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This case study describes the impact of Grobler's practice-as-research conducted through development of illustrations for a book targeted at an international children's readership of 5 to 11 year olds. Providing `an African retelling' of Aesop's fables and intended to stimulate children's playful engagement with African cultures, the book's and Grobler's illustrations' overt agenda was to promote and promulgate intercultural understanding and multiculturalism. Impact has been achieved through initial publication and international distribution of Aesop's Fables in English and subsequent republication in a further nine editions and six languages in the period. Additional impact was derived from Grobler's invited presentation and discussion of his approach to developing his illustrations in the context of international exhibitions and professional fora in Europe.
Attwell and Attridge's paradigm-shifting research on the culturally and linguistically diverse literary history of South Africa has had a significant influence on the country's reassessment of its cultural past, present and future. In a national situation in which literature has always been embedded in political life, apartheid divisions left different racial and linguistic groups out of touch with each other's literary heritage. Attridge and Attwell undertook to bridge these differences by producing the first comprehensive history of literature across all languages and in all periods, widely seen as a major step forward in national cross-cultural awareness. The key beneficiaries are a range of political, cultural, media and educational institutions, and the people served by them, in South Africa and across the world.
This project has had significant reach beyond the academy, through two main avenues. Through sustained relationships with NGOs, faith-based organisations and other members of civil society involved in the management of death in South Africa, the project has aided in the professional development of African staff, and shaped training and facilitation on responses to death, grief and loss. And, through public engagement with its research on the funeral industry — including very broad dissemination of the documentary film `The Price of Death'— the project has engaged local South African audiences in debates around the cost of death and the commodification of funerals.
An exhibition researched and co-curated by the University of Reading's Alun Rowlands — The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art — at Tate St Ives presented an accessible new approach to the display of the Cornish gallery's artworks. It widened public access to this important resource and enabled public understanding and appreciation of 20th-century British art by juxtaposing, and drawing connections between, famous historical artworks, contemporary pieces and examples from popular culture, literature, film, music and local folk ritual. This democratic approach was extended through the associated educational projects, performance events and publications. The model has subsequently influenced strategy at Tate museums across the UK, demonstrating that connections can be drawn across different categories of culture as a way of emphasising the contemporary relevance of previously underused and obscure public collections and as a way of promoting public interaction.
The first major international touring exhibition on the region, Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, attracted up to a third of a million visitors between opening at UCLA's Fowler Museum in February 2011 and closing at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, in January 2013, with intervening shows at Stanford University's Cantor Center and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. The exhibition, its 600-page catalogue, and extensive education and outreach programmes, substantially based on Professor Richard Fardon's research insights, were widely reviewed as a revelatory experience providing the public with a first comprehensive overview of the hitherto poorly understood arts of central Nigeria.
Heather Hughes' 2011 publication of the first full-length biography of John Dube, founding president of the ANC, has had a significant impact on local and national government, public history, national media and public debate in South Africa. This work has changed public attitudes towards Dube as a political leader, and towards the role of women in early twentieth-century African nationalism. This revision of ANC history has been built into permanent exhibitions at several sites within the country. The book's use in a government green paper on land reform also reveals the depth of her work's political impact.
The research impacts on public discourse, professional practice and cultural life. It raises public awareness and professional understanding of how contemporary development is being viewed in Africa. Analysing the work of creative artists from several countries in sub-Saharan Francophone Africa, the research has revealed that, far from presenting development as positive change, artists are depicting economic development in the region as a form of enslavement. For over a decade they have been creating a visual vocabulary to speak about `development' around the most iconic and disturbing images of the Atlantic slave trade. In public events delivered in English, French and Spanish, supported by digital resources, the author is disseminating this view from the continent to a broader audience across the world.
The study describes how the Unit's research underpinned a national exhibition that made an active contribution to the debate about immigration and integration — issues that dominate social, media and political discourses in France. The exhibition helped to confront the clichés, assumptions and tensions characterising the national debate on the place of North African immigrants in French society. The Unit's Dr Rabah Aissaoui was closely involved in defining the structure and content of a national exhibition entitled Generations: A Century of Maghrebi Cultural History in France, staged in Lyon, Paris and Caen between 2009 and 2011. The exhibition was the first of its kind to be staged in the country and brought the richness and variety of the cultural contribution made by North African immigrants to national attention. It was cited as a prime example of good practice in the fight against racism and prejudice in the Annual Report Fight against Racism, Antisemitism and Xenophobia presented to the French Prime Minister by the National Consultative Commission of Human Rights in 2010.
The Africa in Motion Film Festival (AiM), based in Glasgow and Edinburgh, directly emerged from research led by David Murphy and a community of postgraduate students at the University of Stirling. The festival has attracted new audiences for African cinema (over 20,000 spectators since 2006) and contributed to wider debates about it amongst the general public, NGOs, as well as cinephiles in Scotland and more widely. In particular, two projects on the `lost classics' of African cinema allowed neglected films to be discovered both by a general audience and influential film critics/journalists.
Afterall is a research and publishing organisation founded in 1998 by Research Fellow Charles Esche and Professor Mark Lewis at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL). Afterall focuses on contemporary art, and its relationship to wider theoretical, social and political fields. Researchers associated to Afterall undertake and commission research, which is disseminated to an international audience through publications and events. Afterall impacts on the cultural sector and an extended audience by providing a platform for critical and creative responses to art, curatorial and cultural practice and by shaping discourse in this area. The significance and wide reach of this impact is demonstrated through partnerships and high-profile cultural events, publication reach, and support from the cultural community.