Faculty Members' Funded Research Projects
- Better Made Up: Science Fiction and Innovation
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Caroline Basset IP with Sharif Mowlabocus (Member of the Network) Ed Steinmueller (SPRU) NESTA-funded study of Science Fiction and innovation (School of Media, Film and Music and SPRU)
- RCUK Digital Economy Community and Culture network
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Caroline Basset, Epsrc-Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council
- Out of Ruins: The visual culture of New Brutalism in 1950's Britain
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Ben Highmore, Ahrc-Arts & Humanities Research Council
The visual culture of New Brutalism (roughly from 1952-1960) included paintings, sculptures, photography, printmaking, and craftwork, as well as the better known work of the architects who have been most clearly associated with the term (initially Alison and Peter Smithson and James Stirling). Most of the artwork was made in London and Essex but it had international references and aspirations. The visual culture of New Brutalism was practiced by some of the most significant artists of the twentieth century (Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, and William Turnbull) as well as those who have become sidelined in the history of art (Magda Cordell, Nigel Henderson, and John McHale). It was characterised by a set of stylistic interests: the inclusion of ‘raw’ materials (everything from found photographs to bombsite debris); an interest in new possibilities for structuring images (images with no focal point, random forms of ordering); and the production of images that would be compelling even though they were not beautiful (addressed as much to the nervous system as to the eyes). Alongside these characteristics, New Brutalist artists, critics and architects refused to be programmatic: theirs would be an art that faced up to the dynamics of the post-war situation with an ethical responsiveness that would not be seduced by the emerging culture of consumerist plenty and unheralded technological progress, but would also not ignore the possibilities this offered. This was to be a humanist art that searched for progressive potential in the present, scoured the past for lost opportunities, and refused to forget the traumas of the recent past (the blitz, the Holocaust).
As yet no single volume has attended to New Brutalist art as a distinct contribution to post-war visual culture: my proposed book will fill this gap. Indeed art history and cultural history has usually treated the art of New Brutalism as nothing but the prequel to the emergence of British Pop Art, marginalising its distinctiveness and obscuring the early careers of artists such as Paolozzi and Hamilton (both of whom exceed the category of ‘pop art’). Other artists who existed in the orbit of New Brutalism have either been forgotten (Magda Cordell) or are undergoing a reassessment through single artist studies (Nigel Henderson and John McHale [forthcoming]).
While the central task of this project is to resuscitate the term New Brutalism because it refers to a significant moment of post-war British art, the larger project is to argue that close attention to this work ‘throws a unique light on the culture’ within which it was produced. New Brutalism was practiced during a time of harsh post-war austerity and giddy hopes for future prosperity. The artists involved were all affected by the traumatic catastrophes of the war years. Their particular experiences extended far beyond the cultural and material shores of Britain: to Italy, Hungary, the US, Indian, France and elsewhere. New Brutalism refused the specialism of artistic disciplines: architects worked with artists; groups curated and created new forms of visual culture (exhibitions on speed, biology, scientific photography; as well as early examples of instillations as artworks); books and illustrated lectures were all part of New Brutalism. And while traumatic history marks the aesthetic practice of New Brutalism in profound ways, the dominant mood is enthusiasm: enthusiasm for science (the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and the biology of D’Arcy Thompson) and science fiction; a fascination with advertising and commodity design alongside a passion for experimental theatre; a love of B-movies and the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Their aesthetic solutions might not be ours, but as an energetic example of a desire to fashion hope out of oblivion without the amnesia that usually accompanies it, they speak to us urgently and vitally.
- Global Queer Cinema
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Rosalind Galt, AHRC funded research network investigating queer cinemas and film culture from a global perspective. The project includes colloboration with CineCity: the Brighton Film Festival and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
- EPINET - Media Analysis
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Kate O'Riordan, project funded by the European Union
- Sustaining networked knowledge: expertise, feminist media production, art and activism
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Kate O'Riordan, project funded by Epsrc-Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council
- Porn Laid Bare: exploring the relationship between gay pornography and gay and bisexual men’s attitudes towards sex, risk and pleasure
- Sharif Mowlabocus with Justin Harbottle, project funded by THT, www.pornlaidbare.co.uk
- DTA-Now/Then: Documenting, Publishing and Disseminating Objects and Experiences
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Kirk Woolford, project funded by AHRC, Arts and Humanities Research Council
- Going Digital: A Creative introduction to digital humanities research skills
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Kirk Wooford, Caroline Basset, Sally Jane Norman, with Pamela Cox (University of Essex), project funded by Consortium for Humanities and the Arts - South-East England (CHASE), AHRC Skill Development fund.
- Motion in Place Platform
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Kirk Wooford,Bailey (Bedfordshire, CI), Hedges (Kings, CI) Norman (Sussex, CI), White (Sussex, CI) http://www.motioninplace.org AHRC:DEDEFI Scheme.
A team of researchers from Sussex, King's, and Bedford have developed several tracking systems to capture different forms of motion data enabling the study of how people understand and respond to places by moving through them.
- Hearing her: Oral histories of women’s liberation in China and the United Kingdom
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Margaretta Jolly
This collaboration builds on a long standing relationship between oral history and women’s movement history in both the UK and China, but unites hitherto unconnected networks of feminist/women oral historians, focused through two major oral histories coming to completion. Sisterhood and After , funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and directed by the University of Sussex, is partnered with The British Library, and The Women’s Library, London. The BL will archive 50 interviews, including with Susie Orbach (London Women’s Therapy Centre), Jenni Murray, (Women’s Hour), Jan McKenley (National Abortion Campaign), Jane Hutt (Welsh Assembly). The China Women’s University Women’s Oral History , funded by the PRC state Finance Department in partnership with The China Women’s University, has collected 100 lives of women aged 70 or above, including women’s rights activists, Communist Party pioneers and ordinary women whose stories document extraordinary changes in marriage, motherhood and sexuality over the last half century. Recordings are archived at China Women’s University. Project directors Jolly and Li met in 2011 to begin to explore why and how oral history in both continents has been privileged as a methodology for capturing women’s experience. We wish to collaborate further for three reasons. First, there are no dedicated channels of exchange with women’s oral history projects in China. Second, the collaboration unusually crosses curatorial and academic boundaries. We will compare archival strategies and pedagogical use of audio archives. Third, we share commitment to public and community impact. Li is vice-chair of China’s Anti-Domestic Violence Network and Jolly possesses activist connections that support wider dissemination.
- Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Mediated Sound
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Kate Lacey, project funded by AHRC-Arts & Humanities Research Council
The main objective of this project has been to open up the understanding of listening as a public activity, rather than as a code for the passivity long associated with audiences of mass media. By way of new historical analyses, together with new syntheses and critiques of debates about mediated publics, it is a project that seeks to offer a cross-national, cross-media perspective on the historical and theoretical questions of listening as a public action. In short, its ambition has been to amplify the specifically auditory roots of the word 'audience' - a word that combines the experiential with the public aspect of mediated culture. As such, it is a project that goes to the very heart of media studies.
The book that came out of this research reveals listening not just as a complex activity, but as a category of action and experience that ought to be right at the heart of any consideration of the media and public life. It is published by Polity in April 2013: http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745660257