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Research conducted at UEL as part of an ESRC-funded participatory project exploring identity, performance and social action among refugee communities in London has enhanced cohesion within the participating communities, and supported the transfer of specialist expertise and skills from academia to local community and artistic organisations. The latter have benefitted both from the development of innovative methodological research tools and from researchers' support for their subsequent adoption in work with different communities. The research has also contributed to the development of new artistic and cultural resources, including a Verbatim and Forum theatre play. The communication of key research findings through this and other forums has increased public engagement with, and sensitized audiences to, issues relating to the everyday life experiences of refugees in Metropolitan London.
The Unforgotten Coat, winner of the 2012 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and German Children's Book Award 2013, has been praised for highlighting the plight of young asylum seekers. It remains a core text for the Reader Organisation (RO) reading groups in the community and in prison. It was launched on World Book Day 2011, distributed to approximately 50,000 disenfranchised children and has been translated into several languages, receiving worldwide acclaim. The subject matter, and creative process underpinning it, fed directly into important learning initiatives and materials for schools in the North West, workshops at Liverpool's Bluecoat Arts Centre and for Merseyside's the Haven Project. The international reach of the book is reflected in its victory in the aforementioned Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2013 and a further nomination for the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) for the prestigious 2014 IBBY international Honours List in Mexico 2014, a nomination based on its highlighting of the lives of today's young asylum seekers.
The research and the practice methodology that underpin the emergence of the responsive play scripts, alongside the performances of the plays, have had the following impacts:
b) Communities, the General Public, Audiences — restoring, and increasing opportunities for audiences disenfranchised from access to locally generated performance by Chester's Gateway Theatre's closure (2007), to see and/or participate in performance events of high professional standard and thereby engage with local narratives and histories
c) Local theatre professionals — restoring and increasing employment opportunities, and broadening skill sets appropriate to non-traditional performance contexts
Reach: theatre audiences: 7,480; audiences at outdoor events: 27,000.
Significance: evidenced by repeat commissions for playscripts and touring productions.
The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling (GEECS) is the only UK academic research centre devoted to the study of storytelling and its applications. Our research has supported the development and renewed public awareness of storytelling as a powerful, democratic art form. The impact of our storytelling research is both cultural and social as it has generated new understandings of community formation, connectivity and capacity through creative participation. Collaboration with 16 national, international and local partners since 2008 enables the impact of our research to secure both a wide reach within civil society and attain real significance within local communities.
The site-specific performance Capel: The Lights are On increased public understanding of the importance of place and belonging and empowered people with learning disability to articulate cultural capital and heritage through creative intervention. It impacts on civil society and cultural life. It reached a diverse audience of first time and regular theatre goers, people with learning disability, and professional artists. Beneficiaries include its audiences, its participants and the wider circle of professional support, families, friends, and the community of Ceredigion. It facilitated better understanding of rural Welsh life. It temporarily re-opened a former focal point for community and cultural life. It revealed ability rather than disability by making equality between participants clear.
This case study draws together the project-based work of a number of researchers within the UoA 35 based in the Lincoln School of Performing Arts. The thematic link that unites this work is that it has all benefitted marginalized and disempowered communities locally , regionally and nationally by using performance to facilitate dialogue, participation, intervention, and empowerment.
This case study focuses on impact achieved through the widely-seen performances by GW Theatre of Mike Harris' commissioned play about extremism, From One Extreme to Another, in schools in the UK. The project:
Since the Bradford Riots in 2001, research at Bradford has helped to defuse underlying tensions between deprived, multiethnic communities and between them and the local state thus strengthening community resilience in the city. Building on global research, particularly in Latin America, we have introduced participatory and peace-building methodologies into the locality, but with implications beyond it. The Programme for a Peaceful City enhances our impact through academic-practitioner reflection spaces. Our research with rather than on communities fosters their voice in policy, contributing to a non-confrontational response to the EDL in 2010, 2012 and 2013 and bringing community activists from Bradford's diverse communities together to co-create the ESRC-funded Community University (Comm-Uni-ty) in May 2013.
Reminiscence theatre's primary goals are to improve the well-being of senior citizens and promote intergenerational dialogue. ARTA has successfully engaged 100 marginalised older people, 13 young volunteers and over 200 others since 2012. The project has created a new model of reminiscence theatre by proving that archive material can be used instead of live interviews. It has learned the strengths and weaknesses of this approach and found creative solutions to the problems. It has also given the Reminiscence Theatre Archive a long-term `living' future. Finally ARTA has disseminated good practice internationally through a website, articles, training events and conferences.
The Scots Words and Place-names Project (SWAP) engaged the public through an embedded use of the internet and social media, a strategy designed both to collect data on the Scots language and to raise the profile of Scots in the wider community. In order to make the project accessible to younger generations, a successful schools competition was run using Glow, the Scottish schools intranet operated by Education Scotland. SWAP also involved two partner organisations from the cultural sector, Scottish Language Dictionaries and the Scottish Place-Name Society, in order to provide a bridge between academic and cultural bodies and the general public.