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The two-year ROTOЯ programme of exhibitions and events has been a cornerstone of the University of Huddersfield's efforts to introduce new audiences to contemporary art and design, as encouraged by successive Arts Council policies for enhancing public engagement. As well as raising awareness, inspiring curiosity and providing cultural enrichment, it has initiated changes to local authority policies on providing cost-effective, high-quality cultural services and has functioned as a vehicle for research into how the impact of such programmes can be captured. As such, it has served as a model partnership for local authority and university sectors in offering cultural leadership, generating and measuring engagement and delivering public services.
Researchers at the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) study the practice and products of photography in terms of both artistic importance and social relevance, recognising photography's many roles including its presence in: the art world; reportage; autobiographical practice; and in social and political education. This case study demonstrates PARC's impact on cultural life via the production of work and curatorial practice, bringing new insights, challenging assumptions, and raising awareness of the role of photographic practice in the public realm.
The Centre for Worktown Studies was established by the University with Bolton Museum in 2009 to promote research inspired by the Museum's Humphrey Spender `Worktown' documentary photographs produced for Mass Observation between 1937 and 1939. It has presented five leisure history conferences with post-conference reviewed publications, obtained AHRC funding for a doctoral community arts project, delivered two oral history projects in Bolton, offered four `Humphrey Spender Scholarships, contributed to a Mass Observation 75th anniversary exhibition and established a collaborative partnership with the Mass Observation Archive. It has had a significant impact on public cultural life in Bolton and beyond.
The Research Unit for Research Utilisation (RURU) has had wide-ranging impact on the ways in which policymakers, research funders, intermediary bodies and practitioners think about research use, the strategies they employ to enhance research influence, and their assessment of research impact. RURU has helped to transform thinking from ideas of one-way `knowledge transfer' towards more situated and interactive models, which are about influencing organisational as well as individual behaviour. The reach of the impact has been international (e.g. Australia, Canada, the USA and Scandinavia, as well as the UK), and cross-sectoral (encompassing the criminal justice, education, healthcare and social care sectors). The overarching contribution has been towards more effective research policy, better public policy making and improved public service delivery.
University of Glasgow researchers have played a pivotal role in enhancing awareness and understanding of cosmology, relativity and gravitational-wave astronomy on the national and international stage.
The impact that will be described within the case study focuses on how the research — which centered upon the multifarious applications, conceptualisations and roles drawing has today within various professions and disciplines - was beneficial to a group of educators with respect to their planning and implementation of an art and design based curriculum. To this end the case study will detail how the research undertaken around drawing by Staff and Cureton directly affected how both drawing was conceived by these teachers and how this informed the development of their curricula.
Research into the artist Dora Gordine established her importance in twentieth-century art and design, and her significance in the wider cultural and political arena. This research led to the establishment of an ambitious large-scale exhibition on Gordine at Kingston Museum.
This exhibition had a lasting beneficial impact on the practices and capabilities of the museum, enabling it to use the skills and experience gained in the Gordine exhibition to launch a new exhibition on Eadweard Muybridge and to build new partnerships with the British Film Institute and the Tate. This has significantly changed the culture and approach of Kingston Museum, enhancing its local, national and international standing.
This case study reclaims neglected writers and texts, enabling user engagement with British literary heritage through the commemoration, interpretation and presentation of authors' lives and forgotten or rare fiction. It expands cultural capital and enhances the imaginations and understanding of individuals and groups by raising awareness of the lives and literature of non-canonical Victorian and Edwardian writers. Using previously unexamined archival and privately-held source material it challenges previous assumptions about, for instance, disability and invalidism in relation to Victorian women writers. Through cultivating interest in, and enabling public knowledge of, such authors and their work it creates cultural and educational enrichment.
Our research has harnessed the power of photography to expand the cultural imagination, creating new works and interpretive practices that enrich, illuminate and challenge perceptions of society and the world in which we live. Through exhibition, publication, and public and community engagement, our research has: 1) created cultural legacies for major public (Millennium Dome, Treasury) and commercial (Airbus) projects; 2) provided enhanced cultural experiences to multiple audiences and specific communities in the UK and Europe, provoking reflection on ideas of place and identity, and contributing to processes of cultural memory and reconciliation (Association of Jewish Refugees, Healing Through Remembering) and; 3) expanded photography within the cultural economy, working in partnership (Photoworks, Multistory) to build and sustain audiences for photography within and beyond the region.