Wave after wave of crises and polarising inequalities have renewed policy attention onto how local communities themselves can provide vital support, knowledge and leadership in forging solutions. The rise in deep poverty requires radical change and new ways to imagine and shape our transition out of such foundational challenges (Joseph Rowntree Trust, 2023). Brexit and the pandemic have simultaneously demonstrated stark uneven geographies and the potential power of neighbourhood resilience (Unwin, 2023). There is both a consultation need and fatigue around social infrastructures, regeneration, public health and sustainability (Wynn et al., 2022; RTPI, 2023). Creative practices present a source of transformational change that can stimulate new connections, imagine different futures and inspire action (Vervoot et al., 2023). My PhD research pioneers a creative participatory methodology that can make timely contributions to public engagement in these social policy realms, which this Fellowship aims to mobilise. I have developed a co-methodology, participatory listening research, that can be extended and applied to public engagement. Participatory listening research is a way of listening with others to our environment that generates new knowledge whilst embracing different listening experiences, practices and positionalities. Specifically, the PhD research applied this approach to gentrification, asking: What can listening with residents on the UK south coast tell us about urban seaside gentrification and displacement injustices? Gentrification is popularly contested and deeply rooted in policy-relevant spatial dynamics, offering a window onto broader societal trends (Smith, 2005). Listening creates a different way of connecting to over-rehearsed yet persistent issues of spatial injustice. By combining sound (Oliveros, 2003; Robinson, 2020) and mobile studies (Sheller, 2020) with a participatory ethos (Beebeejaun et al., 2013), listening with residents can expand our understandings of relationships to place and hyperlocal socio-environmental change. Looking to the other extreme of uneven geographies, the government's Levelling Up agenda is concerned with restoring pride in place and social infrastructures in 'left behind communities' (APPG, 2023). Defined as 'the framework of institutions and the physical spaces that support shared civic life' (ibid:6), social infrastructures can seed social capital (British Academy & Power to Change, 2023). This has refocused public engagement attention onto devolved and neighbourhood-led infrastructures, such as Labour's parallel Take Back Control (Norris, 2023). My gentrification-specific analysis can be expanded to these broader policy concerns, questioning how hyperlocal socio-environmental change resonates through: the re-engagement of underserved communities, de-gentrification, public health and sustainability agendas. Participatory listening research offers a new method for public engagement that is mutually beneficial, restorative and imaginatively-oriented. The Fellowship activities will extend, apply and deepen this methodology through creative engagement, knowledge exchange and academic dissemination. Firstly, I will add a novel dissemination method to the toolbox by co-creating interactive listening walks, geo-locative mobile soundwalks, a podcast and digital story that share the gentrification findings. These will be co-designed with local arts-based organisation, Brighton & Hove Music for Connection, in consultation with residents advisory and community groups. Secondly, using these creative outputs, a series of knowledge exchange symposia will be hosted with relevant academic, practice and policy networks. Thirdly, I will deepen the academic significance of this approach through journal publications, conference papers and funding proposals. Overall, the Fellowship will enable me to transition from the doctorate into a career as an applied and engaged social policy researcher.

This project focuses on the representations of Muslim masculinities in contemporary British and American diaspora novels. The study aims to reveal how normative values and social practices around masculinity enter narratives, as well as how they communicate cultural, social, and religious norms of masculinity and sexuality in characters' accounts of daily life in various diasporic contexts. Treating masculinity as an identity category with discursive and performative effects operating in intersection with age, sexuality, ethnicity, and class, the selected novels represent Muslim characters living in diaspora as highly complex intersectional subjects challenging and problematizing gender norms. Although the figure of the Muslim diasporic subject has gained considerable visibility in contemporary cultural and literary studies, the proposed project avoids cis-gendered and gay-centred readings when dealing with diasporic masculinities, and offers a more nuanced account of migrant experiences that is inclusive of heterosexual, queer and trans characters. The diasporic Muslim characters occupy fluid spaces in both their gendered behaviours and their relationships with religion. Shaped by a constructivist approach to queer intersectionality, this project aims to explore the ways in which (i) masculinities are expressed, embodied, and performed in contemporary diaspora literature, and (ii) the Muslim characters become the agents of social critique. Questions predicating this project include: How do Muslim masculinities in Anglophone literature complicate the intersectional operations of gender, religion, diaspora, and sexuality? What are the conditions of fluidity and constraint in the diasporic experiences of gender and sexuality? How do Muslim masculinities relate to national and transnational contexts of identity politics? How are the representations of Muslim masculinities in contemporary Anglophone novel received critically? The theoretical framework of the proposed project will contribute to the fields of (i) Anglophone literary criticism, (ii) diaspora studies, (iii) gender studies, and (iv) transnational sexuality studies.

In August 2020, Belarus burst into a massive peaceful protest against dictatorship, met with immense violence. We could see a direct connection between private traumas - such as domestic abuse, and public traumas - such as state violence. The crackdown on the protest and the ongoing repressions have resulted in destruction of the social support networks. Today, every second Belarusian woman is concerned about facing physical or sexualised violence and 83% of women are afraid of violence from the law enforcement agencies. These women are left on their own and silenced, and the trauma is expanding. With this project I aim to explore my personal and familial experience of domestic abuse and state violence in Belarus as well as the power of poetry to enable women to share their experiences of gender-based violence and patriarchy and find empowerment in that. Autoethnography, as a research method which combines autobiography and ethnography, allows me to place my personal and familial experience in a large social, political and cultural context in order to highlight the big social issues and bring about change. The practical outcome of this research will be a body of poetry that seeks to raise awareness and promote societal change around domestic abuse and misogyny in Belarus

Advanced digitisation techniques allow the recording of the shape as well as other optical and physical properties of artefacts to a degree of accuracy. As such, techniques such as 3D scanning, photogrammetry, X-rays and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) enable new ways to document artefacts and their conditions. Previous studies indicate that these techniques often result in datasets in which the digitisation method and its limitations are not well documented. In addition, the organisational needs which prompted the digitisation and the impact of those needs on decisions made during digitisation and the processing of the outputs are often missing. This poses problems for the interpretation of the datasets, including their reliability and accuracy. These issues are of major significance to both the scholar or conservator as they support the assessment and interpretation of recorded features and changes. The Victoria and Albert museum (V&A) intends to incorporate digitisation techniques into its enhanced offering of information about its collections. As such, there is an interest in the development of protocols and techniques which support the conscious digitisation of artefacts. This involves the documentation of decisions, reliability and accuracy of the digitisation process and resulting datasets. A collection of artefacts which is of interest to the conscious digitisation of artefacts is the V&A's collection of large scale reproductions. This is because the collection present challenges including i) their digitisation, due to their scale and difficulty of access; and ii) effectively using the resulting dataset for their study and conservation. Large scale reproductions at the V&A are mostly produced by casting which was extensively used in the 19th century as a means to disseminate artworks. A remarkable example is the cast of the iconic Trajan's column at the V&A. The original column has stood in the Trajan's Forum, Rome, since its creation in A.D. 113. The 30m high column tells the story of Trajan's campaigns in Dacia (modern Romania) between AD 101-106. Current understanding suggests that the V&A cast was created from another copy commissioned by Napoleon III in 1862. Since its installation at the V&A in 1873, the cast has been exposed to the environmental conditions within the Cast Courts gallery. As a result, panels present extensive corrosion of metal fixings and armatures causing on-going disruption and loss of material from the front surfaces of the panels. The aim of this project is to integrate advanced digitisation techniques and standards to support the conservation of the V&A's collection of large scale architectural reproductions. This will be achieved by i) developing methods to incorporate advanced imaging and visualisation techniques into the documentation of the collection; ii) documenting evidence of decisions made in the creation of reproductions and datasets; and iii) developing quality indicators that assist the interpretation and visualisation of the artefact under consideration of the dataset's inherent limitations. The research will use the Trajan Column cast to explore the issues mentioned above and to improve the understanding of its manufacturing and its condition including changes in the shape of the artefact due to environmental conditions over the years. Of interest is the fact that there are different reproductions across Europe of the Trajan Column which can potentially be compared to support their cross-study and the understanding of their state of conservation.

This research aims to offer a more specific insight into racialised violence under current conditions of capitalist democracy by drawing upon populism studies and biopolitical theory so that we can interrogate racial violence produced by right-wing populism as well as put us in a better position to discuss what constitutes a more democratic practice of biopolitics. We currently live in a "populist moment" (Mouffe,2018) whereby the internal antagonism between "the elite" and "the people" has been exploited by right-wing populist actors to produce a social frontier on the grounds of race. This is due to the continued lack of democratic control over many aspects of ordinary people's lives (Canovan,1999). Additionally, although biopolitical theory does offer an account of racism (Foucault,1975-76; Agamben,1998; Esposito,2008), since the Covid-19 pandemic, questions around how biopolitical mechanisms are deployed to police "the people" and its outside have come to the forefront. I argue that it is necessary to study this problem by drawing on both populism and biopolitics because populism's emphasis on formulation and political strategy means that there is no thorough survey of history and its effects on the construction of "the people" on the grounds of race, it only offers the means to reinterpret the discursive construction of these social movements. Yet, this normative element is something that is missing from biopolitical theory. Although theorists such as Mbembe (2003) offer an account of biopolitics that situates race at the heart of their work, it is too focused on diagnoses. Biopolitical mechanisms do not operate in a political vacuum, and the ideologies and discourses which underpin them warrant investigation. Yet, in both bodies of thought, there remains a profound yet unconfronted ambiguity in how racialised body features. A theoretical encounter is required, which shall be staged through this research project to overcome this.