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Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine's research on mediating memory in the museum has influenced the development of permanent exhibitions on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) which have opened or been reworked in recent years. As part of two AHRC network projects (2009-10 and 2012-13) and as a member of the Raphael Samuel History Centre she has collaborated with museum practitioners to develop new curatorial and outreach practices including three German museums, the Imperial War Museum and a new east London heritage site. Drawing on her research she has advised several museums, which have taken on board a number of her suggestions when they modified their exhibitions.
Impact: Public engagement: interactive demonstrations of human cognition on BBC web pages completed by 251,757 people since 2008.
Significance: The involvement of massive numbers of the public who, by successfully completing on-line tests, acquired an understanding of cognition and memory.
Beneficiaries: The public.
Attribution: As a result of his published research on human cognition at the University of Edinburgh from 2004, the BBC invited Professor Robert Logie to develop interactive demonstrations for the public.
Reach: Worldwide: 251,757 people from 150 countries. Media coverage, two Reader's Digest books (2011 and 2012) and exhibits in a major new science exhibition, launched 2013.
Bill Niven is a public history practitioner, and an acknowledged expert on war and post-war Germany. The Buchenwald Child was a particularly well-known national story. It was based on wartime events but written up in the post 1945 period, where it was used by the socialist Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR) to demonstrate its antifascist roots and prove its sympathy towards Holocaust victims. Niven's study revealed that this much lauded story was largely founded on myth shaped by the exigencies of the Cold War (i.e. the need to prove that the GDR was the `better' Germany). His work started a major re-evaluation that stretched, as was always intended, beyond the boundaries of academia into the public domains of national identity formation within the context of reconciling the present with Germany's National Socialist and post 1945 divided pasts. This reassessment has taken the form of public discussion in the German media (newspapers, radio, TV), including a one-hour TV documentary film based largely on the book and including interviews with the Buchenwald Child himself, Niven and the director of Buchenwald Memorial Site. A paperback version of Niven's book was produced and distributed by Germany's Federal Centre for Political Education. It has since triggered discussion within organisations representing veteran survivors of the camp.
Robert Macfarlane's research focuses on interrelations between landscape, nature and culture. As a writer, essayist, broadcaster and public speaker, Macfarlane communicates his research far beyond academic audiences to reach a general public through his engagement with the traditions of nature writing. His work has led to enhanced public awareness of the natural world and engagement with issues including habitat loss, climate change and place-consciousness. His work has also led to new artistic ventures and to new courses at HEIs. A significant dimension to such impact has been its extensive presence in the broadcast and print media, which have devoted considerable space and attention to the agenda represented by Macfarlane's work.
Dr. Elena Isayev has led three projects, drawing on the implications of historical research, in collaboration with art practitioners, to engage young people, minority and disaffected groups in shared reflection and creative activity. These projects, centred on the paradoxical idea of Future Memory, have been used to create alternative spaces in which to re-think attitudes to human mobility, otherness and identity. While promoting new forms of cultural and artistic activity, the projects have also produced social benefit, in enabling large numbers of people, especially young people in deprived communities, to think constructively about their own identity, memories and sense of belonging.
Graham White's research has had an impact on the preservation of cultural heritage, on processes of memorialisation and on formal innovation in broadcasting practice. His work on the performance of memory and the presentation of the self, explored particularly in public legal processes of historical reconstruction, fed into his creation of a series of original and adapted radio dramas during the census period. The reach and significance of this research, in particular focused on his 2010 adaptation of B.S. Johnson's formally innovative 1969 novel The Unfortunates for BBC Radio 3, but also in adaptations of Henry James' novel The Ambassadors for BBC Radio 4 and JG Ballard's novels The Drowned World and Concrete Island for the same network, is borne out by a range of evidence, from audience and beneficiary response to critical reception and a BBC award for innovation. The main beneficiaries of this research are the BBC, the B. S. Johnson estate, and radio audiences.
Research undertaken in the School of English into the interrelations between memory, trauma, and narrative led to the `Storying Sheffield' project, which gives a voice to a diverse range of people, including long-term users of mental health services, people with physical disabilities, older people with degenerative conditions, migrants, and people in areas of socio-economic disadvantage. This has had significant socio-cultural impact for its participants, who have benefitted from an increased sense of well-being and belonging. There are also benefits for the wider community, through increasing understanding of these often marginalised sectors of society. In addition, the project has impacted on policy-making, through collaborations with Sheffield City Council, and emergency service providers, and on therapeutic training and practice, through collaborations with Rampton Hospital (a secure unit) and Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Trust.