Britain is often portrayed as 'a nation of gardeners'; indeed recent surveys indicate that in the summer months two-thirds of adults are regular gardeners, with women being more intensely involved than men. In rural and urban areas gardens attached to dwellings are a significant, 'everyday' element in a range of landscapes, spaces and terrains. The domestic garden is often viewed as a private space, but its material form being external to the house means it is not readily separable from the public domain and other ecological landscapes such as parks, woods, and allotments. When gardening people can create their everyday landscape through ' mixing with the earth'.\n\nThere are a vast range and number of professional narratives on gardens and gardening including novels, films, how-to garden books, and magazines. In recent years there has been a significant growth in TV coverage ranging from expert advice, to instant makeover, and lifestyle programmes. These narratives play a prominent role in shaping not only domestic garden design and gardening styles, but also social and cultural landscapes. Very little, however, is known about meanings of the garden from the perspective of 'ordinary' people themselves and how this changes over the life course. Why do people say they 'love' their gardens? How do gardens relate to family life/history, children's play, fears, adventures, and getting older? Do people have special memories of childhood gardens? How does gardening improves people's well-being and quality of life? What do people like doing in their gardens? Do men and women have different ways of visualising the garden? This project seeks to gather, analyse and present lay narratives on gardens and gardening from the Mass Observation Archive based at the University of Sussex.\n\nThe project will start by analysing writings from the Archive to provide a context to the intensive analysis of people's 'garden stories'; we will track 30 selected cases, and interrogate respondents life stories in relation to themes of the home, family, garden practices, and memories. The 'Garden and Gardening' Directive issued in 1998 generated one of the largest numbers of responses for many years. Respondents were asked to write about their childhood, garden memories, plants/flowers that are 'special' to them, garden knowledge, and their gardening habits. They were also asked to send in a photograph of their garden, many did so; approximately 80 good quality photographs of gardens reside in the Archive will have been operational for 70 years and a series of public events are planned. The contemporary media indicates the strength of public interest in gardens and the results of this project will provide a major opportunity to engage the public with arts and humanities research.\n\nThe research will be of interest to:\n- Academics concerned to advance knowledge on the links between lay narratives, \n gender and the life course, and domestic landscapes;\n- Garden Designers, gardening 'industry' expert, and policy-makers seeking to gain a \n better appreciation of the significance of the garden in every day life, and how and why\n gardening habits change;\n- Creative artists and horticulture therapy organisations (e.g. Thrive) wishing to \n appreciate the deep emotional benefits of gardening for people;\n- The media and public at large interested in the contemporary meanings of gardens.\n

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

'"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953' investigates exhibitions developed for communication of propaganda and resistance from the inter- to the post-war period in Britain. The exhibitions that are central to this project were intended to influence or persuade, with ideas, not objects, as the central focus. Pivotal to this project is a vision, which the designers shared, of such exhibitions as active and participative 'demonstrations', as acts of provocation, rather than as 'displays' seen by a passive audience, primarily acting as platforms for displaying the fruits of commerce, trade, industry or the arts. This vision was initially inspired by exhibitions held in Russia and Germany and informed the visual language of the early British welfare state. This project will focus, in particular, on a range of exhibitions developed by the Artists' International Association (AIA) from 1933 and the Ministry of Information from 1940, intended to inspire hope, pride and to teach the populous new skills. These can, as shorthand, be described as "propaganda" or "information" exhibitions, although the complexities and contradictions of these titles will be addressed within this project. These were mounted by a network of designers including Misha Black (1910-1972), F.H.K. Henrion (1914-1990), James Holland (1905-1996), Milner Gray (1899-1997) and Richard Levin (1910-2000), all of whom worked on exhibitions during the two decades from 1933 and were members of interlinking personal, professional and activist networks, many of them recent arrivals fleeing the Nazi threat. AIA artist-members included many of the most significant British artists of the time: Henry Moore (1898-1986), Eric Gill (1882-1940), Augustus John (1878-1961), Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and Paul Nash (1889-1946); while the Ministry of Information's Exhibitions Division employed celebrated Modernist architects Frederick Gibberd (1908-1984) and Peter Moro (1911-1998). This research will connect propaganda exhibitions held across a range of locations around, and beyond, Britain during these decades. They were mounted by an extended network of designers, for whom group-work was an important manifestation of a belief in collaboration and collectivity. It will assert this as a key, but largely overlooked, element in British Modernism. Particular case studies will include various AIA exhibitions mounted from 1934 (for example 'Art for the People', 1939 held at Whitechapel Art Gallery and 'For Liberty', 1943, held on a London bombsite); The Peace Pavilion at the Paris World Fair, 1937; The Modern Architecture Group (or MARS) exhibition, 1937; Picasso's Guernica touring sites around Britain including a car showroom, 1937-8; Empire Exhibition, Glasgow, 1938 (in particular installations by Misha Black); the British Pavilion at New York World's Fair, 1939; Aid to Russia, 1942; Ministry of Information exhibitions mounted in sites such as Charing Cross Underground Station and travelling round Britain to shops and village halls from 1940-45; and by Central Office of Information from 1946; and Britain Can Make It, V&A, 1946, (specifically installations by Design Research Unit). Drawing on primary and secondary sources, this project will also make comparisons of the style, content and ideological impetus of other exhibitions mounted across Europe and North America during the same period. Major outputs of "The Materialisation of Persuasion" will be: a monograph entitled 'Modernism, Propaganda and the Public: Exhibitions in Britain 1933-1953'; a co-edited essay collection 'Beyond Boundaries: Art and Design Exhibitions as Transnational Exchange from 1945'; a methodologically-focused journal article; and a documentary film exploring British propaganda exhibitions during this period and assessing their significance today.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The aim of this project is to provide biodiversity researchers with a facility analogous to word sketches, but based upon taxonomic and trophic relationships between species. Using evidence- based lexicographic techniques and exploiting the implicit taxonomic structure of the biodiversity data, the project will create 'life sketches', offering researchers a statistical snapshot of how, how often, when and where a particular species occurs in the literature, and what kinds of trophic interactions with other species it engages in. With such a tool, researchers will be able to address key questions in biodiversity sciences, such as the evolution of trophic interactions across the tree of life with focus on different geographic and time scales, with a much enhanced statistical power that may challenge long held but not robustly tested hypotheses describing key processes of the co- diversification of unrelated organisms through time and in place.