In May 2025 Brigstow Institute launched a funding cycle around the theme of “Postcolonial natural history collections and museum and archive practices”. The theme looks to bring together individuals form diverse disciplines and practices who are interested in exploring the research value of natural history collections and archives, and postcolonial methods of museum and archive practices.
How can you create an innovative immersive experience which blends neuroscience, immersive technology, and movement, for an inclusive audience? This project seeks to explore the research landscape to give firm foundations for their multimedia installation.
Can resident-led, creative action address barriers to children’s outdoor play and mobility in urban neighbourhood environments? This research aims to co-design hyper-local approaches to transform underused threshold spaces (doorsteps, pocket parks, pavements, residential street space) into playable, social spaces and sites of everyday creativity and connection within an urban community in Bristol.
How can poetic writing produced by, or with, AI accurately model human voice, narrative and place-based experience? This project develop new methods to ground voice, experience and unique expression in poetic compositions and multimedia works created with AI.
How do people living with chronic kidney disease want to tell their stories; who do they want to share their stories with; how do they want their stories told? This research consults the Welfare State International (WSI) Archive to scope out other ways to democratise health through public art.
This research will find out if creating purposeful, practical, and fun outdoors activities will help older men to build social connections and combat loneliness and isolation. Can it further encourage connection with settings of health, and care that can benefit their health and wellbeing?
What does it mean to be an Irish Bristolian today? What is the history and heritage of the Irish in Bristol? How can processional arts be used to understand unwritten pasts and speculative futures?
How will reconstructive prosthetics adapt to future environments? How can creative methodologies and interdisciplinary co-design help answer this question?
How can we explore the ethical considerations of using AI to create art? Could AI provide a crucial tool for poets with access needs to write and create?
How do neurodivergent archive users use and experience archives? How do we make archives more accessible for neurodivergent users?
How can researchers explore Caribbean storytelling and folklore as a social act of human self-possession, a means of sharing experiences, and a mode of affirming values? How have these storytellings been captured in archives and how are they told today?
How can researchers come together to form a network to reestablish Léon Brunschvicg as one of the preeminent philosophers at the turn of the 20th century?
What agency is afforded to queer people when imagining future technological development? How can we develop creative practices that bring queerness to the forefront of re-inventing approaches to technology?
What can be learned from the way that Caribbean people tell stories and how this practice has evolved? How might we preserve these stories for wider audiences? And what is the most effective way to re-tell these stories in alternative formats for digital, potentially younger, audiences?
How can creative techniques and artistry be employed to think about how a space can invite people to step forward and act in an emergency?
How can researchers create a layered and polyphonic soundscape that voices the process of selection and omission inherent in the creation of historical narratives and archives?
What research can be done into the practice of how to ethically decolonise rock and mineral collections? And how can we bring curatorial practice, poetry, academic thinking and art into the development of decolonising processes?
If non-professional actors can bring realism and authenticity because they have had similar lived experiences to those of their fictional characters, what is at stake when asking non-professional actors to work with such experiences, especially when they might be traumatic? How can such processes be carried out in an ethical, collaborative, and safeguarded way?
How can we co-create knowledge with plants? How can academic researchers and art practitioners collaborate to consider practice-based approaches to studying plants?
How do humans relate to one another in contexts mediated by the technological, the artificial, and the re-embodied? And how can puppetry and robotics inform a new ethics of relation?
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