Funded by
SRF20\200078
Regulatory Brokerage and Performance – Shaping the World of Regenerative Medicine
Professor Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner
University of Sussex, Professor of Social and Medical Anthropology, Department of Anthopology
Awarded: £ 51,604.00
Regulation in the life sciences is usually presumed to have the power to protect and to enable. Regulations are also often treated as something static; something to be followed and implemented. This research concerns the need to see regulation as an active practice. The research-based examples that I have gathered from Asia, USA, and Europe show how regulation in the life-sciences, apart from being reified and commodified, is also brokered, ritualised and performed in local and international transactions between scientists, companies, governments and international organisations. First, the book-project examines the practices of scientists, entrepreneurs, medical experts, patients, officials and politicians and their global links to develop a performative perspective on the international dynamics and politics of regulation in the emerging and shifting field of regenerative medicine. Second, a research proposal building on the book’s analysis will examine the unfolding regulation of Human Genome Germline Editing in jurisdictions across the world.
SRF20\200072
Race and Slavery in Contemporary Arabic Literature and Culture
Professor Ziad Elmarsafy
King's College London, Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature
Awarded: £ 50,597.91
The project explores questions of race and slavery in contemporary (post-1970) Arabic literature. By bringing theories gleaned from work by Orlando Patterson and Critical Race Theory (inter alia) to bear on novels published over the past four decades, the project will investigate the relationship between race and slavery on one hand, and the forms and configurations of citizenship and authoritarian rule in the Middle East and North Africa on the other. An important thread running through the project will be the intersection between slavery , gender, and sexuality. The corpus to be studied includes works by Alaa al-Aswany, Muhammad Munsi Qandil, Haji Jaber, Ali al-Muqri, Hammour Ziada, Najwa bin Shatwan, Jokha al-Harthi, Saud al-Sanousi, and Samiha Khrais among others. Project outputs will include a monograph, a series of workshops, and an international conference on the subject.
SRF20\200058
The role of rights in achieving climate justice and sustainable development
Dr Sam Adelman
University of Warwick, Associate Professor, School of Law
Awarded: £ 56,037.94
The project will analyse the use of rights-based climate litigation in two developing countries: the constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment in South Africa and the rights of nature in Colombia. It will identify successful litigation strategies, and identify rights-based cases likely to be brought in future. It will analyse the role of rights-based litigation in protecting nature, promoting sustainable development, and protecting the human rights of particularly vulnerable groups such as women, children and indigenous peoples. It will analyse the role of human rights and climate litigation in protecting the rights of future generations. The research will assess the degree to which these provide models for climate litigation in other countries in the global South.
SRF20\200113
Teos and Abdera: Two Cities in Peace and War
Professor Peter Thonemann
University of Oxford, Professor of Ancient History, Faculty of Classics
Awarded: £ 47,278.00
In late summer 2017, ongoing Turkish excavations at the site of Teos in Ionia uncovered the largest and most important Greek inscription to have been discovered this century. It records, in thrilling and moving detail, the assistance provided by the Teians in the repopulation and rebuilding of their daughter-city, Abdera in Thrace, after its sack by the Romans in 170 BC. The new text is startling testimony to the ancestral friendship- and support-networks that existed between Greek poleis in the Hellenistic world, and includes (among other things) the longest surviving description of an honorific statue to survive from the ancient world. The aim of this project is to publish this extraordinary new inscription as the centrepiece of a substantial and ground-breaking academic monograph; a shorter popular volume will also be published simultaneously in Greek and Turkish, disseminating the results of the research to a non-specialist audience.
SRF20\200045
Venice: A New Imperial History
Dr Anastasia Stouraiti
Goldsmiths, University of London, Lecturer in Early Modern History, Department of History
Awarded: £ 51,575.00
This project aims to produce the first comprehensive academic monograph on the impact of empire on early modern Venetian culture. While colonial frontiers and encounters in the east Mediterranean have long attracted the attention of historians, the place of colonialism in Venetian metropolitan culture has been largely ignored. The proposed project will address this historiographical gap by examining the relationship between overseas expansion, popular culture in the imperial centre, and the formation of civic identities at home. Focusing on histories, novels, poetry, musical media, artworks, festivals and prints, the project will investigate the myriad cultural channels through which empire building shaped daily practices, social rituals and symbolic forms in the Venetian metropolis. Ultimately, the project seeks to integrate the analytical category of empire into a novel rereading of Venetian social and cultural history, while also making a critical intervention in the broader fields of imperial and colonial studies.
SRF20\200100
Between autonomy and abandonment: reconsidering patient-centred care
Professor Alison Pilnick
University of Nottingham, Professor of Language, Medicine and Society, School of Sociology and Social Policy
Awarded: £ 43,389.16
The principle of patient-centred care (PCC) underpins much UK healthcare, and is widely regarded as an uncontentious moral good, addressing the power imbalance caused by previous, paternalistic modes of practice. However, research does not show a clear link between PCC and improved health outcomes, and it has been suggested by some critics that the focus on patient autonomy leads instead to patient abandonment. This project will consider PCC critically from a sociological perspective, to identify the ways in which there may be ‘good’ interactional reasons for ‘bad’ healthcare practice, and to consider how moral norms and interactional norms may be in conflict. A critical sociological engagement, grounded in empirical analysis of consultations, will reframe existing debate, addressing the consumerist conceptualization of medicine that underpins PCC and questioning to what extent reformers of doctor/patient interaction have crucially misunderstood the role and nature of medicine in their pursuit of projects for reform.
SRF20\200158
Kodachrome Travels: Colour Film, Realism, and the ‘American Pacific’ Imagination, 1935-41
Professor Jeffrey Geiger
University of Essex, Professor, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies
Awarded: £ 58,183.39
This project focuses on colour films shot across Oceania by American amateur filmmakers, beginning in 1935 when Kodachrome stock was first marketed. During the years just before the Second World War, vast increases in tourism on the seas coincided with profound transitions in the Pacific region, with European colonial networks still entrenched and US expansionism soon to exert its greatest impact. The locales and peoples that these travellers encountered and filmed were on the verge of total militarisation, the culmination of centuries of political and commercial competition. These films, mostly housed in library archives and rarely screened, not only provide historical records of Pacific sites but reveal a hidden history of colour film and its relations to shifting perceptions of cinematic realism. At the same time, they indicate the fashioning of American selfhood on a global stage during a period when established colonial networks were yielding to ‘American Pacific’ ambitions.
SRF20\200030
The Spoken, the Hidden, and the Historical: Individual Reparation Claims and the German Jewish Experience after the Holocaust
Professor Gideon Reuveni
University of Sussex, Professor of Modern European History, Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Department of History
Awarded: £ 51,604.00
German payments to survivors of the Holocaust were the largest financial reparation undertaking in history. The claims contain testimonies as well as supporting evidence of all kind, providing much information on Nazi persecution as well as on Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust. Put together, this is the most extensive untapped Holocaust related archive we have. My project is designed to set out some preliminary markers that will facilitate further investigations of this important field of historical inquiry. It will incorporate the perspectives of the claimants, the different mediators, together with that of the German bureaucracy that processed the claims, showing how the study of personal compensation claims can help us gain a better understanding of changing conceptions of historical selfhood as well as to provide access to lost voices of men and women that otherwise did not leave many traces from their lives.
SRF20\200168
Rehabilitation and women prisoners: a study of the therapeutic community
Professor Elaine Player
King's College London, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, The Dickson Poon School of Law
Awarded: £ 54,123.00
The proposed monograph focuses attention on the rehabilitative treatment of an under-researched population of women prisoners, namely those serving long custodial sentences for serious offences. Renewed interest in prison rehabilitation and the proliferation of cognitive behavioural programmes, has led to considerable criticism by feminist writers of the ways in which dominant strategies of risk management translate rehabilitative needs into criminogenic risks. The present research, conducted in the only democratic therapeutic community (DTC)for women prisoners, acknowledges that powerful arguments range against therapeutic services in prisons. However, it contends that the DTC model has the potential to support a feminist conception of rehabilitation, where emotional distress and behavioural dysfunction can be explored in relation to experiences of disempowerment rather than treated as syndromes of personal ineptitude. The research identifies ideological changes to the prison culture that facilitate this perspective and establish a necessary duty of care to residents in the DTC.