Dr Mara Nicosia and Dr Alberto Rigolio
NIF22\220071
The Syriac Rhetorical Tradition between Greco-Roman paideia and Arabic Aristotelianism
Durham University
Award value: £115,500.00
My project aims to reshape our understanding of Syriac intellectual culture by investigating its engagement with late antique paideia (i) and with Aristotelian rhetoric (ii). Classical texts such as Isocrates, Plutarch and Themistius were available in Syriac translation from as early as the fourth-fifth centuries CE, but it is yet to be ascertained how Syriac Christians used these texts and how the curriculum of Syriac rhetorical studies emerged. I intend to achieve this goal through the first systematic study of Antony of Tagrit’s Syriac treatise “On Rhetoric” (ninth cent.). Antony, a teacher of rhetoric, was the first Syriac scholar to articulate rhetoric as an academic subject; his comprehensive treatise demonstrates engagement with the Syriac classics (Ephrem, Jacob of Serug), secular Greco-Roman culture (Homer, Plutarch, and the progymnasmata), Christian rhetoric (Gregory of Nazianzus) – but also with Aristotelianism more broadly. My study of Antony’s treatise will be necessary to reconstruct both the curriculum and the functioning of Syriac rhetorical teaching, but it will also be a crucial addition to our understanding of Aristotelianism in the broader context of Byzantium and Islam. The first part of my project aims to reconstruct Antony’s classroom, its curriculum, models and exercises, and its engagement with late antique paideia. The identification of Antony’s sources will provide unprecedented insights into the material that circulated in late antique schools across language boundaries (Greek, Syriac, Arabic). This work will enable me to investigate the complex relationship between Syriac rhetoric and Aristotelian rhetoric in the broader context of Byzantine and Islamic Aristotelianism, which will be the subject of the second part of the project. In part 1, I intend to carry out a close textual analysis of Antony’s treatise, its sources and its uses. This will be a pioneering study and a considerable advancement on existing scholarship. In part 2, I intend to use the technical vocabulary of rhetoric to assess the level of independence or reciprocal influence of the Syriac rhetorical traditions and Aristotelian rhetoric in Arabic. This work will build on the methodology that I have developed during my PhD and will transform Syriac rhetoric by showcasing the linguistic strategies (loanwords, calques, secondary formation, neologisms, etc.) employed by each tradition to create its technical vocabulary, testifying to the history of the circulation of words and philosophical concepts.
Dr Daniel Ferguson and Dr Joachim Aufderheide
NIF22\220137
Virtue and Method in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics: An Intellectualist Approach
King's College London
Award value: £104,229.00
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has been the widely studied source for his ethical views. But this is not his only substantial ethical work. In his Eudemian Ethics (EE) Aristotle likewise tackles important questions such as, “What is happiness?” or “What is virtue?” He furthermore attempts to answer these questions in a methodical, systematic way. Despite this, however, scholars have not appreciated the EE in its own right until recently. If it has been considered at all, it has been more frequently used as a (dubious) tool for interpreting the Nicomachean Ethics. Because of this neglect, Aristotle’s main theses in the EE remain poorly understood. To remedy this, for my dissertation I developed the first comprehensive Intellectualist interpretation of the EE. According to this view, happiness in the EE is simply the intellectual activity of the “contemplation of God”—the contemplation of philosophical and scientific truths and explanations. For my next project, I wish to study the topics of virtue and method in the EE from my Intellectualist perspective. Aristotle offers a theory of character virtue in the EE and makes remarks that gesture towards a theory of the intellectual virtues. One part of my project will be to interpret these theories from my Intellectualist vantage point. This will involve tackling questions that my Intellectualist account gives rise to. E.g. How can Aristotle plausibly say that all of his virtues aim at promoting the contemplation of God? And why must the person who achieves happiness have all the character and intellectual virtues if happiness is just one kind of virtuous activity? Nobody has tried to answer these questions about the EE. But they are, as I see it, precisely the questions that ought to be asked of Aristotle’s Eudemian theory of virtue. The second part of my project will be to examine how Aristotle approaches ethical questions and what form he thinks answers to such questions take. Our understanding of Aristotle’s method (broadly construed) depends on our understanding of how he answers the aforementioned questions. What, for example, does ethics look like when the contemplation of God is the primary source of value for other goods? And how does Aristotle proceed throughout the EE to hit upon his accounts of things like happiness and virtue? My Intellectualist approach, which makes novel claims about Aristotle’s answers, will also likely result in an alternative interpretation when it comes to questions of method as well.
Dr Gabriel Bayarri and Dr Ainhoa Montoya
NIF22\220263
Discourse Polarisation: The Memetic Violence of the Latin American Right-Wing Populisms
School of Advanced Study, University of London
Award value: £119,250.00
In recent years we have seen in Latin America the emergence of populism, the advances of right-wing radicalism and the resurgence of extreme nationalism. This project aims to analyse the memetic communication of some of the most representative leaders of Latin American right-wing populist parties and how this communication exacerbates political polarisation and violence. Memes, through their simple and humorous discourses, legitimise forms of violence against political opponents, normalising and consolidating political polarisation. The objective of the project is twofold: first, to investigate how these discursive representations contribute to legitimising political violence against opponents, whom they stereotype, despise and dehumanise in order to construct them as “enemies”; second, to understand the lessons that the Latin American region brings to the analysis of global right-wing populisms and authoritarian political expressions. The project spans politics, media studies, and social anthropology. Building upon previous research I have conducted on the importance of political polarisation through memes, this study becomes particularly important as right-wing populisms — which have been mostly studied from an Anglo-Eurocentric perspective — are increasingly building ties with other regions, including Latin America, which require novel approaches. Based on a combination of digital research, online focus groups and short-term fieldwork, the project will: 1) detect the connotative and semantic dimensions that are related to the legitimisation of violence; 2) synthesise the main categories found in the memes studied through grounded theory; and 3) analyse the explanations of different segments of sympathisers of right-wing populism regarding the emotions and ideas that the memes elicit for them. The research outputs include: 1) the organisation of a virtual conference entitled “Social Media Communication and Right-Wing Populisms in Latin America and Beyond”; 2) two papers presented at international conference; 3) an edited book emerging out of the aforementioned virtual conference on right-wing populism, political polarisation and inclusive communication (Routledge); 4) a single-authored article to be published in a reputed Latin American journal (ÍCONOS Revista de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO Journal); 5) an article co-authored with the Co-Applicant published in a reputed anthropology journal (Political and Legal Anthropology Review-PoLAR); 6) and two public-facing articles that disseminate research findings beyond academia (The Conversation; Open Democracy); 7) A dataset for potential research reuse. Overall, this project will provide an understanding of the global rise of right-wing populisms and authoritarian expressions without losing sight of regional histories and idiosyncrasies, while enabling comparison and tracing connections with its European manifestations.
Dr Julia Aramendi and Dr Amélie Beaude
NIF22\220310
Exploring locomotor and biomechanical diversity in the hominin fossil record based on long bone external morphology
University of Cambridge
Award value: £119,250.00
Because of their degree of preservation and potential in identifying new species from our family tree, teeth and cranial remains have long been the centre of attention in human evolutionary studies. As such, the rest of the skeleton is often ignored, especially when the remains appear in an isolated fashion or are highly fragmented. However, the postcranial skeleton is particularly relevant for understanding many behavioural and social aspects in our ancestors, and there is still much work to do in order to decipher postcranial variation throughout human evolution. The present project focusses on the analysis of key postcranial skeletal adaptations during different stages of human evolution between 4Ma and 40ka in different geographical areas in East and South Africa, and Eurasia. The main objective of the project relies on the study of long bone morphology to tackle long standing questions about the origins of some of the cornerstones of humankind (e.g., bipedalism, toolmaking). For that purpose, questions related to biomechanics, modularity & integration, and ecomorphology will be addressed by exploring the link between form and function in long bones, as well as the existing morphological relationship among limbs and within different regions of specific long bones. The study relies on a novel technique that combines cutting-edge methods to analyse the external morphology of the humeri, radii, femora and tibiae of living primates (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, baboons, macaques, modern humans) and fossil hominins (Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Homo) on the basis of digitised 3D models. The technique was tested during the applicant’s PhD and combines use of fixed and sliding landmarks, which altogether provide a detailed descriptive tool aimed at overcoming some of the difficulties resulting from the discovery of isolated, usually incomplete long bones in an increasingly complex evolutionary picture. Geometric morphometric studies will be performed upon the morphological data stored in the landmark configurations, followed by the application of multivariate statistics and artificial intelligence algorithms. The combination of these techniques and the additional calculation of shaft cross-sectional biomechanical properties will not only provide insights into morphological diversity in the samples under study, but it will also help comprehend the biomechanical significance of such variations. Hence, the present project based on the further development and application of a novel method to the study of the postcranium of extinct and extant primate groups is expected to contribute new evidence to the ongoing discussions about hominin palaeobiology, behaviour and locomotor diversity.
Dr Simone Toji and Professor Abdoumaliq Simone
NIF22\220344
Reconsidering urban narratives in Brazil: Central areas in São Paulo as problems and potentialities”
University of Sheffield
Award value: £119,250.00
Since the 1980s, when the central areas of São Paulo were abandoned due to other areas in the city being elected for financial, corporate and administrative operations (Frugoli Jr. 2000), the city centre in São Paulo has been continually rendered as an ‘urban problem.’ To ‘solve’ the ‘problem’, projects of ‘revitalization’ and ‘renovation’ have been implemented by several administrations over the decades. However, scholars and civil society have been continuously criticizing these urban interventions as acts of gentrification, in which the most vulnerable are thoroughly disregarded (Frugoli and Sklair 2009). The proposed project interrogates the characterisation of central areas of São Paulo as ‘urban problems’ by focusing on the complex network of actors involved with the local garment industry, showing how the informal and precarious dynamics of the latter have shaped the city centre historically and contemporarily. Combining a thorough literature review of historical and scholarly accounts with fieldwork observations, the project seeks to make ‘legible’ the everyday city (Amin and Thrift 2002) that emerges from the impermanent interrelations between migrants, entrepreneurs and suppliers of the clothing manufacturing, district and municipal authorities, as well as unions and local non-governmental organizations. In acknowledging the routines of the working poor and lower-middle-class residents of two neighbourhoods, Bom Retiro and Brás - in their journeys facing marginalization, economic uncertainty, and transient opportunities in São Paulo - the research will reconsider urban narratives that have overlooked these dynamics as legitimate urban processes. The project will provide insights into questions of migration, popular economies and urban intervention.
Dr Ben Fried and Dr Andrew Nash
NIF22\220506
Migrant Editors: Postwar Migration and the Making of Anglophone Literatures, 1967-1989
School of Advanced Study, University of London
Award value: £119,139.00
‘Migrant Editors’ will investigate the postwar transformation of London's publishing houses and magazines by immigrants from the wider Anglophone world. It will be the first book-length work to address this subject with the comparative scope and editorial focus that its actors and texts demand, illuminating migration’s galvanizing impact on artistic creativity and institution-building. How did immigrant-led publishing institutions develop through the decades of decolonization and shape later twentieth-century fiction, both British and more broadly Anglophone? Drawing on extensive archival research and original interviews, I will study the creative impact of four migrant editors and their institutions—Margaret Busby’s Allison & Busby publishing house, Sonny Mehta’s Picador fiction imprint, Carmen Callil’s Virago Press, and Bill Buford’s Granta magazine—on writers who span the diversity of English literatures, from Buchi Emecheta to Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie to Kazuo Ishiguro. ‘Migrant Editors’ will extend from the founding of Allison & Busby to the establishment of Granta Books, engaging with contemporaneous theorizations of migrant cultural production and contemporary theorists of world literature. In particular, I will build upon Stuart Hall’s reflections on the hybrid nature of diasporic identity, analysing mediation—between home and metropolis, text and institution—as a process that characterizes both the migrant experience and the editorial function. Throughout, I will address the creative consequences of migration—inseparable from embedded factors of race, gender, and class—for the works and their editors, exploring intersections and deviations across London’s literary communities. This project will result in a monograph, two academic journal articles, public engagement across several platforms, and an international conference on the theme of ‘Migrant Cultural Institutions’. By reshaping our understanding of the institutional background powering the postwar expansion of literatures in English, ‘Migrant Editors’ will shed new light on canonical authors, foreground a neglected dimension of British immigrant life, and help to define the emergent academic field of the Global Anglophone.
Dr Fabrizio Ansani and Professor Maria Fusaro
NIF22\220522
The Medieval Origins of Raw Materials Diplomacy: Saltpeter Trade between Italy and England in the Late Fifteenth Century
University of Exeter
Award value: £119,250.00
The main goal of this proposal is to completely revise the dynamics of late medieval war economy. It aims at a reinterpretation of strategic raw materials as marketable goods, providing a review of their commercial viability and business performance, trade regulations and incentive structures. This will be done by concentrating on the procurement of saltpeter, the irreplaceable, rare, and expensive component of gunpowder, indispensable for waging war at the time of the so-called ‘artillery revolution’. Focussing on the consistent trade flow between Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, the project will revise the conception of strategic materials in the fifteenth-century, demonstrating how contemporary governments differentiated military goods from industrial commodities. It will show how considering a commodity as ‘critical’ influenced the behaviour of authorities, thus demonstrating that policymakers developed and implemented an idea of military logistics diametrically opposite to the improvised strategies pursued by medieval commanders: the first Offices of Ordnance, established contemporaneously in Naples and London, were indeed the direct result of this rationalized planning. The project will also stress the late medieval origins of the cooperation between private commercial firms and states in providing equipment for the new standing armies. It will therefore analyse how merchant-bankers and craftsmen profited from, and served well, the realization of governmental grand strategies, detailing the crucial role played by these groups in helping rulers access larger pools of critical materials – assets which were no less important than financial revenues. The project considers ambassadorial negotiations as state interventions in the market, tracing the roots of the present-day ‘raw material diplomacy’ and highlighting the effects of the economic interdependence between fifteenth-century European powers.
English and Italian documentary evidence will be analysed through methodologies proper to the history of economics, war, and institutions, with the aim of offering a comprehensive view of a multifaceted subject – the centuries-old quest for strategic supplies – whose history is yet to be written. The detailed assessment of these data will form the basis of a monograph focused on fifteenth-century saltpeter exports from Southern Italy to England, Portugal, and Burgundy aimed at the 'New Studies in European History' series published by Cambridge University Press. The monograph will also reassess the early history of gunpowder technology, proving how the exploitation of a domestic source allowed a rapid advance in artillery weapons across medieval Europe.
Dr Liran Samuni and Dr Catherine Hobaiter
NIF22\220640
Chimpanzee Cultures: social learning and tool-use flexibility in savanna chimpanzees
University of St Andrews
Award value: £118,692.00
Cultural practices and the ability to manufacture and use tools are hallmarks of human societies, and until just a generation ago were considered the answer to the question of what makes us humans. To explore human behavioural uniqueness, we often rely on comparative studies of our extant relatives, especially chimpanzees, who show a variety of tool-use behaviours and a diversity of potential cultural traits. To identify cultural practices within a population, it is important to consider both the social and ecological impacts on behavioural expressions. However, given the time-intensive and detailed observations needed to inform cultural practices, studies investigating both the social and ecological drivers of tool use expressions simultaneously in multiple chimpanzee groups are rare. Here, I propose to study the cultural and ecological influences of a recently described tool-use behaviour - underwater algae fishing - in six chimpanzee groups living in the savanna environment of the Moyen Bafing National Park, Guinea. Algae fishing tool-use behaviour is ideal to address questions on cultural evolution, as it offers the rare opportunity to examine the impact of the social and physical environment on tool use ontogeny and expression. The ecology of algae fishing sites is temporally variable due to changes in water depth and algae availability, offering the opportunity to inquire whether individuals maintain group-specific variations despite the necessity to continuously adapt tool use behaviours to the changing environment. Further, since algae fishing locations are frequented by multiple individuals at once and repeatedly over time, detailed cross-sectional data can be collected and optimized using standardized camera trapping methods. Using camera trap footage collected over a 3-yr period and across 30 algae fishing sites, I will study within and between-group variation in tool use techniques and tool materials, the ontogeny of tool use behaviour, and the impact of tolerance on the successful acquisition of tool use. I will explore these tool use aspects while accounting for water depth, algae location, and availability of tool materials. Together these objectives will allow me to examine the existence of cultural traditions and the role of social learning mechanisms in the acquisition of skilled tool use, a prerequisite of cultural evolution as a conduit to understand the evolutionary pathway of human material culture.
Dr Nadezhda Mamontova and Professor Jonathan Oldfield
NIF22\220691
'Soviet Underground’: The Geopower, Resource-Making, and Relational Ontologies of Volumetric Cartography in the Arctic
University of Birmingham
Award value: £114,205.50
Geological knowledge as an instrument of power has recently gained attention in social sciences. Research has proposed the concept of geopower to explore the relationship between geological processes and (geo)political actions. Geontopower is exercised through both research and policy regarding resource extraction. Yet most of the research has focused narrowly on neoliberal forms of governance and their critique, overlooking Soviet experiments with geological matter, distinct geo-political policies and practices which continue to impact current political debates and strategies. This research intends to examine the role of geological maps in the production and conceptualisation of ‘resources’ in Soviet Russia, with the focus on the debates among leading Soviet geologists on the essence of geological matter and the ways of its cartographic imagination. It further discusses the relations between mapping and geopower regarding how disagreements in interpretations of the earth history, based on country-specific regimes of geological knowledge production, have stimulated recent debates over the borders, resources, and power control in the Arctic. In particular, this research will show how different regimes of geological knowledge production in tandem with environmental security and protectionist discourses affect current Arctic international policies, and what role geological maps play in this process. At a theoretical level, this research engages with the ‘geological turn’ in social sciences which calls for critical reconsidering the role of geological imagination in social processes. It is based on documents stored in the Russian archives, revealing the evolution of the notion ‘resources’, developed by Soviet academic and state agencies, and the analysis of state orders, strategies and protocols over the Arctic development and resource protection. Understanding how the notion of ‘resources’ is framed in different political and metrological regimes is relevant to a wide range of energy security, environmental and social questions we face as a result of the long-term history of resource exploitation in the Arctic.
Dr Leo Townsend and Dr Nat Hansen
NIF22\220695
Having Our Say: The Pragmatics and Politics of Group Speech
University of Reading
Award value: £107,130.00
Social groups of various kinds have the capacity to perform speech acts: they can recruit an individual to speak for them, or they can rally behind a unified message. When the company spokesperson announces its divestment from fossil fuels, or the protest group demands equal pay for all, these speech acts of announcing and demanding are attributable to the group itself, and they normatively commit the whole group, not simply the individuals involved in their production. It is the company that needs to follow through on its announcement, and the protest group that needs to demonstrate entitlement to its demands. Moreover, just as groups of various kinds are capable of performing speech acts, so too can this capacity can be impeded: group speech can be silenced, distorted or not given due consideration. For example, a group’s spokesperson might be threatened or intimidated into silence, or the demands of the protest group might be dismissed out of hand, because of the social identity of its members. Such cases are apt to be described as genuine injustices; it is not simply that group speech goes wrong, but that the group itself is wronged in the exercise of its linguistic agency. This research project is a systematic exploration of the pragmatics and politics of group speech—of what it takes for groups to speak (“pragmatics”), and how the speech of certain groups may be systematically empowered or disempowered (“politics”). The project aims to develop a broadly Austinian account of group speech, and use this account to characterise practices of group silencing and collective communicative resistance—that is, ways in which certain groups’ efforts to perform certain speech acts are unjustly disabled or dismissed, and how groups can seek to counteract such injustices. In the course of doing so, the project highlights real-world practices of group silencing that take place within legally-required consultation processes between States and Indigenous and rural communities, and examines some of the ways that these communities have sought to resist such treatment.
Dr Carlo Bottaini and Dr Dirk Brandherm
NIF22\220821
From Boom to Bust on the Atlantic Fringe – copper supply networks in the Irish Later Bronze Age
Queen's University Belfast
Award value: £119,250.00
For the entire duration of the Bronze Age (c. 2500-800 BC) metallurgy provided one of the most significant drivers for both technological and societal change. The ubiquitous and growing demand for copper, when copper ores only occur in some closely circumscribed geographical areas, shaped new exchange networks and established new communities of practice. Over the course of the later 3rd to early 1st millennia BC, exhaustion of some of the existing copper supply sources and the opening up of others led to periodic changes in regional and inter-regional socio-economic interactions. Often these changes in copper supply patterns align with wider transformations in the archaeological record. For Britain, the outline of these developments is now reasonably well understood, but the same does not hold true for many other parts of Atlantic Europe. For the Later Bronze Age of Ireland in particular, we still lack reliable data that could provide us with insights into changes in copper supply patterns. What we do know is that Irish copper sources dominated the supply of that metal across the British Isles for much of the Early Bronze Age, but that with the exhaustion of the respective ore bodies and concomitant decline of Irish copper mining, Ireland lost its position as a net exporter of copper and from the mid 2nd millennium onward would have had to import most of the copper feeding its domestic metalwork production. This is despite the fact that metalwork production and consumption continued to increase throughout the Irish Later Bronze Age. The present project aims to address this gap in our understanding. It will establish the sources of the copper consumed in Ireland after the island lost its role as the main supplier of that metal in the British Isles, and on this basis will reassess the island’s changing role in wider regional and inter-regional socio-economic interactions. The project will also provide a more reliable chronological framework for Irish Later Bronze Age metalwork and the copper supply patterns underpinning its production, which in turn will allow us to assess how changes in these patterns relate to other transformations in the archaeological record, concerning population density, land-use and settlement structures, as well as the emergence of powerful chiefdom-type polities that controlled crucial economic resources and trade. In doing so, the project will facilitate the placing of these developments in a wider Insular and European context.
Dr Taarini Mookherjee and Dr Mark Burnett
NIF22\220414
Shakespeare, India, Diaspora
Queen's University Belfast
Award value: £119,250.00
Despite its ubiquity in cultural studies, diaspora is a term infrequently employed in the flourishing fields of Global and Indian Shakespeare criticism. Yet some of the most globally visible adaptations of ‘Indian’ Shakespeare have been conceived of, funded by, or performed in the diaspora. In this project, I will be mobilizing theories of diaspora as a lens for the analysis of Indian Shakespeare adaptations in the UK, USA, and Canada, three countries with prominent and markedly different South Asian diasporic communities. These adaptations raise questions about nomenclature: how should we designate productions that resist neat categorization? What literary, cultural, and social milieu(s) should we draw on in our analyses? And what avenues of analysis do they offer for broader questions about the relationship between diasporic audiences and national identities? I argue that diasporic theory offers a useful vocabulary for analyzing these Indian Shakespeare adaptations for three reasons. First, while the diasporic context necessarily takes us beyond the physical boundaries of the nation-state, it remains inescapably linked in affective, political, economic, and social modes to the homeland. Therefore, by focusing on the Indian diasporic adaptations of Shakespeare, we can explore the ways in which these works respond to and reformulate the idea of the Indian nation. Second, as a liminal condition that is defined by loss, the diasporic experience affords an effective framework for thinking through the multiple histories of migration, legacies of colonialism, and intersections of global capital today. Finally, the diaspora offers a paradigmatic model for a theorization of adaptation; to be a member of a diasporic community is to literally inhabit a space of adaptation in which different languages, histories, and cultures intersect. In this project, I draw on a range of different genres and media to develop an expansive and grounded argument that moves beyond a nation-based approach to Global Shakespeare. Among my samples are Rajat Kapoor’s theatrical experiments with Shakespeare and clowns (2009–), the RSC’s Indianized 'Much Ado About Nothing' (2012), and 'We That Are Young' (2017), Preti Taneja’s diasporic and intertextual feminist rewriting of 'King Lear'. Over the course of the two-year fellowship, I plan to complete my second monograph, 'Shakespeare, India, Diaspora', convene an international symposium at Queen’s University Belfast, and co-edit, with Prof. M. T. Burnett, a special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin on the topic of ''Shakespeare, Diaspora, and Performance, that will expand on the theories and practices excavated in the monograph.
Dr Benedetta Luciana Sara Carnaghi and Dr Helen Roche
NIF22\220373
Making Fun of the Fascists: Humour Against the Leader Cult in Italy, France, and Germany, 1922–1945
Durham University
Award value: £118,989.65
In 1925–1926, as the world’s first fascist dictatorship consolidated its power, there were four high-profile attempts on the life of the Duce, Benito Mussolini. As I show in my award-winning paper ‘Mussolini’s Four Would-be Assassins: Emergency Politics and the Consolidation of Fascist Power’, each attempt failed. Fascist propaganda responded to these assassination attempts by celebrating Mussolini’s bodily power and highlighting the contrast between the Duce’s virility and the weaker bodies of Fascism’s defeated enemies. This aspect of the ‘liturgy of fascism’ (Emilio Gentile) is well known. The starting point for my postdoctoral project is an examination of its unintended consequences: discourses celebrating the leader’s body provoked mockery by the regime’s opponents. Humour against the cult of the leader became a form of resistance to authoritarianism. Over time, jokes about the Duce evolved into but one part of a wider culture of using humour to undermine the regime’s authority and legitimacy. Examining the uses of humour in combatting European authoritarianism before and during the Second World War, ‘Making Fun of the Fascists: Humour Against the Leader Cult in Italy, France, and Germany, 1922–1945’ will provide the first monograph-length study of humour as a common strategy of resistance in Fascist Italy (1922–1945), Nazi Germany (1933–1945), and Vichy France (1940–1944). Based on archival records held principally in four countries (Italy, Germany, France, and Britain), it will combine the methodologies of comparative, micro, and ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ (everyday history), with those of the history of emotions. Fascist leaders present a fictitious narrative of imminent collapse, promising an imminent new order. By arguing that humour is a tool to deconstruct this fictitious narrative that fascist propaganda built around the cult of the leader, I will make a substantial contribution to all the fields whose methodologies I employ and to the history of authoritarianism more generally. The project is also grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical approach pertaining to the theory of humour as resistance. Among others, Sigmund Freud develops this theory in his ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’, where he argues that the function of humour is to release excess energy. Freud viewed humour as the highest, most mature defence mechanism. My project contributes to the field by grounding such a theory in the lived experience of people under authoritarian regimes.
Dr Luciana Mabel Cordo Russo and Professor Helen Fulton
NIF22\220099
Charlemagne in Wales: The Transmission, Reception, and Translation of Charlemagne Narratives in Medieval Wales
University of Bristol
Award value: £112,458
The legend of Charlemagne is one of the most popular sources of narrative in the Middle Ages, and one which substantially contributed to the configuration of medieval European culture and identity. Although a significant corpus of Charlemagne texts circulated in Wales, inspiring a series of translations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this material has received comparatively little attention and is still poorly known. This project thus intends to fill this gap in knowledge by systematically studying for the first time all the Charlemagne material produced in Wales with the aim of elucidating how Charlemagne texts were transmitted, translated, rewritten and interpreted for their new Welsh audiences. In addition, it will further our understanding of the place of Welsh texts within wider British and European networks of texts related to the legend of Charlemagne in north-western Europe, simultaneously providing insights on their connections, shared common elements and idiosyncrasies. The Charlemagne material comprises not only a cycle composed of four popular Latin and French texts translated into Middle Welsh, but also the little-studied Kedymdeithyas Amlyn ac Amic (The Friendship of Amlyn anc Amic). Moreover, all the references in thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth-century Welsh poetry will be identified and examined, since they offer valuable clues to the reception of the Charlemagne legend and the access to French-language material. The objectives of the project will be accomplished by the study of the textual transmission and material context of the tales (including new work on little-explored Welsh manuscripts), the formal and thematic comparative analysis of target and source texts, the analysis of the strategies of translation, the identification, where possible, of patrons, translators, and audiences, and the examination of the place of the Welsh texts within broader insular and European literary traditions. The project's global approach and multiple levels of analysis (philological, material, textual, historical) will be implemented by way of an innovative multidisciplinary methodology combining new methods in philology and manuscript studies, a linguistic-pragmatic approach for the identification of syntactical and stylistic patterns in the process of literary transfer, narratology, and medieval translation, framed in cutting-edge theoretical developments within the fields of comparative medieval literature, linguistic approaches to translation, and translation studies.
Dr Yuri Kawaguchi and Professor Bridget Waller
NIF22\220105
Evolutionary Function of Infantile Features in Faces: How does “babyness” differ within and between species?
Nottingham Trent University
Award value: £119,250
All mammals (and humans in particular) have a long period of vulnerability in early development and so receiving adequate care from adults is critical for their survival. The mechanisms underlying parenting and other social interactions with infants are therefore important to understand. Almost 80 years ago, early scientists proposed that a facial “baby schema”(Lorenz, 1943), a set of physical features of infants, including a relatively bigger forehead and eyes, protruding cheeks, and a small nose and mouth, are key features in distinguishing infants from adults. This baby schema was assumed to be shared across species and function as a releaser of caretaking behaviour from conspecific adults. Empirical studies in humans support this idea, but, surprisingly, this assumption has not been tested in non-human animals. We do not know whether the baby schema has shared form and function across species and whether these features vary as a function of need for adult support. If the baby schema does act as a releaser of caretaking, variation across species and individuals should be related to the amount of adult care towards infants. However, expression of babyness (hence vulnerability) could also be risky due to infanticide in some species. We will test the function of infantile facial features across primates to understand the selection pressures that lead to its evolution. The aim of this project is to substantially update and confirm classic work using a new methodology. This is important because it will give an insight into the mechanisms underlying parenting and other social interactions with infants, which is critical for survival of all mammals. The project will achieve a comprehensive understanding of the function of infantile features in faces, thereby gaining more insight into the crucial function of the face in social interaction.
Dr Sonam Silangwengmu and Professor Ulrike Roesler
NIF22\220152
The Utilisation of Local Narratives in Tourism Development in Contemporary Eastern Tibet, China
University of Oxford
Award value: £115,132.50
Tibet’s cultural and historical heritage has long been seen as an essential source and condition of tourism and economic development in contemporary China. Studies have already pointed out a mutually beneficial relationship between culture and tourism (Kolås 2007; Hillman 2009). In recent years, with the State’s slogan of “telling China stories well (Chin. Jianghao zhongguo gushi)” through cultural tourism projects (Huang and Wang 2019), narrative literature such as myths, legends, and folktales is used as a mean of tourism promotion and political propaganda. In this process, local narratives are reconstructed and reinterpreted to serve the State’s political aspirations. However, little research has been done on the importance of the role of the narratives and their implications in the tourism sectors in Tibetan regions, where they have been given new meanings and functions. Thus, this proposed project aims to investigate the politics and poetics of local narratives concerning historical and legendary figures such as the Chinese Princess Wencheng (7th century CE), who was married to the Tibetan Emperor Songtsen Gampo (c. 618-650), the 6th Dalai Lama Tshangyang Gyamtso (1683-1706), and the epic hero King Gesar. These figures are an integral part of the Tibetan narrative traditions in the eastern Tibetan region of Kham. They are now also being remodelled and utilised in developing the local tourism industry. By conducting ethnographic fieldwork and analysing primary and secondary sources, the following research questions are addressed in this project: How have the legends and narratives of historical figures been restructured and used in Kham’s current cultural tourism projects to fit into the State’s recent scheme of “telling China stories well”? Are the traditional narratives gradually eroded and replaced by new narratives if the “tourist version” becomes dominant? Do politics and tourism have shaped public perception of these narratives and figures, and how are local Tibetans involved in and challenged by the cultural politics of contemporary China’s national narration? Examining the above research questions on the utilisation and incorporation of local narratives into tourism development projects in Kham, this proposed project will shed light on how the State purposefully reconstructs, frames, and represents narrative literature and traditional culture of the Tibetans in particular, and ethnic minorities in general, in tourism, as well as the dilemmas that locals face and the political implications such cultural reconstruction have in contemporary China.
Dr Lila Braunschweig and Dr Flora Renz
NIF22\220175
The Art of Not Being Sexed Quite so Much: A Feminist Theory of the Neutral
University of Kent
Award value: £105,750
How can we alter and transform gender norms that negatively affect the lives of many women, as well as LGBTQ* people? This project seeks to answer this question by looking at the role of gender regulations and assignations in the reproduction of gender norms. Drawing on materialist, as well as queer and critical trans feminist perspectives, this project asks what collective challenges to structurual and interrelational gender norms might be possible.
Through case studies of different instances where gender norms most acutely intersect with everyday day life, namely sex-segregated bathrooms, gender markers on identity documents, and intersubjective gender categorizations, the project offers a systematic critique of social processes of gender regulation and assignation and their overlooked role in the persistence gender hierarchies. Those social processes encourage normative gender habitus, clog our symbolic imaginaries with rigid and hierarchical conceptions of difference, and particularly marginalize queer, trans and intersex persons. While the option to add additional gender markers beyond male and female is gaining ground in a number of jurisdictions, this project will consider whether this option fully addresses the prevailing effects of gendered and gendering social processes.
Using these case studies as a basis, the project theorizes an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms that it conceptualizes as a politics of non-assignation and norm alleviation. To do this, the project proposes a critical reconstruction of the ‘neutral’, drawing on an innovative reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes as well as on echoing traces of this approach in queer and feminist scholarships. The project aims to bring this theoretical approach in conversation with contemporary efforts at neutrality, specifically experiments like gender-neutral bathrooms, or gender-neutral pedagogy. From there emerges an alternative emancipatory conception of the neutral, distinct from traditional and mainstream conceptions of gender-blindness, widely criticized by feminist theorists for their androcentric effects. Interrupting the regulation and governing of individuals and groups according to explicit gender divisions and implicit normative assumptions produces two main transformations. Firstly, it opens a space for inventive gender expressions without forcing or normalizing them. Secondly, it makes sexual difference insignificant in certain moments and spaces and alleviates the weight of gender in our symbolic imaginaries. The overall objective of this project is therefore threefold: to characterize and theorize such a feminist and queer theory of the neutral, highlight its contribution to contemporary reflections on gender justice; and investigate its core practical, ethical, legal and political implications.
Dr Gabriele Bonomelli and Professor Barbara Bombi
NIF22\220253
Dynamics of conflict. Original Perspectives on Religious Turmoil in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1378-1603)
University of Kent
Award value: £114,750
This project will focus on the production of fictitious letters, namely satirical poems, fictitious dialogues, and Latin and Vernacular pamphlets and invectives that were addressed to the major political and religious figures between between the outbreak of the Great Western Schism in 1378 and the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. These texts will be examined within the context of diplomatic communication and religious conflict, starting from the distinctiveness of the English religious milieu, and comparing it to the Italian and German contexts. The project will challenge scholarly debates on recusant history and on the strategies used by the Catholics to express dissent against the English Crown, especially in the sixteenth century. In doing so, the project will be developed following a four-step methodology: it will be grounded on a comparative study of non-official polemical literature and politically relevant writings in England, Germany and Italy; it will approach the study of these sources using a "longue durée" chronological framework that bridges over the Medieval and the Early Modern periods; it will provide a thorough work of analysis and edition of unedited primary sources from European manuscript repositories; and it will implement an interdisciplinary approach in the examination of unedited primary sources, concerned with their language, rhetoric, codicological and palaeographical features, and historical context.
Dr Dipali Mathur and Dr Robert Porter
NIF22\220371
“Rematerializing” the Digital: Governmentality and the Environmental Consequences of Life Online
University of Ulster
Award value: £119,250
As the management of toxic wastes and pollution generated by our ‘online’ lives becomes one of the central challenges of the 21st century, this project responds to an urgent political problem: what constitutes “good governance” apropos the environmental costs of digital technology? In employing Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this project is interested in analysing the “discursive regimes” through which the problem of what we call “digital toxicity” is rendered visible and ‘governable’. As a way of focusing its research, the project will undertake a cross-cultural analysis of e-waste governance in the UK and India in order to make broader claims about colonial histories and the global asymmetries of power and privilege that underpin the governance of contemporary e-waste management but remain invisible in political and policy decisions. For instance, even though research has demonstrated that over 90% of waste is generated before consumers can even purchase the product, at the stages of mining, manufacturing, distribution and retail (Lepawsky 2018: 7), e-waste policy excludes consideration of highly polluting wastes generated upstream at the level of industry and instead represents e-waste as a “postconsumer” problem. Unsurprisingly, most of these heavily polluting and resource-intensive processes are the source of livelihood for marginalized communities in developing countries of Africa, Asia and South America. While the management of e-waste is invariably described as a technical problem or a policy problem, the project argues that it is a complex social and cultural problem because the way in which we think about digital technologies shapes our ethics and our politics. More specifically, it is by re-thinking the problem of e-waste from a socio-cultural perspective that we are able to recognize the problem in the more expanded sense of e-“wastes”, for affecting change. Can UK’s e-waste policy help us ‘make sense’ of India’s burgeoning informal e-waste economy? Conversely, when read from the context of a developing country, do UK’s e-waste policy concerns rewrite colonial imbalances of power?
Dr Yair Berlin and Professor Yaron Peleg
NIF22\220404
The Zionist ‘negation of the diaspora’ and the emotional experience of the fear of the gentile
University of Cambridge
Award value: £94,575
For many of Israel’s founding generation, Israel was above all experienced as the ‘negation of the diaspora’. This has been widely described by several historians, perhaps most notably by Anita Shapira, who also described the decline of this ethos from the 1960s onwards. When reading the Zionist discourse about diaspora life we can find a widespread use of emotional language to describe both life in the diaspora and its negation. The use of this language has been recognized in the literature but is almost always mentioned to illustrate attitudes towards the diaspora rather than to analyze the emotional terminology in itself.
In this book-length study, this project will analyze the emotional understanding embedded in the changing and diverse relationship to the diaspora experience in Zionist and Israeli discourse, focusing mostly on the range of feelings associated with fear. The project will use recent historical and anthropological methodologies that place the emotional world at the centre of our understanding of cultures and historical processes. The project examines how the Zionist movement’s evolving approach to the emotion of fear reflects the more general ethos of 'eradication' of fear in modern society. The project will unravel the hidden emotional discourse embedded in the representation of the diaspora to achieve a thicker and more nuanced understanding of the cultural history of the ‘negation of the diaspora’ as a drama that is still ongoing and is not just part of Israeli society's historical past. As such, even when explicit talk about the ‘negation of the diaspora’ appeared to have lost much of its power, traces of the cultural effort to eliminate this 'diasporic fear' can still be found, for example, in the discourse of fear of the 'Arab enemy' and in the attempt to describe the state of Israel as a place of 'emotional security' for Jews.
Dr Whitney Pailman and Professor Federico Caprotti
NIF22\220448
Integrated Business Models for Off-grid Energy Access in Low-income Urban Settlements at the Grid’s Edge
University of Exeter
Award value: £79,190
To provide affordable, modern, and sustainable energy access in cities, innovative and integrated approaches are needed. Globally, rapid rates of urbanisation place additional demands on urban infrastructure systems to keep pace with growing energy service delivery needs. The complexities of providing essential energy infrastructure and basic services are particularly pronounced within cities in the Global South, where urban and peri-urban communities experience considerable energy access challenges. Within Africa, millions of urban and peri-urban households living directly under the grid do not have access to electricity or cannot afford to use grid electricity. This presents both a pressing challenge and opportunity for researchers, innovators, utilities, the private sector, and policy makers to critically engage with new ways to of addressing pertinent energy access challenges within low-income urban settlements. This necessitates a paradigm shift from singular, centralised modalities of grid infrastructure to recognising heterogeneity in urban energy systems and the integration of off-grid solutions to fill the energy access deficit.
While there has been a greater focus on the application of mini-grids in rural contexts where grid extension is not technically or financially viable, there is paucity in the academic literature on the application of stand-alone mini-grids in urban low-income contexts. This is an important area of research as developing mini-grids in urban contexts add additional layers of complexity. Grid infrastructure is often not designed to co-exist with multiple modes of off-grid technologies, and urban energy governance often fails to adequately include off-grid technologies like mini-girds. Furthermore, although there has been a growing interest in grid connected mini-grids, very few academic studies have applied an integrated business model approach to off-grid mini-grids in urban low-income settlements and isolated/stand-alone mini-grid applications.
The proposed research project uses a comparative case study of innovative mini-grid pilots in low income settlements through the Umbane mini-grid pilot project in Cape Town and the Utilities 2.0 initiative in Uganda. The aim of the study is to explore how integrated approaches to off-gird electrification and planning can improve the quality of urban infrastructure service delivery and include mini-grids more effectively in urban electrification strategies. The proposed study will use a mixed methods approach through qualitative and quantitative research including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, surveys and document analysis. A key contribution of the proposed study is analysing how an integrated utility business model can be applied to off-grid mini-grids in urban informal/low-income settlements in Sub-Saharan African cities.
Dr Alessia Zubani and Professor Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina
NIF22\220475
Engineering Empire: Technology and Power in the Late Antique and Medieval Middle East
University of Oxford
Award value: £116,278.50
The project explores the history of technology in the late antique and medieval Middle East and its importance as a fundamental element in political and royal ideologies of power. Despite extensive scholarship on the history of science in this context, the political and social applications of technology remain largely unexplored. On the one hand, this is consistent with the general neglect affecting the history of this discipline in this region. Yet, such a state of affairs also reflects long-held assumptions regarding the primacy attributed to the Hellenistic School of mechanics and its main heirs, the Byzantine engineers. By posing a direct link between the Hellenistic and Byzantine technological traditions, scholarship implicitly ruled out the possibility that non-Greek mechanicians might also have made a significant contribution to the history of late antique mechanics. It has also been assumed that such interest in technology is a development characteristic of Western thought and societies. This project challenges these interpretations of history to achieve the first systematic study of the entanglement between politics and technology in Sasanian Iran and the early Medieval Islamicate world. Though it addresses the issue from various perspectives, the role played by ingenious devices—from automata to talking statues and clocks—in ideological programs, is its primary focus. To date, the lack of material evidence ensured that such devices remain largely neglected. The project overcomes this limitation by relying on textual sources from various languages, including Latin, Greek, Middle Persian, Arabic, and Persian, as well as iconographic evidence, thus providing a holistic approach to the study of technology in the late antique and early medieval Middle East, which does not confine itself to the study of material culture. The project leverages this new methodological approach to provide the earliest comprehensive study of the relationship between technology, artistic-material culture, and processes of political ideology formation in early medieval Islamicate societies. By establishing and analysing patterns of circulation of ingenious devices as diplomatic gifts, however, it also provides new insights into the existence of an imperial visual culture common to all major courts in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Furthermore, in examining the transfer of technological knowledge through this wide region from a diachronic perspective, it also advances our knowledge of how Islamicate mechanics relates to its Hellenistic and Iranian antecedents.
Dr Anne Kairu and Professor Fiona Nunan
NIF22\220497
Critical Review of the Implications of Project Requirements of UK Voluntary Carbon Offset Schemes
University of Birmingham
Award value: £119,100
Climate change is threatening human and biodiversity habitats across the world. Among the many strategies that have been developed to mitigate climate change is the use of carbon offsets. This study seeks to assess the technical specifications set by voluntary carbon offset schemes and identify challenges experienced in adhering to these specifications over time in community-based offsetting projects. The findings will inform the design and specifications of carbon offset projects, and support needed for the ongoing effectiveness and sustainability of such projects. Available research has reported on limited success, or even failure, of carbon offset projects from the community perspective. There has been little attention given to the technical specifications of carbon offset projects and how they affect implementation, co-benefits and sustainability of the projects in the Global South. This research therefore seeks to answer the following research question: how do the technical specifications of voluntary offset schemes affect the implementation, co-benefits and sustainability of offsetting projects in the Global South?
The project will be carried out in the UK and Kenya. Voluntary offsetting schemes in the UK will be mapped and their project selection and development specifications, and monitoring and reporting requirements, reviewed in response to the aims of the project. Purposive and snowball sampling will be used to identify respondents for key informant interviews amongst voluntary carbon offsetting schemes, aiming to interview at least five key personnel within the schemes. Secondary data on carbon offset schemes will be obtained from grey literature, policy documents and online sources. Two offsetting projects will be selected in Kenya and will be studied in detail. The findings of this study will inform the design and requirements in implementation of carbon offsetting schemes that are more appropriate, fair, sustainable and effective, essential for both local communities and for the future of offsetting schemes in the fight against climate change.
Dr Gordon Omenya and Dr Neil Carrier
NIF22\220517
Resilient Memories, Claim Making and Cultural Heritage Among the Migrant and Stateless Makonde Community in Kenya.
University of Bristol
Award value: £110,175
This project focuses on critical questions of memory and heritage in East Africa through a focus on the Makonde people, in Kenya, a group who came originally from Mozambique, and only recently gained Kenyan citizenship. It explores heritage and identity for such a minority group living in a land where their presence and rights have not always been secure. The Makonde community is in this dilemma where it finds itself within a diversity of cultural forms and it is struggling to collectively re-own its culture and heritage. As critical heritage scholars argue, heritage is inherently linked with power relations and representation and is a space for contestation where contesting groups showcase their resilience. Within this space, issues of whether people belong or not, as well as claims over ownership and power control, support the making of heritage. Heritage scholars further argue that within the same space, there are social, economic and political struggles as heritage is contested, delineated and appropriated.
This project explores Makonde material culture and cultural heritage within a wider theme of a displaced and migrant community who lives in Kenya having migrated from Mozambique. About 18,500 Makonde migrants have stayed in Kenya for many decades and are finding themselves in a dilemma of threat to their cultural heritage and social memories. However, Makonde people have been able to deal with their social memories while at the same time making claims on the land that they have lived in for several decades in Kenya. The Makonde is therefore an interesting case-study of how communities can be resilient about their social and collective memories, identities and heritage even in places where they find themselves as a diasporic minority group.
The aim of this study is therefore to: examine the relations between the usage of memory and arts in the reconstruction of Makonde’s heritage; examine resilience building by Makonde on their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in Kenya; assess how Makonde resilient memories, culture and heritage have impacted on Kenya’s culture and heritage as well as the process of claim making and contestations by the Makonde community. Finally, the study evaluates the extent of social and economic integration between Makonde and their host communities in Kenya. A descriptive research design and a postcolonial theory will be used in undertaking the study.
Dr Scott Romaniuk and Professor Christian Kaunert
NIF22\220694
Counter-Terrorism Policies and Civil Society Organizations in Central and Eastern Europe: A Cross-Country Comparative Analysis
University of South Wales
Award value: £119,250
The United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) influenced the formation or domestication of counter-terrorism policy through the United Nations Security Council, Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and TSA in many parts of the Western and non-Western worlds. However, these Western and Western-styled authorities constitute only part of the line-up of players and actors on the influencing side. What should be determined as part of a larger research agenda is the role of the other non-Western actors when it comes to influencing the proliferation of counter-terrorism policies and their effects on civil society elsewhere. Mixed methods research, including experimental methods, could lead scholars and additional scholarship to grasp the nature of the emergence of counter-terrorism policies in still relatively young and fragile democracies in Central and Eastern Europe, specifically the role of Russia and influencing of neighboring former-Soviet bloc states. As against previous studies where the US, UK and other Western powers influenced the formation of counter-terrorism measures, Russia has assumed an active position in this area. This opens up to further study on the influence of non-Western state as influential state actors deconstructing Western democratic ideals in and around Europe. Thus, examining the empirical impacts of such influence could enhance scholarly views on the democratic character or trajectories of some of these states that comprise the European Union (EU). This study complements and builds on the applicant’s forthcoming book project through Lexington Books addressing the intersection of counter-terrorism and security policy and civil society organizations in Central Europe.
Dr Olufemi Adetunji and Dr Cathy Daly
NIF22\220700
Climate Risk and Vulnerability of Cultural Heritage in Nigeria: Mapping and Investigating Nature-based Adaptation Strategies
University of Lincoln
Award value: £116,250
Around the world, cultural heritage sites are vulnerable and conceivably being lost to the impacts of climate change such as flooding, bushfires and coastal erosion which is resulting in loss of heritage and the detachment of individuals and communities from the histories of the past. Changes in climatic conditions occur in varying dimensions affecting temperature, precipitation level, and sea level resulting in extreme weather events and fast deterioration and destruction of cultural heritage sites around the world. Scholars are also advocating nature-based strategies for adaptation and mitigation of climate change to harness the potentials of nature in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and improvement of capacities of communities to adapt to climate change impacts. In Nigeria, for instance, various cultural heritage sites which represent the histories and identities of communities are facing increasing risks from climate change and variability. This project, therefore, aims to evaluate and visualize potential exposure and vulnerabilities of national monuments to climate change but also to investigate nature-based adaptation strategies to address the impacts. The project will adopt a combination of innovative geospatial and qualitative methods to assess the values of cultural heritage to local communities. Geospatial data on location, climate, topography and sea level of the heritage sites listed on the national and state heritage registers will be collected to under the exposure and vulnerability of the sites to climate change. Also, interviews of key informants across local communities of the heritage sites will be conducted to understand the values and connections of the communities to the heritage sites. Lastly, two expert review fora will be conducted to include government employees, professionals, researchers, community organisations and non-government organisations to understand the impacts of policies and interventions to address climate change in Nigeria. The project will further develop National Monument Climate Risk Index (NMCRI) and Nature-based Heritage Adaptation Checklist (NbHAC) to inform the level of exposure and vulnerability of heritage sites to climate change and understand the nature-based solutions that can be implemented in different communities in Nigeria.