Log in
Rosengarten's work during the past fourteen years has provided the HIV field with new ways of rethinking otherwise seemingly intractable problems of more effective prevention. Despite over 30 years of biomedical and social research, and policy and programme implementation, the HIV epidemic continues to grow. The efficacies of repurposing potentially toxic and partially effective antiretroviral drugs for prevention in those perceived at risk of infection has thus come under scrutiny. It is in this context that Rosengarten's work has intervened and introduced an alternative approach to prevention that directly scrutinises the social contexts in which people live and work with HIV. Through this approach and her active engagement with clinicians, policy makers, scientists and advocacy groups she has contributed critical insights that have been incorporated into approaches to HIV prevention in practice.
Emma Tarlo's research on modest dress and Islamic fashion plays a substantial role in combatting social prejudice and promoting understanding of religious minority groups in Britain and Europe. Addressing issues of the rights to religious expression and the need for socially inclusive design, it has attracted widespread coverage in British and international media, including religious and ethnic minority and fashion media, stimulating public debate on-line and off. Professor Tarlo has engaged with diverse publics in the context of museums, Islamic societies, inter-faith events, schools conferences, and through interviews on radio and film. Her research has been taken up in new educational curricula and by artists and designers seeking to combat social prejudice through design.
Professor Okagbue's research into modern African theatre, diasporic performance and post- colonial possibility has had impact in African and British communities and in the world of theatre. Founder and first President of the African Theatre Association (AfTA) 2006-2012, Okagbue has built networks between African and UK practitioners and local Black communities through projects, including the Sameboat anti-slavery memorial project 2007-9 and the AHRC-funded research project Beyond Linear Narratives at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths, for which he was co-investigator. An important impact of this work has been the success of new diasporic writing and performance, including playwrights directly mentored by Okagbue.
Irit Rogoff has shaped the emergence of an `educational turn' in the arts and humanities, arguing that contemporary artwork, together with its institutions and social platforms, transforms education practices in non-academic arenas such as museums, theatres, bookshops, art academies, and social and political occupations. This work started at the moment in which both the Bologna accord and neo-liberal impacts on education began pulling towards the professionalisation and homogenisation of Higher Education culture. All of the projects elaborated within this case study have aimed to expand the understanding of how cultural actors become educational stakeholders.
Rogoff's theoretical and curatorial research has taken diverse forms including scholarly publications, exhibitions and social forums, and she has brought these issues to audiences from the arts and public organisations beyond the university sector through advisory roles, public speaking, and social organising. Following numerous publications, exhibitions, and events, she founded freethought, an experimental platform for pedagogy, research and production. Launched in 2012 at the Austrian arts festival, Steirischer Herbst, freethought has subsequently developed a core project on `infrastructure' launched at Berlin's House of World Cultures in 2013. Her published research, exhibitions, and public forums have been widely influential in debates on education in the public sphere, as evidenced for example by her involvement as a funded partner in the establishment of a freethought laboratory in South Korea's new Asia Cultural Complex.
Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths since 1998, is an expert on urban fashion start-ups. Her research chimes with government interest in self-employment among `young creatives'. It has shaped policy and thinking at the DCMS and London Fashion Week, and the Centre for Fashion Enterprise in East London. She has played a direct role in the development of start-ups in Germany, Austria and Italy across the full range of creative industries. Many of her now classic articles are key references in policy debate, and her original work has `handbook status' for young independent fashion designers. She has shaped thinking on newcomers and start-ups in the context of high youth unemployment across Europe, on the rise of 'new fashion cities' and on urban cultural policies including Fashion Weeks.
Franklin is a key participant in a formative period for global media and communications, in which power struggles over ownership and control of the internet are intensifying. Her work presaged the current global outcry over illegal forms of state-sponsored online surveillance and non-transparent forms of corporate storage and control of personal data. She combines participatory action research and critical theory with a leadership role in advocacy on human rights for the online environment. Focusing on UN and intergovernmental arenas in internet governance, her research unpacks how public, private, and civil society actors look to frame the terms of debate around diverging priorities for the internet's future design, access, and use. Her work has put human rights and principles advocacy for the internet onto the international human rights and internet governance agendas. It has played a formative role in increasing recognition — at the UN and European Union for instance — that online we have rights too.
This study describes some of the impact that has come out of our long-running research on content-based multi-media algorithms. We enumerate three particular routes to impact: Adding value to large archives of multimedia, giving a voice to disabled musicians, commercialising the research through games and media companies.
Nirmal Puwar's project, Noise of the Past, has sought to transform the public imagination of war by bringing post-colonial stories into the UK's national memory of World War II. At the same time it has worked to re-imagine the research process and its relation to publics. It has shown how the `noise' of the past, derived from narratives and situations that are usually excluded, can move cultural memory beyond a nationalistic, militaristic consensus. The research produced an award winning film, `Unravelling,' and a live musical performance, `Post-colonial War Requiem'. They were launched in 2008 at a large public event in Coventry Cathedral, opened by Martin Bell (OBE, UNICEF ambassador). On 14 November 2010, Noise of the Past was invited back to Coventry Cathedral to mark the 70th anniversary of the Blitz. The highly affective moving film (20 min) has won international awards and been screened at festivals, museums and public events and is submitted for viewing along with this ICS. Significantly the call-and-response methodology initiated by the project engaged artists and creative practitioners in music, poetry and film as active collaborators in the research process and also engaged publics not simply as audiences but as dialogic participants.
In research that challenges the dichotomy of music/ noise, Drever has investigated the properties and subjective effects of the high volumes produced by ultrafast hand dryers, finding that it is highly aversive for vulnerable groups including people with dementia, sensory impairments, and autistic spectrum disorders, in some cases exacerbating their social avoidance. These effects have been communicated to the public, industry professionals, and policymakers through a combination of creative art works and presentations of the research findings in varied public settings. They have been widely reported in the international media, via both general interest and specialist publications and programmes. He has worked closely with the UK's Noise Abatement Society and with industrial designers, who have welcomed his input to helping them improve hand dryer design.
The switch of the nation's televisions to receive digital signals is widely acknowledged as the biggest government-enforced change in British life since 1971's decimalisation. Jonathan Freeman's research on the human factors of digital switchover is recognised as an essential source of information to government, industry, and consumer groups (including charities such as RNIB) and therefore as a key foundation in the success of the switchover. In particular, his research influenced the design of easy-to-use TV equipment, and communications about switchover to different types of viewer, improving the experiences of millions of TV viewers in the UK and beyond.