Research Networks and Clusters
Research constellations across Media Arts and Humanities include the following networks and clusters.
Networks
- Analysis under Uncertainty for Decision-Makers Network
Analysis under Uncertainty for Decision-Makers (AU4DM) is an interdisciplinary network of STEAM experts, developing the future of decision analysis and its application within policy and other decision-making contexts. Areas of focus include climate risk, energy transition, futures methods, science fiction prototyping, deep uncertainty, uncertainty visualisation, the science-policy interface, and the use of the arts within stakeholder engagement.
With deep links across academia, policy, and industry, AU4DM holds workshops, conducts research, and produces insight to improve decision-making around the most pressing issues facing society today. The network is always open to new partnership opportunities.
- Digital Humanities Climate Coalition
Climate change, it’s been said, is also “everything change.” Internationally-agreed targets for mitigating climate change (by rapidly achieving net zero and limiting temperature increase), and for adapting to climate change (by increasing the resilience of human and natural systems), imply deep transformation across almost all areas of society. Such transformation is not only necessary, but also an opportunity to do things better: more equitably, more inclusively, more compassionately, more convivially.
The Digital Humanities Climate Coalition (DHCC) was launched in 2021, initially as a collaboration between the Sussex Humanities Lab and colleagues at Edinburgh, Southampton, and Humanities & Data Science Turing interest group. The DHCC is dedicated to understanding and improving the environmental impact of Digital Humanities research, and the particular contributions that researchers can make to a rapid and just climate transition.
The DHCC is devoting its energy to this urgent work, in those areas that we know best: the use of digital tools and methods within arts and humanities research. At the same time, the DHCC adopts a “very big tent” approach to the definition of Digital Humanities. We also recognise that aligning with planetary boundaries means learning new skills and perspectives, transforming what it is that we know best, and opening our hearts and minds to unfamiliar ways of doing things.
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Contacts: Jo Walton, Alice Eldridge
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- FACT///. Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology
The FACT///.community (Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology) seeks to promote dialogue, collaboration and support diverse voices in trans-disciplinary computational thinking and environments, ranging from history, digital arts, computer science and digital humanities.
The community is a direct result of the Ada Lovelace Day Beyond Numbers (2018) event held at the Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL). The aim of this event was to celebrate women, non-binary and transgender scientists, artists, musicians, researchers and thinkers whose works are based on scientific, technological and/or mathematical methods.
FACT///. is currently led by Irene Fubara-Manuel and Sandra Nelson with Cécile Chevalier and Sharon Webb.
- Languages for Specific Purposes in Higher Education (LSPHE)
LSPHE is a network organised around a yearly small-size conference aimed at language teachers in higher education. The annual conference started in 2015 as a joint effort between the University of Manchester and Cambridge University to bring together LSP practitioners from around the UK and beyond. Benoit Guilbaud is a committee member.
- Not Only Dressed but Dressing: Clothing, Childhood, Creativity Network
This AHRC-funded research network is led by Dr Hannah Field (English Literature, Sussex; PI) and Professor KieraVaclavik (French and Comparative Literature, Queen Mary; Co-I). The network brings together scholars, curators, and creatives to explore new approaches to children’s clothing in museums and in the wider world.
Today children’s clothing is a vibrant and lucrative part of the global fashion industry, and costume brings histories and ideas to life in museums, schools, and heritage sites. Debates over how children and young people wear clothes — from school dress codes to ethical consumption to fancy dress — show that children's dress is being taken more seriously than ever before.
This network will create new approaches to the flourishing interest in clothing and childhood, with a particular focus on the relationship between children's clothing, design, agency, and creativity. The network’s three museum partners — the Young V&A, the Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, and the Musée du textile choletais— will host a series of interdisciplinary events in 2022.
For further information, visit the Not Only Dressed but Dressing website.
- Philosophy of Language and Mind European Network
Philosophy of Language and Mind (PLM) is a European network of centres devoted to the Philosophy of Language and Mind. PLM was founded in 2010 and organises international conferences, workshop and master classes taught by leading experts in the field. Corinne Besson is a board member
- Scholars of American Visual Arts and Text (SAVAnT)
Founded as a network in 2014 by Joanna Pawlik (Art History, Sussex) and Doug Haynes (American Studies, Sussex), SAVAnT became a virtual doctoral school in 2016, bringing together scholars and students working on American visual art across the disciplines of Art History, American Studies, English, and History. SAVAnT seeks to map the lines that lie across and between Art History, Visual Culture, and American Studies in all historical periods, and across the Americas broadly defined. The school aims to support research and dialogue both between these fields and between CHASE institutions. Participants in SAVAnT are based in universities across the consortium at all career levels and covering a wealth of specialisms.
They have organised a variety of events, including the Chasing America symposia (2015 and 2017), the Facing America conference (July 2015), Student Reading Workshops (2018), Show-and-Tell of Artists’ books at the British Library’s Eccles Centre (2018), and a symposium on American Art and Populism (2019, keynote: Professor Cécile Whiting, University of California). Their website serves the network of scholars and students across CHASE.
- The AHRC Music for Girls Network
The AHRC Music for Girls Network is running for 18 months, starting February 2022
“Music for Girls” takes seriously a question raised by musicologist Steve Waksman in a 2017 essay collection. He asked, “what happens if we consider a 12-year-old girl’s collection of N’Sync albums and other items as a significant form of recording collecting”?
Our network brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, members of the public, curators, and music industry personnel to foreground and analyse women’s knowledge cultures of popular music. We create space for women, trans, and non-binary people to articulate their relationships to music, illuminating what Michel Foucault would call “subjugated knowledges” — ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have been rendered silent in academic conversations, in the media, and in our own experiences in the classroom.
We are collaborating with Lucy Malone from Museum of Ordinary People, curator and writer Rosa Abbot, music industry advisor Glenn McDonald, Alex Peverett at the Sussex Humanities Lab, and the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts.
We are organising three core events across 2022-2023: a Symposium with the University of Leeds on 18th May 2022, a five-day exhibition based on community workshops in the Sussex Humanities Lab in September-October 2022, and an international conference in 2023.
Mimi Haddon is Principal Investigator, Bethany Klein (Leeds) is Co-Investigator
- The Feedback Musicianship Network
The AHRC Feedback Musicianship Network is running for 12 months, starting in June 2021.
Feedback instruments offer entirely new ways of engaging with sound, music, instrument design and musicianship. This presents complex new research challenges: we do not yet have the right language to describe the behaviour of these radical new instruments, or a clear scientific understanding of how best to shape their behaviour. There are large gaps in knowledge of luthiery of these hybrid acoustic/electromechanical/digital instruments, which also demand new composition, notation and performance techniques, and new understandings of virtuosity. The Feedback Musicianship Network will bring together artists and researchers to address these challenges.
Chris Kiefer is Principal Investigator.
- The War and Media Network
The War and Media (WAM( Network is based at the University of Sussex. It was founded in 2003 in recognition of the global interest in the subject of War and Media as an important area of research and debate.
The aim of the WAM Network is to establish productive dialogue between academics and practitioners interested in this area. The WAM Network now has over 600 international members from academia, and the defence, journalistic and artistic communities.
The War and Media Network Website is a resource that members can draw upon and contribute to. It provides opportunities to disseminate material and promote events related to war and media. Membership of the network permits email notification of future War and Media Network events, as well as other events, information, publication and news about war and media.
In 2012 the network also established direct links with the Sage major international journal ‘Media, War and Conflict’ that maps the shifting arena of war, conflict and terrorism in our intensively and extensively mediated age. We hosted our 10th Anniversary conference in Italy in 2018: ‘Spaces of War: War of Spaces’
Contact: Sarah Maltby