There are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people in the world today (UNHCR Global Trends in Forced Displacement, 2018). Refugees, migrants and asylum seekers are at the forefront of international politics as populations defined by 'crisis', while the UN and humanitarian agencies attempt to bridge gaps in national policies on aid and resettlement. Visual and craft artists have played an historically important yet lesser-studied role in UN and humanitarian welfare programmes, in art therapy, and in communicating human rights. However, refugees and migrants can also be represented as nameless human flows and passive recipients of aid, which may strain both refugee and host communities. Significantly, the art industry and art galleries encounter parallel problems in aestheticizing the experience of people affected by war and displacement. While art asserts a powerful role in challenging hostile representations of refugees and migrants, in reality opportunities for refugee artists and curators in mainstream gallery culture, and opportunities for interpersonal dialogue and intercultural exchange with host communities remain limited. Understanding Displacement Aesthetics proposes a timely reappraisal of this field of vision by historicising the humanitarian aspirations of art and craft, and analysing the impact of artistic responses to displacement and refugees. It investigates how 'displacement aesthetics' emerged after 1945 in both the practice and exhibition of art and craft, UN-sponsored welfare programmes in Europe and Palestine, and international art museums. The research seeks to understand the relationship between the uses and practice of art, the influence of and resistance to cultural stereotypes, art's interplay with humanitarian sentiment and action, and the political categorisation of refugees and migrants. Seeking to understand and utilise this history, the project identifies how displacement aesthetics continues to operate in the current refugee crisis in the international art world and in grass-roots artistic initiatives in Greece, Palestine, Australia and the UK. Crucially, this project seeks to move beyond a focus on tropes, by amplifying how art practices can enhance the potential and resilience of refugee communities. The ambition of the project is, therefore, to transform displacement aesthetics by bringing together academics, artists, curators from migrant and refugee backgrounds together with the internationally renowned arts NGO In Place of War, and two leading art galleries in the UK, Manchester Art Gallery (MAG) and the Whitworth Art Gallery (WAG). The research addresses the ambitions of creative artists and curators, who, as migrants and refugees, face particular career barriers, and yet can be obliged to focus their practice on their outsider identity. A programme of inclusive, co-designed art projects will facilitate art-making, participatory exhibitions, and create a community 'welcome space' as a permanent infrastructural change in Manchester Art Gallery. These projects will generate research data to evaluate how effectively art museums can support refugee/migrant artists and communities and build solidarity across communities. The project is led by a team of experienced scholars in the cultural history of war and displacement (PI), art history and contemporary art (CI), cultural theory and resilience studies (RF), and participatory art methods (team). Distinctively, these senior academics are also experienced curators, and the CI is also a practising artist, who will co-design the impact projects in partnership with MAG, WAG and the NGO In Place of War in collaboration with local participants in Manchester. This is an exceptional opportunity to catalyse the history of displacement aesthetics and make sustainable changes that benefit local communities, while advancing approaches to collecting, curating and representing art.

Exhibitions of fashion in museums are increasingly prevalent. They are enjoyed by visitors because they present familiar, visually appealing objects that reveal intriguing stories about personal identities and social histories, design and manufacture. They are popular with museums because they increase public profile and generate new visitors and income. Over 200 institutions in the UK hold fashion and textiles items. The majority are small and mid-sized regional museums like the partners on this project: the Beecroft Art Gallery holds the UK's leading collection of swimwear which comprises over 500 items from 1899 to the present; Manchester Art Gallery's collection encompasses a group of outstanding mid-20th century couture featuring work by Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Dior, Cardin and McQueen; Bankfield Museum, Halifax contains exceptional local womenswear from the 19th century. The UK's important fashion collections are increasingly on limited or inadequate display (or not visible at all) due to funding cuts to the museum sector and reductions in specialist curators. Fashion objects also present specific display challenges because of their fragility and the need to provide a replacement for the human body. Blockbuster fashion exhibitions hosted by major museums do not provide viable professional models for less well-resourced institutions without specialist fashion curators. The potential of fashion collections in many small and mid-sized regional museums remains untapped. This research will produce an 'exhibiting fashion toolkit' that will enhance the skill sets of non-specialist curators in small and mid-sized museums and equip them to produce resource effective, engaging and innovative displays. The toolkit will be created through observation and analysis of the development of three fashion exhibitions that respond to the collections, spaces and resources at each partner's venue. The toolkit will be available free, online, as a series of short films covering aspects of exhibiting fashion, illustrated by the exhibitions staged at partners' venues. It will offer visual and spatial-based strategies, such as inventive mannequin solutions and advice for the effective staging of objects, alongside practical solutions (including online options) for exhibiting fashion. Research will be led by the PI from an exhibition-maker's perspective, a specialist approach that focusses on visually and spatially led exhibition development. The project will interrogate and expand the PI's original museological concepts of 'threshold' (transition into the exhibition space); 'landscape' (space inhabited by object and viewer); 'object' (exhibition content); 'the body' (physical and non-physical human forms). Research activities will employ methods from conventional curatorial and experimental exhibition-making practices with an emphasis on visual and spatial strategies. The research will be supported by the Co-I using observational methods, including experimental documentary film-making, to capture live the interactions between the PI and curators as they develop the exhibitions. This builds on the Co-I's previous experience in practice-as-research co-produced with museums and archives. Insight gained through this research will identify the particular qualities of curatorial and exhibition-making approaches and will inform the development of the toolkit. The Co-I will also assist in assessing the impact of research on participants and audiences. Should COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing measures be re-introduced during the project time frame we will develop each exhibition as an interactive audience experience through online outputs. Project Instagram and exhibition visitor guides will give public access to the research. A symposium, conference papers, articles in journals and museum publications will target the relevant professional and academic audiences to maximise impact of the research.

There are many claims for the benefits to both the individual and society from access to and participation in cultural activities, such as visiting exhibitions and museums. Today these range from improvements in personal wellbeing to increased community cohesion and socio-economic regeneration. These claims relating to cultural value are not new, and contemporary justifications for cultural provision contain echoes of 19th century notions of self-improvement through 'rational recreation' and the 'refining' effects of access to art. However, both then and now, what people actually encountered in the exhibition or museum did (and does) not necessarily conform to these ideals. Instead there is much historical and contemporary evidence to show that people construct their own experiences of cultural value - for example, through their personal motivations for, and social contexts of, exhibition-visiting. The objective of this project is to show how an understanding of how cultural value was conceived, promoted and experienced in the past can illuminate how it is conceived, promoted and experienced today. Many cultural organisations such as museums and galleries have rich and well-documented histories, dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries, but their relationship with these histories is often complex. On the one hand, there is a sense of pride in the institution's founding ideals; on the other hand, there is a drive to innovate and to deliver continuous improvement in response to shifting external policy and funding agendas. As as result, the motivation and resource for disinterested historical research and reflection are not high priorities for institutions. This project aims to address this omission by demonstrating the pertinence of historical perspectives on cultural value - from the perspectives of institutions and audiences - to contemporary policy and practice. Specifically, the project focuses on the claims made for the benefits of visiting exhibitions and museums in the city of Manchester and the evidence of visitors' actual experiences, from the mid-19th century to 2010. A group of historical case studies, each based on specific periods of innovation or change in terms of cultural provision, provides a basis for analyzing continuities, shifts and ruptures in the 'public good' rationale for promoting museums and exhibitions. Each case study also compares the objectives of the organizers and patrons/funders with evidence of how the displays were encountered and interpreted by their visiting publics. The sites of study encompass a range of scientific and art exhibitions: the Manchester Mechanics Institute, Manchester Art Gallery, the Manchester Museum, and the Whitworth Art Gallery. In terms of the research methodology, there are complex issues relating the survival and evidentiary status of historical sources and their interpretation, particularly in relation to how 'culture' was experienced and understood by audiences in the past. Surviving sources are partial, fragmentary and often suggestive rather than definitive. Therefore an important further project objective is to interrogate and reflect on the methodological issues arising from this kind of study, and thus provide a reflexive resource for future researchers, postgraduate students and cultural organisations.

The research for this Fellowship will form a major part of the first systematic study of the relationship between Pre-Raphaelite art in all its forms and science. The Pre-Raphaelites were the most original, experimental and influential of Victorian art movements, and they remain the most popular. The last year alone has seen major exhibitions of the Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, photography, drawing and design. It may seem counter-intuitive to link the Pre-Raphaelites, famous for their medievalism, to science, but they were the only Victorian artists to make this link repeatedly in their own manifestos, from essays in their early periodical 'The Germ' (1850) to Holman Hunt's retrospective account of the movement 'Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood' (1905). In such writings they argued that art should draw on and even emulate the sciences. Many critics have seen this as a marker of the Pre-Raphaelites' claim to being a modern art movement, but few have taken it seriously as a guide to how we might read their art itself. I will be exploring in detail the different positions the Pre-Raphaelites took on the relationship between art and science, to see how far the claims they make for how art should respond to science are borne out in their painting, design, sculpture and poetry. During the Fellowship itself I will be working on four key topics. Firstly, I will be working closely with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum in South Kensington to see how the Pre-Raphaelites influenced the buildings in which the Victorians put their scientific view of the natural world on display. Through the patronage of John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites were directly involved in the design and decoration of the Oxford University Museum. I will be tracing this involvement in detail, to see how they helped to shape the building, both in practice and through their ideals. I will be looking too at how the Natural History Museum was shaped by Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, particularly in the decorations that Richard Owen commissioned and Alfred Waterhouse designed for the inside and outside of the building. A close study of these two buildings will show how the spaces which we still use today to present our own scientific understanding of nature were shaped by Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic principles. Secondly, I will be conducting an experiment in art criticism to see whether a fuller knowledge of what the Pre-Raphaelites said about science changes how we look at their paintings themselves. I'll be studying Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings in the major collections around the UK, including the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Walker Art Gallery and the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. I'll be working particularly closely with the Manchester Art Gallery and the Manchester Museum to devise ways of involving the general public and scientists themselves in this experiment, based on the existing models of their respective Pre-Raphaelite Experiment and Living Worlds exhibits. Thirdly, I will be studying the papers of the Anthropological Society in the Royal Anthropological Institute to see how they bear on the poetry of A. C. Swinburne. Swinburne was a member of the Anthropological Society, at which scientific questions over evolution, race, sex, and the relationship of savagery to civilization were hotly debated between its foundation in 1863 and its merger with the Ethnological Society in 1871. This will be the first thorough study of how these debates are reflected in his poetry from the same period. Fourthly, I will be reading systematically through the 'Fortnightly Review' from 1867 to 1873, to put the many Pre-Raphaelite poems published in this periodical in these years back into the context of its well-known commitment to positivism and scientific materialism.

Over 20 years ago, Stuart Hall posed the question, 'Whose heritage?' (Hall, 1999). Hall's call for the critical transformation and reimagining of heritage and nation, for 'un-settling "The Heritage" and re-imagining the post-nation', remains as urgent as ever. In the context of the ongoing disparate impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global re-ignition of the Black Lives Matter movement, 'a national collection' cannot be imagined without addressing the structural inequalities in the arts, debates around 'contested heritage', and the difficult and contentious histories imbued in objects. Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage aims to build on decolonial feminist approaches and creative machine learning (ML) development: to enable digital cross-search of collections, to surface patterns of bias, to uncover hidden and unexpected connections, and to thus open up new interpretative frames and potential narratives of art, nation and heritage. Transforming Collections seeks to address the following questions: - How can we counter structural biases and decentre white Western narratives in our cultural collections? (Wekker, 2016; Olusoga, 2016) - How can we surface suppressed histories, amplify marginalized voices, and reevaluate artists and artworks ignored or sidelined by dominant narratives? - How can we transform the architectures and 'algorithms of oppression' (Noble, 2018) that underpin collections and reproduce inequalities and erasures? - How can we imagine a distributed yet connected 'national collection' that builds on and enriches existing knowledge, with multiple and multivocal new narratives? - How can we reimagine art, nation and heritage through collections as part of the wider 'digital cultural record' (Risam, 2019)? Transforming Collections is an interdisciplinary collaborative project led by University of the Arts London (UAL) with Tate, home to the national collection of British art from the 16th century and an international modern and contemporary art collection. The project will be led by a core team from UAL's Decolonising Arts Institute and Creative Computing Institute, working closely with Tate as an Independent Research Organisation (IRO). In addition to Tate, Transforming Collections has nine project partners and four collaborating organisations across the UK, representing significant public collections as well as major arts charities and key archives of different scales. These are: Arts Council Collection, British Council Collection, Birmingham Museums Trust, Glasgow Museums, Liverpool Museums Trust, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Wellcome Collection, Art Fund, Contemporary Art Society, Art UK, the JISC Archives Hub and Iniva (Institute of International Visual Art). We also have an international project partner in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, who will host a major project conference in year one. The project adopts a braided approach enfolding 1) Critical art historical and museological research with 2) Creative machine learning development and participatory design and 3) Artists digital commissions as interventions into collections. Building on the insights and emerging findings of the Tate-led TANC Foundation project, Provisional Semantics (2020-22), and the UAL-led projects, AHRC Black Artists and Modernism (2015-18) and UKRI MIMIC project (Musically Intelligent Machines Interacting Creatively, 2018-21), Transforming Collections approaches the challenge of 'dissolving barriers' as a problem of knowledge and power - not only a question of what becomes visible, legible, accessible, but also how, and for whom. As such, Transforming Collections aims to model and test new and sustainable ways of searching across collections; to expose in-built inequities in collections data; to reconnect, recontextualise and reinterpret the work of 'artists of colour'; and empower diverse stakeholders in discovering the sometimes uncomfortable stories that collections.