Our Projects
We support a range of partnership-building projects around the themes of place and community. Read more about a selection of them here:
Islamic Art and Culture in York
Dr Richard McClary (Department of Art History) and Helena Cox (curator, University of York art collection) have brought together the first comprehensive exhibition of Islamic Art to be held in Yorkshire. The exhibition launched at the Borthwick Institute for Archives and Research Collections in November 2023 and will run until June 2024. It gives students, staff and the general public the chance to explore vibrantly coloured ceramics, paintings, artefacts and photographs that span a thousand years of history – covering the 8th to the 19th century – from across the Islamic world.
The exhibition’s objects, which hail from lands under Muslim rule from Spain to India, tell the story of how Islamic Art History emerged as a field. In doing so, they address historiography and orientalism, the importance of calligraphy and script to Islamic cultures and the role ceramics play in helping audiences to understand changes in artistic style over time and space. The project’s vision, developed through Richard’s research, captures the rich and shifting nature of this specific field, and, more broadly, contributes to the increasingly self-aware, wide-ranging and inclusive approach to the discipline of Art History that the wider department at York supports. Fittingly, the exhibition launch coincides with the introduction of a new Masters programme in Islamic Art and Cultures.
The project has involved the largely under-represented Muslim community in York through their direct engagement and a commitment to representing and studying past and present Islamic heritage. As this important work of building mutual partnerships continues, it coincides with the University's commitment to ensuring that campus is a welcoming and safe place in which all communities can develop cultural knowledge, understanding and tolerance together. Through the involvement of the University's first curator, Helena Cox, the exhibition has also begun the process of making institutional art collections available to the public as they are brought to life by the expertise of York’s art historians. For more images of the exhibition and news on further events follow @ArtAtYork on instagram and X.
'Photograph by James Allan (c) She Goat 2023.'
Healing the Performing Arts
In May 2023, Dr Karen Quigley invited Olivier award-winning theatre-makers Shamira Turner and Eugénie Pastor, collectively known as She Goat, to spend time exploring and devising a dynamic performance lecture. Pushing the boundaries of knowledge, representation and communication, the lecture aims to explore the reality of how art gets made in a UK cultural sector that relies on creative freelancers. By examining the costs – literal and metaphorical – of the sector’s precarious funding system and the continued strain of covid-19, the project also looks towards ways of forging a sustainable future for the theatre industry, all the while offering its own innovative method of performance-making as one possible template.
In a blended approach to creative production, the performance involved research into the history and politics that have shaped today’s art funding landscape, interviews with industry experts and creative sessions with University colleagues and students. The result was a diverse, interconnective mode of education that sought to entertain as well as provoke audiences, and to widen access to knowledge about the current climate of British cultural life. The project culminated in a work in progress performance that allowed the testing out of performative ideas in front of an audience. She Goat also used part of the budget to commission recent University of York alum Isaac Saward to remotely create a short audio piece responding to the provocation ‘my journey since graduating’, which featured within the lecture.
As well as providing a platform for Shamira and Eugénie in their own freelance work, their experimental approach to performance challenged traditional ideas about higher education teaching. The project’s long-term aim is to develop a more sustained learning community between academics and freelancers whose collective resources can create new ways of thinking about art and education.
To continue engaging the public in ensuring the future health of a vibrant arts ecosystem, She Goat seek further collaborations with higher education institutions and aim to create a full-length finished piece for 2025. They are also currently developing another community-centred theatre project.
Performing the Past
Prof. Benjamin Poore and Dr Rebecca Benzie (School of Arts and Creative Technologies) worked with Barley Hall, a medieval town house in central York, to organise two public talks on the subject of staging the historical past in contemporary theatre.
The first talk, by Prof. Poore and Dr Benzie, discussed some of the challenges of working with theatre archives to understand the writing and staging of historical plays, based on their experience of working with York Theatre Royal’s archives. The second, given by Dr Ella Hawkins (University of Birmingham) analysed the many different approaches that costume designers take when recreating historical styles of dress for modern audiences, and explored the important role that designers play in Shakespearean performance today.
The events tie in with ‘The Bard at Barley Hall’, an exhibition of historical costumes and theatre ephemera at Barley Hall, which Dr Benzie helped to research and develop in collaboration with the Jorvik Group, which owns the attraction, during summer 2022. The exhibition is open to the public until 2024, and included in the ticket price for Barley Hall.
The project has helped to develop the School of ACT’s relationship with Barley Hall and the Jorvik Group into a more public-facing one, engaging new audiences and raising the profile of research on the contemporary representation of the past in the theatre. Furthermore, it is allowing the researchers to gain a better understanding of how heritage attractions use theatre resources and archives to communicate with the public, and deepening the School’s partnerships with important civic partners in the City of York, opening up new opportunities for collaboration in the future.
Photo credits: Dr Rebecca Benzie
Contemporary Mayan Testimonial Culture
Dr Natasha Tanna (Department of English and Related Literature) is working with the Abejas de Acteal, an autonomous indigenous organisation in Chiapas, Mexico, to support the Abejas’ work on producing a testimonial book in Tsotsil and Spanish and a documentary film in Tsotsil telling the community’s story in their own words and images.
The Abejas de Acteal (Bees of Acteal) are a pacifist organisation inspired by liberation theology. They share similar aims to the better-known Zapatistas, including autonomous control of their lands and defence of ‘madre tierra’ (Mother Earth) from corporate exploitation. Unlike the Zapatistas, however, they are against armed struggle.
The year 2022 marked the 25th anniversary of the 1997 massacre of 45 members of the Abejas de Acteal. Survivors want to preserve the memory of the violence committed against their community and their resistance to it, both to inspire the younger members of their community to continue the organisation’s work and to share their story with other groups resisting land privatisation and exploitation globally.
Like many indigenous communities, the Abejas use collective governance and decision-making processes. They are aiming for this sense of collectivity to emerge through the film and the book, counter to the emphasis on individual leaders or figureheads in some accounts of indigenous organising and resistance. The creation process is collective, involving gathering testimony from across the community.
The Abejas are keen for external engagement with the process of creating the book and film from someone familiar with how collective testimonios might be received in other contexts, including the Global North, as international solidarity has been vital to their struggle. Dr Tanna’s expertise on collaborative literary creation in contexts of violence and discrimination, and her familiarity with Latin American testimonios from an external perspective, allow her to play this role, alongside Cardiff University’s Dr Joey Whitfield, a specialist in Latin American testimonial narratives.
Inclusive environmental governance in the páramo
Dr Hanne Cottyn, Prof. Henrice Altink (Department of History) and Prof. Piran White (Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre) worked with partners in Colombia to make environmental governance more inclusive. Their Paramunidos project promoted the inclusion of local communities and their knowledge and cultural practices in the protection of the páramo ecosystems of the Andean highlands.
Páramos are the areas of uplands between above the treeline but below the snowline; these ecosystems are crucial to urban water security and global carbon storage, but also provide a livelihood to rural communities. Climate change and competing interests in natural resources present a number of challenges to these regions.
Previous research, funded by NERC and coordinated by the project team in collaboration with five UK and Colombian research institutions, demonstrated a clear need to include local knowledge and cultural practices in building more inclusive environmental governance. Paramunidos worked towards this by using three concrete outputs of the previous project: the CD Sonidos Agroecológicos with songs composed and interpreted by emerging rural artists about life in the páramos; the documentary Cantares del Páramo, which explores the music and themes of the CD; and an interactive online platform and Whatsapp bot called Paramunos, where users can share research, art, experiences, and events about the protection of the páramos.
Through cultural events like the 4th Festival Campesino de Memoria Paramuna, and by sharing tools like the Paramunos platform through intersectoral networks, the project created and strengthened participatory spaces for knowledge exchange bringing together artists, educators, researchers, social organisations and public institutions from rural páramo communities.
The protection of the páramos, along with the issues of climate change and water security, are high on Colombia’s national political agenda, making this a timely project. Strengthening inclusive environmental governance is urgent as páramo conservation policies are contested, particularly by rural communities who fear being displaced and losing their livelihoods. By consolidating the results and partnerships created through previous research and projects in the arts sector, this initiative contributes to reducing and mitigating socio-environmental conflicts in the páramos.
Yorkshire Digital Drama Group
Dr Lisa Peschel (School of Arts and Creative Technologies) and Susan Walls (KiB) are working together to ease loneliness among elderly adults by engaging them in online drama readings.
Loneliness and social isolation in older adults are serious public-health risks, potentially increasing rates of dementia and other medical conditions. The Yorkshire Digital Drama Group aims to reduce these problems by bringing young and old participants together in structured social interaction: reading plays together online.
The project has its origins in the charity KiB’s response to the Covid lockdowns. KiB (Kissing it Better) aims to end the isolation of old age by bringing the generations together and during lockdown, Susan Walls convinced some of the charity’s elderly constituents to try reading a play together online using Zoom. They met for 16 weekly rehearsals, and recorded a full read-through as a ‘performance’.
The experiment was so successful that Walls ran it again on Zoom even after lockdown ended. Unlike traditional theatre performance, the online format enabled even those with serious mobility issues to participate, and performing with a script removed anxiety about memorising lines. It also improved participants’ familiarity with technology, giving them confidence to participate in other forms of online activity.
Walls approached Dr Peschel to experiment with involving students as co-organisers to help make the project more sustainable. During spring 2022, with support from the Place and Community KE fund, four theatre students helped organise a 16-week run of the Yorkshire Digital Drama Group, while Peschel used questionnaires and interviews to collect data on the participants’ experience. A full-length recording of the play was edited and provided to participants as a memento, and a one-minute version and a brief video interview with a participant were created to promote the project.
The project is now in its second phase, with its first iteration having generated extremely positive social interaction among the elderly participants, and between them and the student organisers. The project team now hopes to gather further evidence of the Group’s effectiveness and to document a model that could be used by new university-charity teams for new groups of participants.
Building collaboration with the Ruff Sqwad Arts Foundation
Dr Pete Dale and Dr Amandine Pras of the Department of Music used the Place and Community Knowledge Exchange fund to develop a collaboration with the Ruff Sqwad Arts Foundation (RSAF).
RSAF's mission is to raise aspirations and opportunities for less advantaged young people in Tower Hamlets through grime music-making and by raising participants’ awareness of career opportunities in the music industry. The duo at the heart of RSAF – Prince Owusu-Agyekum (aka Rapid) and Ebenezer Ayerh (aka Slix) – are grime legends themselves.
RSAF believe that collaborating with Pete and Amandine can help them to further develop their programme. Pete is one of only a few academics who have researched the use of DJ decks and MCing in music education. RSAF feel that his knowledge of MC and DJ skills as well as school curricular requirements allows him to understand their values and methods. Amandine is an expert in sound recording and music production. She has taught audio engineering to music producers who represent a large range of cultural backgrounds, including recent workshops in Bamako (Mali), Saint-Louis (Senegal), and for the Women in the Studio program in Canada. Her knowledge and skills can help RSAF align their programme with the requirements of formal, production-focused qualifications in music and expectations in the industry.
The Place and Community KE fund supported Pete, Amandine, Rapid and Slix to hold meetings in London and York to develop their ideas for this collaboration and begin looking for funding to expand RSAF’s offer. On their visit to York on 28 April, RSAF hosted a workshop in the Trevor Jones Studio with University of York Music in Production students, as well as an open ‘In conversation’ presentation with Pete at the StreetLife Hub on Coney Street.
Ultimately, the collaboration will result in a two-year series of workshops aimed at Key Stage 4 pupils in Tower Hamlets, supporting teenagers throughout their KS4 studies and helping them to develop their talent as artists and other industry-related skills.
Find out about the events hosted by the StreetLife project.
A group of York academics are working on a project to revitalise one of the city’s iconic streets. The StreetLife project has been awarded nearly half a million pounds from the UK government’s Community Renewal Fund to explore new ways to revitalise and diversify Coney Street through adaptive re-use of empty retail units. It draws inspiration from York’s rich history and heritage and vibrant creative communities, and will involve businesses, the general public, and other stakeholders in shaping the future of the high street.
The project is led by Professor Rachel Cowgill from the Department of Music, Dr Kate Giles from the Department of Archaeology and the Heritage360 research centre, and Professor Helen Smith from the Department of English and Related Literature. They are working with partners from the city, including the York Civic Trust, the York Conservation Trust, City of York Council and the York Music Venue Network.
Taking up the lease on 39-41 Coney Street, the project team are hosting pop-up events including musical performances, digital music-making, letterpress printing workshops and opportunities to explore the street’s rich heritage between April and June 2022. StreetLife will also offer reskilling and development opportunities to volunteers and other members of the local community.
Details of upcoming events and tickets are available on the StreetLife website.
York C20: An Architectural Gazetteer of Twentieth-Century York
Dr Joshua Mardell’s ‘York C20: An Architectural Gazetteer of Twentieth-Century York’ project drew new attention to York’s unsung, under-researched and threatened twentieth-century architecture through a user-friendly, visually rich public website, supported by the Place and Community Knowledge Exchange Fund. It considered how York sought to reconcile two seemingly paradoxical problems: reaping the benefits of modernity and progress while preserving many of the social and aesthetic benefits of the traditional city.
The project began in April 2021, bringing together History of Art students of all levels with external partners, residents and visitors, to offer a richer, more holistic and balanced understanding of the city's social and architectural significance, locally and nationally. Together, project participants produced detailed but accessible vignettes of significant post-1914 buildings and actors, which will be available on the project website.
Seemingly hidden in plain sight, twentieth-century buildings in York have received only limited academic attention. Yet there is much of significance, including the statutorily-listed Theatre Royal extension (1967, Patrick Gwynne), Bootham School Assembly Hall (1965-6, Trevor Dannatt), and buildings at the University of York (1963-71, Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall), whose significance needs to be contextualised within a broader story.
Recent losses in York make this research vital. Hudson House, the former offices of British Rail's Eastern Region (1967-70), a built manifestation of York’s global importance as a centre for transport history, was demolished in 2018. Further losses include the Edmund Wilson Swimming Baths, Acomb (1969) and the North Eastern Electricity Board Control Centre, Hungate (1968). Plans to transform the former Banana Warehouse, Piccadilly—built in 1925 for Burley wholesale fruit merchants—into a hotel threaten to erase the physical evidence of the River Foss’s former use for trade. York C20 uses an architectural lens to tell these hitherto uncharted stories of social change related to recreation, industry, commerce, habitation patterns, infrastructure and transport.
Heritage Game Jam
Dr Colleen Morgan and Despoina Sampatakou (Department of Archaeology) partnered with the European Society of Black and Allied Archaeologists, Museum Detox and the Past at Play Lab (Leiden University) to host a Heritage Game Jam. The event explored how collaborative game design can contribute to decolonising heritage gaming and digital archaeology. The Place and Community KE fund is supported the Jam, which ran between 11 and 13 May 2022.
The innovative ‘game jam’ format combined theory-based and practical workshops with the goal of creating a video game. As well as plenty of time for building prototype games, the programme included talks on game design, decolonisation, and the relationship between gaming and archaeology. The games are available to play on the Heritage Jam website.
The format allowed for playful, rewarding engagement, even with difficult subjects. Participants created collaboratively crafted and compelling games to explore fraught issues in digital archaeology and heritage gaming, fields still noted for a lack of diversity. Importantly, the initiative involved thought leaders in this area from an early stage. The event was streamed on Zoom, providing plenty of opportunity for everyone to join in.
The Heritage Game Jam built a community around joyful, creative and engaging practice and play in archaeology and heritage-based gaming with academics and heritage professionals. The emphasis was not the ‘DIY’ approach of most research, but a ‘Do It Together’ approach that broke down barriers between students, practitioners, and researchers to allow for open discussion and creative synergy. This approach can build lasting partnerships to cut through ‘wicked problems’ like decolonisation and a lack of diversity, and to sow the seeds for future research in the area.
Visual Health in the Performing Arts
Dr Naomi Norton (Department of Music) worked with Allegro Optical and the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine (BAPAM) to organise one-day networking and knowledge exchange event bringing together performing artists, clinicians, medical device manufacturers, and organisations involved in promoting performing artists’ health and wellness. The event took place in July 2022 at the University of York’s Department of Music. It aimed to develop a network, identify research and education topics, review factors affecting performing artists’ visual health, identify care pathways, and enhance clinical effectiveness.
Performing artists have specific eye-care needs: for example, they must be able to quickly read detailed musical scores, change focus between near and far sight, and have a good sense of spatial awareness. Specialists such as those at Allegro Optical are putting performing artists’ particular eye-care needs on the agenda. These efforts align with the work of the Department of Music’s thriving community of researchers interested in musicians’ health and wellness.
By bringing clinical and industry stakeholders in eye care together with performing artists and organisations supporting the wellbeing of performing artists, the event raied awareness of artists’ needs, what industry can do to support them, and what those within the performing arts can do to prevent vision problems and support those affected by them.
A number of key points arising from conversations at the event were summarised in a panel session focusing on ‘Obstacles and Opportunities’. There is a lack of data regarding the number of performing artists in the UK who experience difficulties with their visual health, which causes difficulties in understanding the needs and challenges of this population, persuading medical device manufacturers to develop bespoke products, and convincing institutions and organisations to prioritise visual health. The research and resources that are available focus primarily on musicians rather than other performing artists such as dancers and actors.
Moreover, artists and creators are not generally taught about their visual health or how to protect it and eye care professionals (including optometrists, opticians, and ophthalmologists) are not provided with sufficient insights during their training to be able to cater effectively to the specialist visual needs of performing artists. Different ocular conditions require a variety of approaches to facilitate vision and more needs to be done by venues, lighting designers, employers, and artists to explore this challenge and find workable solutions. There are organisations and individuals working to provide specialist services and support for performing artists, but better communication and connections between them is needed.
Finally, there is a spectrum of visual health within the performing arts and it is vital that the industry and education system work towards being an inclusive environment for all, regardless of visual status and use of vision to engage with the performing arts. While everyone can work towards protecting the level of visual health that they currently have, experiencing visual loss does not mean the end of engagement with the performing arts as there are many ways of thriving within the industry without relying solely on vision.
Dr Norton said, ‘Bringing together this dedicated and passionate group of individuals resulted in an exceptionally rich day full of discussions not only of obstacles to promoting visual health, but also opportunities for collaborative solutions to the challenges that we face. This shared insight and expertise provides a sound basis for further research, collaboration, and educational approaches to supporting a more inclusive and healthy performing arts community that prioritises visual health alongside other aspects of wellbeing. This event was only the beginning and we hope others will join the network and work with us towards those aims.'
Creativity, Heritage and Community
For this project, Prof. Rachel Cowgill (Department of Music), Prof. Stephanie Wynne-Jones (Department of Archaeology), Sarah Maltby and Rachel Tumman (York Archaeology) are developing creative partnerships around the theme of community. The work was supported by the Place and Community Knowledge Exchange fund and builds on a strong existing partnership between the University and York Archaeological Trust (YAT). A series of creative workshops built links between different organisations in York, drawn from the city’s creative, artistic and heritage practitioners working hand in hand with the University and YAT.
The Creativity, Heritage and Community project held these workshops at venues around the city, including the Guildhall, during 2022, allowing the team to hear from creative partners about their priorities. These workshops bring together York academics, heritage specialists, and creative researchers and practitioners involved with creativity and inclusivity through digital creativity and performance. These conversations are helping to expand existing networks and lead to new initiatives.
In addition, a research assistant is working to identify potential future projects involving a range of partners. All these activities will pave the way for a large-scale showcase involving exhibitions, installations and performances based on research that explores creative ways of engaging communities with York’s heritage.
The plans for Creativity, Heritage and Community revolve around inclusive co-creation; working with our communities to explore York’s past and present and involve new communities in arts and heritage activities with local practitioners. The workshops aim to extend engagement with the arts and heritage to new and diverse audiences, including underrepresented groups and those whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity, sexuality, economics or disability. The project team will work with mental health practitioners to develop co-created activities centred on all forms of artistic practice, aiming to develop initiatives that can promote mental wellbeing and improve social connections.