In partnership, Imperial War Museum (IWM) and University for the Creative Arts (UCA) are offering a Collaborative Doctoral Award for a PhD candidate to be embedded in IWM's Participation Department. There they will develop research into audience social impact within the museum, nourishing and deriving new thinking from a live project involving visitors (actual and virtual) to examine in detail the impact of a ground-breaking new season - The Unmaking of the British Empire, planned for 2025. Through an exhibition, public programme and associated events, the season will explore the period of the end of the Second World War to gaining of independence by several of Britain's former imperial territories. The PhD will be a practice-based opportunity to examine the role of community engagement in a participatory co-design process and what different forms of social impact result. The candidate will work cross-departmentally, understanding audience participation through how IWM's Participation Department's programming intersects with Exhibitions, Curatorial, Design, Customer Services, Volunteering, Visitor Experiences, and Audience Insight. During the PhD the candidate will observe at close quarters how the co-design model is devised and implemented; assess how it is realised in the exhibition, public programming, events, and web-outputs; and help design the audience impact research (including participatory forums). The project questions what shared Imperial history means and aims to surpass an understanding of recent contested history. The supervisory team believe coloniality has not ended but is ongoing, and therefore decolonial challenges faced by museums are also enduring. This project will develop understanding about audience participation in decolonising museums as a practice and gain new understandings of contested history, which significantly contributes to the work of decolonisation now and in the future. To support this, the supervisory team will draw on combined teaching and research practices that foreground inclusive design and programming. The exhibition and public programming will be co-designed with community groups who will inform the creation of the season through a full engagement with the history and relevant collections. The project will also move beyond co-design towards the development of a toolkit for sustainable co-creative processes of programming, engagement, and governance, which would be a useful and scalable community-led document for use across the GLAM sector. The toolkit would facilitate inviting public and community groups to engage and co design with the museum and offer opportunities for effective community ownership and leadership. Within the supervisory team a critical activist research approach exists in the areas of contemporary design history, creative pedagogy, and knowledge making. This offers a robust investigative framework for the PhD candidate in this process to empower communities in moving beyond co-design and towards community leadership.

This project originally proposed 12 essays examining how textiles as thread, fabric, garment or artefact could mobilise, mimic and masquerade sex. Sex was configured in this context as both a series of practices and a range of anatomical expressions. In fact, shortly after the project began, Berg Publishers - who published my first book, 'Intersex', in 2007 - commissioned a book based on this research, and the essays have become 12 chapters for a forthcoming book titled 'Fabrics of Desire' to be published by Berg, Oxford, in 2009. During the project's development, a number of texts have been published or accepted for publication. Most notable are a chapter for the University of Technology, Sydney's forth coming book titled 'Fashion in Fiction', and a 6000 word essay titled 'I found myself inside her fur' for a special 'Skin' issue of the international, peer-reviewed Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture, guest-edited by Caryn Simonson of Chelsea College of Art and Design. This project has afforded me the possibility of formally aligning my range of research engagements as writer and textile practitioner and of making a significant, informed and original contribution to a field not yet fully explored. The opportunity to publish this as a singular output, which is in book form, rather than in a disparate form, is especially important, and the book's format (80,000 words in 12 chapters) has allowed me to work with the relationships between individual chapters and the authorial voice used in each. The project sought to examine distinct areas within which textiles and sex relate (for example, through 'gendered' garments; symbolic costume; meaningful fabrication; fetish restraint; body moderation; bed-linen; textile signification; seductive materiality; or anatomical mimicry). Each of the personally selected fields of enquiry have been examined using a Delusion methodology based on 'lateral proliferation' of text, and through scrutiny and interpretation of exhibited and archived visual / textile art and design practice; textile artefacts; textiles in literature and film; etc. Each text has been constructed idiosyncratically in relation to its own 'voice' based on content and structure. This is in keeping with my interest in creative / critical / performative / academic / reflective writing. Dissemination has been via publication through national and international refereed journals within textile and visual culture, and through conference presentations and public lectures in Ireland, UK, Australia and the USA. Notably, the book commission (Berg) that has been secured based on this research, and consequently some of the research activity undertaken through AHRC support, will be publicly disseminated in that form in 2009. This proposal was carefully defined in relation to both personal and external contexts and personal research aspirations. It has enabled me to maximise the potential of previous research outputs in textile practice and text in an innovative and substantial project, and has permitted on going contribution to my subject discipline of textile culture and practice. Significantly, it has sharpened the specific focus of my research, and the project management experience gained has matured my approach to personal research management, articulation of research aims, and my understanding of what is achievable within particular time frames. During the project I made a very significant career change from Reader in Textiles in one institution to Head of the School of Architecture and Design at University of Brighton. This inevitably impacted on my rate of production within the project, and I have most importantly discovered a new mode of operation through the use of Research Assistants supported through this funding. This has provided a new method for my research and ensures that I can remain research active even within this new and demanding role, albeit with a somewhat shifted pace of production.

The project will support an ambitious series of seminars, to be held in across the U.K. for curators, academics and practitioners. Participants will discuss the role of museums, galleries and HEI's in developing a framework for identifying needs and determining strategies for bringing different agencies together and take place against the background of ongoing discourse within craft and design concerning context and language. The model will build upon the experience of four major international textile exhibitions and will be one exemplified through textiles but will be transferable to other domains.\n\nThe aim of these seminars is to inform and engage related sectors and facilities a dialogue that currently does not exist. The seminars will seek to develop collaborative strategies between HEI's, museums and practitioners, which enable the presentation or prioritisation of contemporary textile exhibitions, thus broadening audiences and creating the foundation for further research. Positive case studies, regional exemplars, objective discussion of barriers, constraints and ways forward will form the foundation for debate. The seminars will seek to identify new areas and types of collaborations, both general and particular, and new strategies for future research.\n\nSpeakers for the seminars and specially invited audience members will be drawn from major museum and galleries, HEI's and textile practitioners with appropriate experience. Yuko Ikeda, Curator, National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto, Japan may be invited to provide a comparative international case study.\n\nThe University College for the Creative Arts, the originating organisation, is a specialist Art and Design institution committed to the advancement arts and crafts, and home to the Crafts Study Centre. The seminars will be held in collaboration with Manchester City Art Galleries (working towards International Centre of Textiles Excellence, linking museums, university) and the Vic toria and Albert Museum (key national textile collectioins).\n\nSeminars will be recorded and transcribed. The outcomes will be brought together as a Paper that will be presented to the final seminar, published on the University website and the V&A website. The intention is that the seminars will provide a continuing forum for identifying areas of collaboration for research outcomes. The process itself is one of dissemination - of ideas, information, concerns. Whilst having a clear goal in terms of initiating debate and presenting conclusions, there is also the aim that, in having an open, fluid process, the debate will influence and impact on the work and thinking of all involved, and possibly create tangential areas of research.

An investigation, with a visual outcome, into the role of the photographer of seminal live art events from the 1960s to the present. Through consultation with live art photographers, modes of representation (which clarify the photographers' process and experience, drawing from their photographic archives) will be determined in order to produce work for exhibition which illuminates both on the stylistic attributes of particular iconic performance photographs and the photographers' experience of recording seminal performances.

The 'worlds' animation presents us with often bear little relation to our own, except through spatial cues, anthropomorphism and an array of aesthetic references to fine arts and other creative practice. The project on animation spectatorship explores and describes strategies viewers develop to comprehend and understand the fine-arts based and digital animated 'Worlds'. Film Studies debates of the 'active' spectator, phenomenology and cognitive theory are augmented by interdisciplinary excursions into art and architecture, metaphysical philosophy, literature and critical theory. The project develops theoretical approaches and a critical language sensitive to the multimedia complexities of the animated form.