This research seeks to explore the process by which the GCSE History curricula were constructed, and the contestations around representation, during the 2013-16 national period of GCSE educational reform and subsequent changes to 2024. It employs a qualitative methodology of critical discourse analysis of policy documents to explore the representation of the chosen historical narratives for study; looking at the framing of who is included and the ways they are discursively constructed. It aims to produce detailed qualitative accounts on the ways in which policy actors interact during curriculum construction and the discourses around representation which are created, accepted and challenged at each stage of the policy translation process. Through this process I aim to discover how institutional factors and decision making may have impacted work in creating a representative approach to curriculum policy and design, and how this understanding may offer different approaches to future reform. The representations of identity explored will be individuals or groups who do not fit within the presented dominant groups, and have been minoritised within their social worlds. This will include representations of gender, race, ethnicity and class within different time periods through the curriculum. It will also explore, where those individuals or groups are presented, how they are portrayed and how that portrayal might support or challenge a particular cultural narrative and how that presentation may impact on those who both share and do not share a sense of common identity. GCSE History qualifications saw coordinated reform in the early 2010s, with an stated aim by then Education Minister Michael Gove to employ the history curriculum at all levels to teach 'our Island story' and replace the curriculum which Gove stated was a denigration of Britain's past (Alexander and Weekes-Bernard 2017 p.482). Whilst the concept of creating and affirming a particular national identity through the teaching of History was not new (Haydn 2012), the 2010s reforms made an explicit connection to citizenship and moral education in This research will employ critical discourse analysis approaches to policy actors' documents, supported by semi-structured interviews, to explore the interlinked discourses created through layers of decision making. It will focus on written policy documents, drawn from the government; the DfE; regulatory bodies such as Ofqual and OFSTED and Awarding Organisations. The translation and reinterpretation of these documents and their interactions should reveal the aims of each policy actor and the extent to which they impacted the final curriculum. Through these lenses, I aim to understand the process of policy translation across different actors in History education policy construction to find the blocks, challenges and failures of representation throughout. Through this process, the research will reveal how each subsequent document was transformed through the organisational aims of that policy actor and their dynamics and power relationships with others involved at each stage. Through this understanding of the process of policy creation, it may be possible to identify key areas to improve representation and find new ways to enact change within future iterations of the GCSE History curricula.

Harry is a misfit and unique post-war voice in British photography. Not Steven Berkoff, about to escape into theatre, nor Don McCullin, about to embark on a soul-crushing career capturing overseas trauma. Harry's too busy making a crust to fly off to war or even to Paris to make his name. Harry beats the streets of London with his camera, honing. He's going to make it, not by othering his sitters, nor predating or summoning their daemon - that's John Deacon's job. As Lucian Freud says of him: "It's so odd: the character of the photographer enters into things. I think you'd find Harry had more scope than Deakin. He walked four or five hours a day from district to district." Harry's archive is a precious record. See Wentworth St without the Liverpool St skyscrapers behind Petticoat Lane, just one new block at the end, the rest an expanse of sky, and Blooms, and there's Cannon St synagogue, Petticoat Lane, Commercial St - before the gentrification of the last twenty years! The social historical record of 70s/80s adverts amongst the older, Joycean graphic of shop fronts, fashion of jeans, pullovers, chopper bikes, casual family portraits against brick walls. Atmosphere, in cafes, homes, shops, and market stalls. Layers of ambiguity and freedom inside groupings. Multiculturally, every colour and creed - expressing ease of ethnic mixing that I remember from my childhood.There is so much to this archive. Therefore, the first method I'd employ in this pioneering research of Harry is to build a basic inventory and catalogue. Logbooks and Harry's address book provide clues and names of streets visible in his street scenes. Using an old A to Z to avoid the pitfalls of gentrification changes to locales, there may be enough clues to plot groups of shots in time and space. Networks from outreach already begun by the NPG are another place to step in and begin detective work to identify sitters. Raising the archive, finding ways of getting it seen in community spaces, or places of common footfall in Tower Hamlets' and Soho's hubs, will help to identify sitters still to be named in the 20,000 shots held at the NPG.

How does the UK Home Office "do history" today? How have the Home, Colonial and Foreign Offices "done history" in the past? "Credibility" is a concept in British immigration often taken at face value but actually in need of historical analysis. My PhD investigates the development of "credibility" as notion that organises race, gender and criminality into governmental policies for deporting people in the U.K. to former British colonies. "Credibility" is central in legal sources of "refugee status determination" and since the 1990s part and parcel of a discourse about credible characters and authentic documentary evidence. My project sets out to historicise the authority given to Home Office caseworkers to validate or discredit life histories in relation to histories of British late colonial governance, decolonisation and post-war immigration controls. The project contextualises the provision of expert witness reports by today's Area Studies scholars to Asylum Tribunal Courts about asylum seekers' countries of origin within a wider genealogy of the production of academic knowledge and government policies relating to former British colonies. In addition to offering an account of "credibility" based on caselaw, legislation and parliamentary debates, my project parses how "credibility" discourse has been challenged and reformulated by very different kinds of campaigns and everyday interactions with British immigration controls. How have both racist and anti-racist groups - including imperialist white feminists, Colonial Service pensioners, New Commonwealth immigrants and refugee rights activists - rendered the "credibility" of migrants, of the immigration system, and of the British Empire's legacies? Ultimately, my project asks how the political language in which we register the history of British colonialism relates to the depoliticisation (within the five categories of the Refugee Convention) and subsequent criminalisation of economic migration to Britain from former British colonies. This project will historicise the separation between "genuine" asylum-seekers and "fraudulent" economic migrants, a binary now considered the hallmark of 'postliberal' political discourse.

This practice-based research engages with Uruguay’s ongoing deinstitutionalisation process bringing together spatial theories of coexistence and participatory art. It draws on critical human geography to chart deinstitutionalisation as a social and spatial process, with the understanding that the departure from the psychiatric asylum must be negotiated well beyond its walls. This project combines techniques from contemporary documentary filmmaking and pedagogies of Latin American Third Cinema to experiment with audio-visual practice as a device for witnessing difference and reimagining life together within difference. This research will promote encounters between people, between disciplines, and between practice and theory, engaging in transformative community-processes and the public discussion of topical issues. It will operate micro-politically, employing artistic practice to bring into conversation service users, professionals and staff of Uruguay’s mental health system, carers and relatives, and other members of society. By enabling dialogues outside traditional settings and roles and extending the conversations on mental health beyond the bounds of disciplinary discourses and established institutions, this research will contribute to the understanding of mental health in the context of mad studies and critical disability studies, and will advance the dialogical potential of audio-visual practice and its development as a research method. Recent legislation in Uruguay set the deadline for closing all psychiatric asylums by 2025. However, the recurrent employment of confinement in Uruguay means that this occasion could introduce radical changes in mental health care or merely produce new ways of institutionalisation. Considering the deinstitutionalisation process through the lens of coexistence, I will identify the multiple spatialities and temporalities of confinement in contemporary Uruguay and explore the embodied practices that contest confinement and nurture plural coexistence. I will use audio-visual practice, combining documentary filmmaking and post-screening discussions to bring into conversation service users, carers, professionals and staff of Uruguay’s mental health system, and other members of society. By engaging in public discussion promoting encounters between people, between disciplines, and between practice and theory, this research will contribute to a critical understanding of mental health in contemporary Uruguay and will advance the development of audio-visual practice as a research method.

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