications strategist, workshop facilitator and community activist. 

We are a group of four diverse researchers and practitioners, coming from different countries (USA, UK, Brazil, and Colombia) and backgrounds, who will use the KE Dialogues scheme to explore diverse approaches to listening, presence, embodiment, and wellbeing within the broader context of diversities (e.g. neuro, ethnic, artistic, epistemic).  

We will hold four workshops, through which we will exchange knowledge on, for example, non-verbal communication, body movement, breathing, Deep Listening practices, migration, and co-regulation, as well as listening and sounding creative technologies.  

We will establish the foundations for a prototype Toolkit for Interdisciplinary Communities of Practice. We will also use the audio material to create and distribute a podcast documenting our process. 

Project team members:

• Dr Ron Herrema, School of Design, Bath Spa University
• Professor Amanda Bayley, School of Music and Performing Arts, Bath Spa University
• Silvia Carderelli-Gronau, Dance artist, researcher
• Dr Ximena Alarcón, Sound artist-researcher. 

The project brings together storytellers and grass roots environmental groups along the Dart to engage local communities with the natural history and local ecology of the river through reimagined oral history and folk tale.  

It aims to raise awareness of present environmental challenges facing the river and its communities, particularly pollution and poor water quality, and encourage participation in positive actions that benefit river health and ecology.  

They will do a series of storytelling events that focus on reimagined folk tales about the river and its nonhuman inhabitants to highlight how it has become degraded in recent history and what we can do as individuals and community groups to remedy the situation.

Project leader:

• Dr Charlotte Lancaster, School of Writing Publishing and Humanities, Bath Spa University
  

Project team members:

• Lisa Schneidau, South Devon Storytellers
• Kelly Rich, Dartmoor Preservation Association
• Ana Simons, Friends of the Dart 

The project brings together storytellers and grass roots environmental groups along the Dart to engage local communities with the natural history and local ecology of the river through reimagined oral history and folk tale.  

It aims to raise awareness of present environmental challenges facing the river and its communities, particularly pollution and poor water quality, and encourage participation in positive actions that benefit river health and ecology.  

They will do a series of storytelling events that focus on reimagined folk tales about the river and its nonhuman inhabitants to highlight how it has become degraded in recent history and what we can do as individuals and community groups to remedy the situation.

Project leader:

• Dr Coral Manton, School of Design, Bath Spa University
  

Project team members:

• Dr Birgitte Aga, Head of R and D and Innovation at MUNCH 

Having developed a series of automated painting systems that make public the role of care through a reliance on others for their activation, Dr Natasha Kidd will partner with Bath based support organisations Off the Record and The Carers Centre to shift the site of this work into two community settings. 

Working in collaboration with groups from the Carers Centre and Off the Record, a new series of automated painting machines will be built, installed, and cared for in these new settings with the aim of identifying, tracking, and evaluating the impact these artworks might meaningfully have on those involved.  

Subsequently, this project aims to establish a tangible method for recording and evaluating the emergent value of being with art works. 

Project team members:

• Dr Natasha Kidd School of Art, Film and Media, Bath Spa University
• Off the Record
• The Carers Centre

This project will develop a virtual ‘AI Wordsworth’; a visual and audial conversational agent to enable new ways of measuring the impact of Artificial Intelligence on public engagement with poetry and heritage institutions while considering ethical and creative issues. 

Visitors to Wordsworth Grasmere during the annual Wordsworth Winter School, held during February and March 2024, will have the opportunity to engage with a 3D AI generated William Wordsworth, based on an 1804 portrait by Henry Edridge, and will be prompted to engage him in conversation.

AI Wordsworth will use natural language processing to generate human-like responses, building on large language models. The impact of the experience for visitors will be measured to inform a future project. 

Project team members:

• Dr Amy Spencer, Research and Enterprise, Bath Spa University
• Jeff Cowton, Principal Curator and Head of Learning at The Wordsworth Trust (WT)
• Richard Godfrey, CEO and co-founder of Rocketmakers.

The project will assess the impact and transformative potential of ethnomusicological research by documenting and evaluating the changes and social benefits that have arisen from musical and other artistic collaborations in Kwando village, northeastern Namibia, in 2023. 
The idea of artistic activities being a catalyst for social change in the Kwando community arose from Amanda Bayley’s first visit in April 2023. The rationale for engaging young people in musical and other artistic activities is to divert their attention away from harmful behaviours such as substance abuse. 

The project will assess the extent to which providing opportunities for skills development in arts disciplines leads towards the strengthening of individual, community, and societal well-being (UN SDG3). Working closely with the community head, other community partners, participants, and researchers from the University of Namibia (UNAM), will demonstrate how music can help to build sustainable partnerships that drive artistic solutions for societal change.   
 

Project team leader:

• Professor Amanda Bayley, School of Music and Performing Arts, Bath Spa University

Project collaborators

• University of Namibia

This project will investigate how writers can extend their creative practice through the use of low-cost, widely available augmented and immersive storytelling tools. It will involve a one-day participatory creative workshop for 8 writers held at The Studio. This will be open to writers in the region, as well as those studying at Bath Spa University.

Project team members:

• Dr Amy Spencer, Research and Graduate Affairs / Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Bath Spa University
• Dr Agnieszka Przybyszewska, University of Łódź, Poland
• Mitchell Wilson and Lilly Parr, Co-founders, Layerable.

Sound of the Seahorse is an immersive audio journey designed to amplify the relaxing therapeutic benefits of a massage. A prototype will be co-created that will connect the somatic experience of a massage with an immersive soundscape.

Project team leader:

• Dr Ruth Farrar, School of Art, Film and Media, Bath Spa University

Collaborators:

• Steph Winnard, Producer from All About Creative
• Nik Rawlings, sound artist
• Sam Kelly, BSU-in-residence massage therapist
• Andrew Cooke, composer 

Tulips and Tractors will focus on the development and delivery of a circular walk between Bath City Farm and Wares Nursery. Stories, artwork, local memories and wildlife data will be gathered to open conversations on place and belonging as well as on issues of land use, land ownership, horticulture and agriculture.

Project team leader:

• Dr Richard White, School of Art, Film and Media, Bath Spa University

Collaborators:

• Claire Loder, artist
• Brendan Wistreic, Director of Bath City Farm

The Ideas Bank aims to provide practical advice and guidance to individuals who want to translate ideas for their community into research and/or action. 

The project will include live, in-person engagements, presented as a faux bank that invites local people to deposit their ideas for the bank to invest in. They will be connected with academics who can collaborate on research projects, and given practical advice to realise their idea.

Project team member:

• Ruby Sant, Creative and Culture Development Officer, Bath Spa University

Collaborators:

• Jonathan Eldridge, Writer, Evaluator and Creative Researcher
• Louise Rennie, Street/Event Theatre Artist.

Haunting the Archives empowers young people to tell entangled social and natural histories of Bristol’s Ashton Court estate. Working with material held in libraries and museums across the city, young people reveal lost and silenced queer, colonial and working-class histories haunting the archives, and then work together with participatory artist Jack Young and theatre-maker Elinor Lower to devise an original creative production.

This collaborative work will reveal the labour behind the creation of Ashton Court’s wealth, and expose practices of colonial extraction which furnished its interiors and beautified its gardens. As historians and storytellers, young people lead the way in showing how history can be made exciting, accessible, and relevant as a way of looking at the present and imagining the future in critical and creative ways. Working with Dr Samantha Walton, the team then will create an interactive and dynamic community theatre toolkit to inspire other groups of young people to work with archives in their local area. 

Project leader:

• Dr Samantha Walton, School of Writing Publishing and Humanities, Bath Spa University
  

Collaborators:

• Jack Young, writer and participatory artist
• Elinor Lower, Theatre Maker
• Ashton Court.