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?
Ideas Exchange 2024/25 The project will bring together academics, artists, and filmmakers to deepen our understanding of the social, cultural, and environmental impacts of disasters, as well as the mediating and healing functions of community-based and artistic practices.
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?
Could rocks and samples held in geological collections, their associated histories and related indigenous worldviews help us all begin to understand more fully our relationships with the land and our planet, our past and global future, our cultural and natural heritage?
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?
How does a perspective on the body as a living archive of intergenerational memories inform approaches to migration and memory? How can an embodied and creative approach to ‘memory work’ help uncover, archive, and work through such memories? And how can this type of ‘memory work’ help migrants themselves redefine a sense of identity to live a better life?
What role can 3d medical technologies play in exploring one’s identity? What are patients’ perceptions of 3D medical models and the emotional implications that these can carry?
What are women’s concerns and questions when contemplating motherhood in the climate crisis? What methods are effective in facilitating non-judgemental dialogue between women who have made different reproduction choices?
How have encounters with ideas hidden in the pages of books and archives stimulated imagination? What connections with others happen amongst the labyrinth of shelves and ideas that change the course of lives?
How can community creativity centering on communal gardening in St Pauls contribute to unmooring “traditional” Environmentalism from its white supremacist origins and on-going entrapping?
How can the BDFRN formally establish the network’s structure, research focus and collaborative principles to be used during the upcoming years?
How can we open up conversations about death and bereavement, in a manner that destigmatises grief and promotes compassion and understanding?
How do you create sensitive and authentic cinematic representations of grief? What can we learn from the process of creating films on grief? What can be learned from the different roles and positions involved?
In an emergency, how would you locate a defibrillator? How can we creatively consider ways to ‘signpost’ campus users and members of the public to the locations of live-saving defibrillators?
How might an engaging artwork help women to connect or understand our bodies and hormonal changes on a deeper level?
How can we better understand audiences experiences of temporary monuments? What is the best way to collect and use audience feedback during a live performance?
How we think about time - and use time to think with – matters. This ‘temporal imagination’ shapes our understanding of the world, how it might change and influences what we value. What would an educational approach to time look like?
Can we imagine a time when we take responsibility for the health of our water systems? What might an arts practice look like as a result of this speculative dialogue?
How can we write narratives of hope in the face of this unfolding disaster? What stories will help prepare us and our children to navigate this crisis?
How can researchers use interdisciplinary artistic forms as an emotional distancing tool to developed a framework for creating a responsive, ethically-informed project to collect and curate anonymised stories?
How much do the sounds around you affect your mood? How much do you need to alter a city’s soundscape to benefit its citizens?
How can researchers enable the public to experience a conversation in a different and more immersive way and to communicate concepts of support and kindness through visual, embodied language?
To what extent can visual representations of living spaces offer an insight into the lived experiences and mental well-being of people in the HIV/AIDS community in the UK?
How can we expand current understandings of war and what makes war possible by focussing on ‘home’? Can photo-documentary research disrupt current representations and understandings of war to further the collective understanding of war, war-time and military life?
What causes us to experience temperatures differently? How can researchers facilitate an exploration of human experience of rising temperatures?
How can we explore the creative processes behind our different voices? Can the popular media of podcasts and short films assist the political process of constitution-making? How can we tell the history of Chile’s social movements from the perspective of the objects that shaped them?
How can a wooden printing press offer an antidote to an isolated world which has become dominated by screens and by texts composed in haste? How can a common press allow people to connect off-line, encouraging mindful and embodied practices?
How can theatre making and practice-as-research shed light upon possibly the first performance of Hamlet as well as the colonial history of the early voyages of the East India Trading company?
How have women found information and advice about the menopause? Is it understood and discussed differently within different families or social and cultural groups? And how can creative activities and storytelling help people explore and communicate their experiences of the menopause in different ways, and improve wellbeing?
How can we explore the therapeutic potential of creativity? What is the most effective way to demonstrate the different ways that art and the imagination can enable the bereaved to express and process their loss?
How can we talk about trans lives by examining the life of a gender non-conforming woman from the past? How can researcher explore the life of Jenny Moore from the early twentieth century, and focus on how living outside the law shaped their identity and experience?
What's the best way to learn a poem? Is silent rote learning effective, or is it better to repeat things aloud, to visualise the poem's content, or to move about when trying to memorise it? Do different memorisation techniques induce different psychological effects?
How can culture, creativity and ‘critical making’ can promote better critical understanding of temporality in the Anthropocene?
Can a collaborative filmmaking process provide an empowering space for refugees and asylum seekers? Can filmmaking be used as a critical tool in examining the current immigration system?
By visualising the sounds of marine wildlife and the way they are impacted by underwater noise pollution, can we draw attention to an otherwise invisible challenge?
How can medieval churches tackle longstanding issues of uncertainty in contemporary rural life? How can we draw on the roles of heritage sites to help develop place-based responses to this question?
How can you design a project that incorporates humanities from the outset? Can ‘Blue Humanities’ refining or re-framing scientific research questions?
Can technologies of virtual and augmented reality re-inscribe historical sites with an alternative history and become a moment of celebration for the cultures that were damaged by this history?
Can both productive stitch and subversive stitch be understood as therapeutic? How can researchers explore the role of sewing in 19th century asylums and its relevance to contemporary wellbeing?
What support do young people of diverse backgrounds need to deal with the climate and ecological emergency in their own way? What types of knowledge and understanding young people feel they need in order to better deal with the issue, how they prefer to learn about these topics, and how the arts can facilitate this process?
Can active particles be used to create interactive tattoos? What mechanisms are needed in order to make functional tattoos for a variety of applications?
What perceptions do robots have of humans? What does it mean for us to live in a world increasingly inhabited by artificial and augmented intelligence? How can a network be developed that crosses artistic, scientific and engineering disciplines to explore how machines see us?
How can you stage Elizabeth Blackwell’s experiences as a disabled woman and a pioneering doctor? How can we explores embodiment of disability in performance while exploring what we might learn from such life stories?
What can be learned from a one-day conversation between academics, creatives, and city-council representatives based between the two cities with parallel histories?
Can animation be used as a research method to examine global challenges? Can animation be applied to promote forms of development?
When musicians are creating in dialogue with machines how can humans solve problems pre-emptively? How do we cope in the moment? How do we recover? What new ideas emerge from the irreconcilable?
How can VR and 5G come together to showcase the South-West as a prominent future thinking, creative tech hub?
How can we explore different methods of engaging people with dementia in research? What do people with dementia think of diagnosis services?
What cultural possibilities opened up by the arrival of 5G technology? How can technology bring to life the multilingual history of the Bristol city docks?
How can VR and dance help us to rethink the human perceptual systems and the bias toward vision; the inherent nature of the relationship between perceptual systems and environment for wellbeing; and the ways in which we can re-centre the design for spaces away from visual conspicuity frameworks for sensing, movement and interaction?
How do you create sensitive and authentic cinematic representations of grief? Will multiple voices offer a balanced, holistic perspective or will it universalise and generalise the grieving process in an unhelpful way?
How do children conceptualise kinship? How do children from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds develop concepts of family and relatedness?
Is it possible to write a maths poem? How can researchers break down poetry's reputation for being inaccessible, and obscure?
Can you apply narrative methodology to real life GP consultations and patient histories? This project will use storytelling to create a toolkit that will improve communication when giving and receiving medical histories.
How can a creative event on the untold stories of disabled activism provoke discussion, exploration and creative responses to both the intersections and tensions of activism in Bristol and the South West of England?
How can academics work with storytellers to translate factual research into gripping stories for children and adults? What is the relation between truthfulness and fantasy in storytelling?
What is the contemporary father’s role in early parenting? How attainable are feminist ideals of parenting equity and what the key barriers to them? To what degree can performance art capture/explore tensions in work-life balance?
Which aspects of living with takotsubo cardiomyopathy cannot be captured by the label “broken heart syndrome”? Did participants experience their diagnosis as a “biographical disruption” and does that affect their self-representation?
How can we explore what are the barriers and facilitators to opportunities for play, social interaction, physical activity and healthy eating for children through neighbourhood walkabout and photovoice?
What system of dance and theatrical movement developed amongst the little theatres during the war, and how was it distinctive? What is the relationship between the artistic work of the little theatres, and their political values?
What resources could a multidisciplinary dialogue about ancient Greek and Roman religions discover for understanding, caring for, and cultivating forms of mental and spiritual wellbeing today? How could this same dialogue generate new perspectives on Greek and Roman religions?
How can experimental film be used to address the global decline in flying insects and the loss of bees and biodiversity?
What would be needed to live on Mars?
How can we explore what are the barriers and facilitators to opportunities for play, social interaction, physical activity and healthy eating for children through neighbourhood walkabout and photovoice?
How might Bristol productively acknowledge its ongoing colonial legacy and contribute to the work of truth and reconciliation with Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Metis people? What is the potential role of arts practice within this process? How might contemporary enactments, ceremonies, and rituals devised in response to the archival and material records of this history make visible Bristol’s role in north American colonisation?
Is it possible to design a ‘convincing’ puppet but wanted to discover if you can make an audience feel as though “a beast has life” even if “the being in question doesn’t exist”?
How do people seek out and access certain types of sound? What do they think and feel about the sound that they experience?
Is it possible to develop a generic, interactive museum guide, which is transferrable to all museums? What new forms of interactions, engagements and reflections on museums and interpretations might this make possible?
To what extent can cultural synaesthesia, through the union of sound and taste, allow people to experience their lives differently?
How do connections between the people and place where one lives affect and effect a sense of living well? Can collaboration and creative intervention positively impact upon the wellbeing of a street?
How can experiences of those with food anxieties be used to improve treatment for eating disorders? What types of creative activities, or without food, can help to reduce food anxieties?
How can co-produced participatory art practice, storytelling and ethnographic method benefit older populations from South Asian backgrounds, enhance their wellbeing and in what ways?
How might bringing together artists and scientists with shared interests in experimentation and making/culturing generate insights into creative practice?
How can art be employed to offer materiality and image to the seas and oceans which increasingly occupy and invisible and non-tangible space in the public imagination?
Who was Fanny Fust and what can her life tell us about the experiences of people with learning difficulties in the 18th century? What conversations might such a history spark about disability and consent in the present day?
How can we experiment with creating a repository of translated language that will be both a tool for language learners to learn and practice and for linguists to store and organise pieces of translated text?
What are the societal, playful, and wellbeing implications of being able to control your phone by blowing on a bottle?
How can we explore an intense interaction of human and machine through a new musical performance work?
What makes a place special and unique? What causes people to fall in love with an environment?
Can we develop a methodology to identify and categorise public spaces? As we move in the city do we understand the changing spaces through which we move and does this have implications for the future?
How can researchers expand the multifaceted issue of slavery and the facets of enslaved people's lives to a wider number of disciplines?
In what ways can the process of creating video inform future planning of research into the roll out of the OpenUpMusic’s “Open School Orchestras” programme across the nation in 2017-2020?
Can old, ephemeral items (like postcards) help us to establish a deeper connection with our homes and neighbourhoods?
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