From Harms to Harmonies

The 'From Harms to Harmonies' theme aims to gather research ideas, questions and projects that use objects, substances, or actions deemed 'harmful' and actively engages with their impacts to reframe narratives, build collective communities of care, and find commonalities in their causes.  

That could be anything from building community from social division and inequality, exploring reparative justice, ensuring safety and care in digital spaces, reframing the narrative around youth violence or working with substance users to understand and mitigate risk. The aim is to explore journeys where harmony is found from harm in multiple corners of the University and beyond.

Following our new funding cycle structure the key dates for your diary are:

  • Connections Funding call for application: Opens; 5th January 2026 – Closes; 11.30am 19th Feb 2026 
  • From Harms to Harmonies Ideation workshop – 9.30am - 12.30pm 12th January 2026
  • Exploratory Research Fund applications open – 30th April 2026

Collaborate Events:

As we enter the Collaborate phase of this theme, we’ve connected with past funded projects to curate a series of events that help to stimulate research ideas and questions, bring together potential teams, and connect you with past projects that might fit under this theme.

  • SOMA by Lisa May Thomas
    Tuesday 18th or Wednesday 19th November ; 2 – 3.30 pm both days

    From Harms to Harmonies is a theme centred around care and community building, something often difficult to do in virtual spaces. Join Lisa May Thomas for SOMA, an 8-person interactive and social VR experience which foregrounds the body and connections between bodies across physical and virtual worlds. Using ‘string-play’ SOMA uses physical and virtual strings to stimulate dialogue between participants and explores the more-than-human assemblages that are at play when we interact. Connecting participants' bodies through space and across physical and virtual worlds, SOMA offers new ways of being and caring for each other.

    Sign up here:

    18th https://brigstow-soma-workshop-18-11-25.eventbrite.co.uk 19th: https://brigstow-soma-workshop-19-11-25.eventbrite.co.uk

  • Transform Drugs Boat Tour: Currents for Change
    Wednesday 3rd December 2025; 2-3pm

    Bristol’s past and present are deeply intertwined with the global trade of legal and illegal drug economies, from the transatlantic trade in tobacco, rum, and sugar - industries largely built on exploitation - to today’s evolving urban drug markets. This boat tour will take you through Bristol’s harbours and hidden histories, exploring how different psychoactive substances have been produced, transported, and consumed within exploitative global systems. We’ll connect past and present, from the economies and commodities of the transatlantic slave trade to today’s legal and illegal drug markets.

    Sign up here: https://Brigstow-transform-boat-tour.eventbrite.co.uk

  • From Harms to Harmonies Ideation Workshop
    Monday 12th January 2026: 9.30 - 12

    A workshop to bring together people from across our broad community to either create new or develop existing research ideas in response to the theme. Facilitated by the Brigstow team, we will use creative methods that will help kick start ideas and fuse together individuals interested in similar topics. Throughout the workshop, our hope is that it will generate exciting and inspiring early interdisciplinary research topics and ideas that could be worked up into more solid plans and projects during the Connections Funding stage of our new funding cycle.

    More info on how to sign up to this will follow soon.