This practice-led Radical Spiritual Collective (RSC) research project is situated in and aims to expand curatorial practice as collective knowledge production, and explore and activate a concept and practice of spiritual activism. Comprising diasporic feminist practices in the UK, the RSC seeks to configure and embody a critical and collaborative process of study, knowledge creation and exchange of ancestral belief systems and their artistic feminist recuperation, while developing and enacting public interventions that precipitate a co-liberatory reimagining of public space. The RSC will unfold as a process of collective study and exchange workshops online and in person to engage with Liverpool in the North West region in the UK. The RSC will co-develop a set of performative spiritual interventions in Liverpool - one of the oldest Chinese settlements in the UK/Europe and a convergent site of historically significant and ongoing narratives of industrialisation and globalisation, maritime histories of trade and exchange, migration and displacement, trauma linked to dislocation and oppression of marginalised communities, as well as embedded older myths and legends that map the region as always having been diasporic, liminal and pre/extra-nation (Burman 2006; Mignolo 2018) In particular building on the individual members' existing research and work in the region, RSC will engage with Liverpool as an migratory port(al), and the nearby nature reserve, Collier's Moss, that suffered extensive ecological damage by the waste of the Bold Colliery and Power Station, that is slowly being regenerated by introducing 'foreign plants'. RSC will activate public interventions that would be documented as moving image, photography, audio recordings, drawing and mapping, that accumulate towards an open online archive of artistic and activist spiritual practice, and builds towards a public programme at FACT Liverpool of seminars, workshops and performances.

This PhD will focus on experiences of London Transport staff and passengers during the 1970s and 80s which saw growing LGBTQ+ visibility and increasing workplace protection of minorities through legislation. The project will reflect on how London Transport managed such issues, including examining intersectionalities within LGBTQ+ groups. Passenger experiences will enhance understanding of how LGBTQ+ people used public transport, whether as an amenity, a site of potential encounters, or something to be negotiated with anxiety. The project will explore contemporary collecting practice as a research method for uncovering neglected histories, and the ethical and practical implications for museum collecting policies.

This PhD will be the first to research the relationship between the home darkroom and LGBTQ+ people's quest for freedom of expression and visual representation in Britain from the 1950s to the present. Using practice-based methods, the student will then also develop new museological approaches to share these largely hidden stories of creativity and agency in the home. Despite the expansion of commercial processing labs from the 1950s, rigging up a darkroom in the home thrived as a hobby because it offered creative control over and a cheaper way of producing photographs. Following the rise of digital photography and the almost entire closure of commercial labs from the 2000s, the home darkroom has supported a resurgence of interest in film photography. For LGBTQ+ people, however, developing and printing at home also allowed visual records to be created privately. This has historically been crucial because of the risk of embarrassment (or worse) if certain images were sent to commercial processors, which persisted even after partial decriminalisation in 1967. And yet, while the role played by Polaroids (which similarly removed the need for commercial labs) in LGBTQ+ people's lives is well known, their experiences of the home darkroom is largely unexplored. The project will combine the archival study of LGBTQ+ photographic practices at home with two complementary collecting projects: oral history interviews with LGBTQ+ darkroom users and photographs of and produced in home darkrooms. By working with contemporary practitioners, the student will rethink how to share such hidden stories with museum audiences.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Major cities throughout the Arab world have been undergoing a plethora of unprecedented social transformations in the last century. These transformations have often been drowned out by the constant stream of sensationalist political headlines flooding newspapers and screens outside of the region which have captured the attention, as well as attracted the scrutiny, of Western academia. Although the transformations of Arab countries and cities have been pinned (and, at times, reduced) to key political events, such as the series of uprisings known as the Arab Spring, these ran alongside and were locked in an interdependent relationship with significant social and cultural metamorphoses that are just as key to understanding and analysing change in the region. Rather than in headlines, these social transformations have been meticulously documented and commented on in literature such as novels produced by Arab writers from within the Arab world, and from within these cities-in transformation themselves.