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.
How can we use movement to convey meaning and understanding within the research process? How does embodying a certain role or archetype shapes our interactions with people from outside the normative academic framework? This is more a process of thinking about the embodiment of roles such a ‘the researcher’ and ‘the artist’ and what this means for how we arrange ourselves in co-produced research relationships.
This research team want to co-create guiding principles for an intervention to improve the physical health of people with severe mental illness (SMI). SMI includes schizophrenia, psychosis and bipolar disorder.
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.
What does the future of reparative justice look like in the ever-changing world of our climate crisis and post-colonial environmental challenges? This research project seeks to redefine reparative justice through a lens informed by indigenous knowledge and postcolonial perspectives.
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.
Dark brown or green glass bottles from mid-17th – 19th century are frequently described in the literature as black glass. How can the new geomaterials-informed knowledge about the chemical composition of the English black glass help us uncover its historical and social significance?
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.
By fostering long-lasting individual and communal connections can you elicit care for and engagement with the River Avon? Against a backdrop of catastrophic river health in Britain, this project seeks to enrich, deepen and transform Bristolians’ perceptions of their local river, with the aim of recentring the river’s place in the public imagination.
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