British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Awards 2026
The British Academy is proud to announce the award of 212 British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants worth over £1.9 million to support primary research in the SHAPE disciplines.
In this round, over 1,250 applications were submitted for assessment, resulting in a success rate of 16 per cent.
Worth up to £10,000 over a period of up to two years, the awards will support academics working at universities and research institutions across the UK- as well as independent scholars- by covering the cost of expenses arising from a particular research project.
Funding for the Small Research Grants programme is a public-private collaboration. Support is provided by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST), the Leverhulme Trust and Wellcome. The program has also received support from other partners and endowed funds, including the British Accounting and Finance Association, the Sino-British Fellowship Trust, and the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.
The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants 2026 awardees are:
Please note: Awards are divided by funder and arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.
Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST)
Dr Atta Addo
SRG26\262123
Project Title: Constitutional Corruption and AI Anti-Corruption Systems: A Governance Framework for High-Corruption Contexts
University of Surrey
Value awarded: £9985.11
Funded by: BIST
Governments across the developing world are procuring AI to fight corruption. Yet successive generations of digital anti-corruption technology have been co-opted by the arrangements they were designed to displace. Ghana's Revenue Authority has announced a major AI deployment at customs, a site with a 45-year anti-corruption record documented in four leading peer-reviewed publications by the author. Most research focuses on operational corruption: street-level bribes, facilitation payments, and petty fraud. This project addresses constitutional corruption, a form of elite corruption where political principals, procurement officers, vendors and other elites constitute the nature and scope of anti-corruption systems before and during deployment. Building on prior Ghana Customs research, the project develops the Constitutional Corruption Governance Framework (CCGF), a novel theoretically grounded framework to assist governance of AI systems for anticorruption through three work packages — mapping constitutional corruption in AI procurement; analysing how AI reshapes discretion; and synthesizing findings into safeguard indicators
Dr Taiwo Adedeji
SRG26\260439
Co-applicant(s): Professor David Proverbs
Project Title: Transferring Innovation for Flood Resilience: Cross-National Lessons for Strengthening Community Flood Resilience
De Montfort University
Value awarded: £9179.40
Funded by: BIST
Flooding is one of the most damaging effects of climate change, affecting millions of people worldwide each year. This project explores how communities in the United Kingdom and Ghana are adapting to increasing flood risks through local knowledge, innovation, and collaboration. Building on previous work from the FAIR (Flood: Aware, Inform and Resilient) project, the study compares community-led flood resilience strategies across very different social and environmental settings. Through participatory research, fieldwork, and interviews, it will examine how people anticipate, respond to, and recover from floods, and how successful ideas can be shared between countries. The outcome will be a practical framework and toolkit to help policymakers, engineers, and community organisations strengthen flood resilience and support fair, inclusive adaptation. The project aims to promote sustainable, community-driven solutions that bridge the gap between research, policy, and everyday life.
Dr Uduak Akpan
SRG26\261229
Project Title: Exploring Policy Strategies for Decarbonising Road Passenger Transport in the United Kingdom: A System Dynamics Approach
SOAS University of London
Value awarded: £9718.03
Funded by: BIST
This study examines policy strategies for decarbonising road passenger transportation in the United Kingdom by 2050 using the system dynamics model. Road passenger transportation is disaggregated into four subsystems, namely, economy, travel choice and patterns, travel energy, and GHG emissions. Five policy measures, which align with the avoid-shift-improve framework, are assessed. These are reducing the average number of trips on passenger vehicles, shifting to new energy vehicles, and improving the emission intensities of vehicles using internal combustion engines. The results will indicate whether or not the UK will achieve its decarbonisation targets by 2050, and the policy scenarios and combinations that will ensure that this target is achieved.
Dr Maryam Aldossari
SRG26\261014
Project Title: Palestinian Women and Gendered Political Precarity on the Eastern Mediterranean Route
Royal Holloway, University of London
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This project examines how Palestinian women displaced by war, occupation and dispossession experience gendered political precarity along the Eastern Mediterranean route. Focusing on Izmir and surrounding western Turkish transit areas as sites of waiting, informal settlement and onward movement, and on the Greek Aegean islands as sites of arrival, containment and asylum processing, it follows displacement as a connected geography rather than a single journey from origin to destination. Through 30–40 qualitative interviews with Palestinian women and legal, humanitarian and community actors, supported by field observation and document analysis, the study investigates how border controls, asylum systems and humanitarian governance shape women’s mobility, care responsibilities, protection access and survival strategies. The project contributes to forced migration, feminist border studies and Palestinian displacement scholarship by showing how political precarity is produced across institutional and geographical sites, while foregrounding women’s accounts of navigating uncertainty under occupation, war and racialised border control.
Dr Tom Armstrong
SRG26\261753
Co-applicant(s): Dr Christopher Mark Wiley
Project Title: Musical Pairs: Composers, Their Partners and Creativity
University of Surrey
Value awarded: £9998
Funded by: BIST
In what ways do composers’ partners contribute to the creative process of writing music? In this research, we address this important question through interviewing 12 high-profile classical composers alongside the long-standing partners with whom they share their lives. These interviews will be published online on the project website and supplemented by archival research with the couples’ personal documents including letters, diary entries and photographs, as well as by historical research to situate our findings within the wider context of famous partnerships in earlier periods of music history, leading to a major peer-reviewed journal article and multiple conference papers. A research workshop will be convened to bring together contemporary modes of writing about musicians, to inform the multifarious nature of our work combining published interviews, qualitative and musicological research and oral history.
Dr Rashmi Arora
SRG26\261493
Co-applicant(s): Dr Joseph Ajefu
Project Title: Understanding the determinants of access to green finance and its implications for energy transition: evidence from SMEs in Nigeria
University of Bradford
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This project seeks to investigate the determinants of green finance (credit) and its implications for energy transition among micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria. The objective of this project is four-fold: (i) to investigate the determinants of access to green credit among SMEs in Nigeria. (ii) to examine the relationship between access to green credit and energy transition of SMEs in Nigeria. (iii) to explore heterogeneous effects in the relationship between access to green credit and energy transition of SMEs in Nigeria. (iv) to explore the mechanisms through which access to green credit affect energy transition among SMEs in Nigeria. This project will employ mixed-methods research, which will entail using qualitative data and quantitative data to investigate the research objectives/questions. The findings of the project will be relevant to SDG 7, SDG 9, SDG 11, SDG 12 and SDG 13.
Dr Sinem Arslan
SRG26\260847
Project Title: From Guarantor to Governor: Türkiye, Patronage, and Agency in the North of Cyprus
London School of Economics and Political Science
Value awarded: £9345
Funded by: BIST
This project examines how de facto states, secessionist entities unrecognised internationally, exercise political agency despite profound dependence on external patron states for survival. Focusing on the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the research investigates why political elites sometimes comply, negotiate with, or resist patron-state preferences under changing domestic and geopolitical conditions. Existing scholarship on de facto states largely portrays patron–de facto state relations in terms of structural dependence and compliance while treating de facto entities as unitary actors. By contrast, this project examines how internal political competition, coalition dynamics, electoral pressures, and peace negotiations shape elite responses to patron influence. The project develops an interdisciplinary theoretical framework combining the patron–client framework, principal–agent theory, and nested games theory. Empirically, it draws on elite interviews conducted across Cyprus and Türkiye. Beyond contributing to debates on de facto states, the project also generates policy-relevant insights for Cyprus peace negotiations.
Dr Yuki Asahina
SRG26\261494
Project Title: A Sociology of Second Chance: A Comparative Study of Debt and Personal Bankruptcy in an Age of Algorithms
University of Manchester
Value awarded: £9630
Funded by: BIST
Why is wealth inequality as large as it is? One key to answering this question lies in consumer credit, an important yet often overlooked driver of economic inequality. In recent years, the introduction of algorithmic technologies has rendered the decision-making processes of consumer credit providers less transparent and may have reinforced existing inequalities. The proposed project examines whether this is the case. Specifically, the project offers the first international comparative analysis of three East Asian societies (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) that share similar financial systems yet differ in their regulatory trajectories. Combining comparative-historical analysis with semi-structured interviews, the research investigates how algorithmic credit systems generate multiple indebtedness, how individuals recover from debt, and how these processes vary across societies. By identifying barriers to obtaining a “second chance,” the project advances scholarship on social inequality and economic sociology while contributing to debates on financial inclusion in the age of algorithms.
Dr Saira Ashfaq
SRG26\261008
Co-applicant(s): Dr Ghulam Mujtaba, Professor Alex Lo
Project Title: Women in Top Management and Climate Disclosure Credibility: Evidence from Pakistan
York St John University
Value awarded: £9849.40
Funded by: BIST
Climate disclosure has become increasingly important for investors, regulators, and other stakeholders; however, concerns remain regarding the credibility of corporate climate-related communication. This study examines whether women’s representation in top management is associated with higher climate disclosure credibility among PSX-100 listed non-financial firms in Pakistan. Drawing on Signalling Theory, Legitimacy Theory, and Upper Echelons Theory, the study develops a Climate Disclosure Credibility Index (CDCI) based on three dimensions: specificity, consistency, and verifiability. Using a longitudinal dataset constructed from annual reports, sustainability reports, and governance disclosures covering 2016–2025, the study employs computational textual analysis and panel regression techniques to evaluate climate disclosure credibility and its association with women’s representation in top management. Semi-structured interviews will complement the quantitative analysis by providing contextual insights into disclosure practices. The study contributes by shifting attention from disclosure quantity to credibility and provides evidence from a climate-vulnerable emerging economy where sustainability governance remains institutionally evolving.
Dr Ayesha Awan
SRG26\260252
Project Title: AI Fluency and Financial Resilience among Minority-Owned Businesses in Northern Ireland
University of Ulster
Value awarded: £6131
Funded by: BIST
Northern Ireland's minority-owned businesses are among the most entrepreneurially active in the region, yet their engagement with AI-driven financial systems remains insufficiently understood. AI now screens payments, assesses credit, and flags accounts automatically. Whether business owners understand these systems and can challenge them when they go wrong has become a practical test of financial resilience. This project examines two linked questions: how capably do minority entrepreneurs engage with, and where necessary challenge, AI financial systems (Operational AI Fluency); and what attitudes, trust perceptions, and social norms shape whether they use these tools at all (AI Beliefs). Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with members of the Minority Business Network NI (MBNNI), set against the financial disruptions of 2026, the research produces two peer-reviewed journal articles, a policy brief for Invest NI and the FCA, and a public talk for the MBNNI business community.
Dr Martina Ayoub
SRG26\261512
Co-applicant(s): Professor Rania Kamla
Project Title: Porous Boundaries: How Wartime Innovation Shapes Civilian Sociotechnical Regimes
University of Edinburgh
Value awarded: £9005.23
Funded by: BIST
Previous literature on the transition to sustainability assumes or takes for granted that military technologies accidentally trickle down into everyday life. Such assumptions treat war as an external shock or disruption to sociotechnical systems. This research aims to challenge this assumption by exploring the extent, actors involved, and processes by which firms might intentionally blur the lines between tools built for war and those built for society. We compare historical chemical manufacturers (like Bayer and Monsanto) with today’s AI and tech giants (such as Amazon and Palantir) to map out century-long patterns, shifts, and discourses shaping the entanglement and endogenisation of technologies used to navigate warzones or track adversaries and those repackaged to manage modern agriculture, city infrastructure, and green sustainability initiatives. We further suggest implications for how such entanglement might shape future efforts toward sustainability, as tech companies profiting from today's conflicts are simultaneously designing tomorrow's environmental solutions.
Dr Yekta Bakırlıoğlu
SRG26\260377
Co-applicant(s): Dr Erman Orsan Yetis
Project Title: Designing for Innovative Reconciliations towards Empowerment (DIRE)
Lancaster University
Value awarded: £9950
Funded by: BIST
Design disciplines are increasingly used to address difficult social issues, and design thinking is gaining influence in management and social sciences fields to translate research into practical interventions. However, the social and political aspects of design practices and outcomes tend to be overlooked in design processes, which result in design outcomes that reproduce power dynamics involving social and environmental harms and oppression in different ways. This project will uncover these power dynamics embedded into design practices and outcomes and explore novel design practices fostering sociological and political imaginations and adeptly addressing complex societal issues. The goal is to understand the opportunities for and barriers against innovative reconciliations that empower both individuals and communities, and to develop a design framework for reconciling the practical needs of individuals with strategic objectives for empowerment in favour of social and environmental justice.
Professor Fleura Bardhi
SRG26\262231
Project Title: Witnessing Loss: Perspective of Institutional Informants on Forced Displacement
City St George's, University of London
Value awarded: £8054.50
Funded by: BIST
When people flee conflict or persecution, they experience loss in multiple layers: possessions, practices, routines, and identities built around them. Yet this loss does not end at the moment of leaving. For asylum seekers and refugees, it becomes extended through markets, institutions, and policies that prevent rebuilding, or recovered when these enable reconnection. Through interviews with NGO and grassroots workers supporting refugee resettlement in the UK, this preliminary project investigates how loss is extended or alleviated by the institutions and markets that displaced consumers encounter. Theoretically, the study will contribute to the consumer research and marketing literature through the examination of the last stage of consumption: disposition. It also aims to generate insights for policymakers supporting resettlement and business-to-consumer (B2C) firms operating in markets that displaced consumers depend upon.
Dr Hanna Binks
SRG26\261251
Co-applicant(s): Professor Thea Cameron-Faulkner
Project Title: The Welsh Acquisition Sketch Project: Documenting early Welsh language development
Aberystwyth University
Value awarded: £7099.37
Funded by: BIST
Language acquisition research is severely biased towards English and other major European languages (Kidd & Garcia, 2022). It is acknowledged that the empirical evidence underpinning language acquisition knowledge needs to consider the diversity in the types of languages that children learn and the cultures they grow up in, including for those languages facing endangerment and loss. One productive way to widen the evidential base for language acquisition, while also addressing the broader problems associated with language endangerment, is to adopt a documentation approach to acquisition. This crucial project aims to contribute to this effort by documenting the acquisition of the Welsh language, a minoritized and under-researched language, by constructing a small-scale annotated corpus of naturalistic data that documents the Welsh used by and with children at different ages.
Dr Konstantin Bogatyrev
SRG26\262557
Project Title: Benchmarking the Autocrat: How Comparisons Shape Regime Support
London School of Economics and Political Science
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Authoritarian governments survive partly by shaping the comparisons their citizens make. People judge a government not against an absolute standard but against a reference point: the country's own past, or other countries. This project asks which comparison most affects whether citizens of an authoritarian state support their government and its institutions. Using parallel online survey experiments in Russia and Kazakhstan, I present respondents with the same facts about living standards but vary the yardstick against which those facts are set: the present against the 1990s, against the Soviet era, against a successful democracy, or against a neighbouring country. I measure support for the government with indirect techniques suited to politically sensitive settings, alongside attitudes toward democratic institutions. The study offers the first experimental evidence on whether controlling the reference point is a tool of authoritarian resilience, and on which comparisons threaten or reinforce it.
Professor Helen Bridle
SRG26\261123
Co-applicant(s): Professor Gnanathusharan Rajendran
Project Title: From Playtime to Profession: Engineering Stereotypes in Young Children
Heriot-Watt University
Value awarded: £9973
Funded by: BIST
Engineering contributes 26% of GDP to the UK economy, but suffers from a severe skills shortage and significant gender imbalance. Much effort to tackle this situation has produced minimal change. Stereotypes, both related to gender and engineering as a career, serve to dissuade young people, and especially girls, from considering, and pursuing, engineering careers. Children begin forming career aspirations as young as 4 and at a similar age are strongly influenced by gender stereotypes. However, although the area of early years engineering is growing there are many unanswered research questions, particularly linked with understanding, and tackling, stereotypes with this age group. Building on previous literature we have developed, and piloted, an app based methodology to explore stereotypes related to gender, ethnicity and disability and engineering suitable for young children. This project will focus on data gathering in schools and nurseries to identify key stereotypes about engineering at early years.
Dr Carlos Callirgos
SRG26\260717
Project Title: Identity After the Institution: A Longitudinal Phenomenological Study of UK Veterans' Transitions into Civilian Work and Entrepreneurship
Independent Researcher
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
When service members leave the military, they leave a total institution that has shaped not only their working lives but their sense of self. This study asks how UK veterans reconstruct identity in the years following discharge, and how that reconstruction shapes the kinds of civilian work, including entrepreneurship, they pursue and sustain.
Drawing on Goffman's theory of total institutions and using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the project will follow twenty UK veterans across two waves of in-depth interviews over an eighteen-month period. The longitudinal design captures identity work in motion rather than as a single retrospective account.
The research is led by a veteran-researcher with sixteen years' US Navy service, providing rare insider access and methodological reflexivity. Outputs will include peer-reviewed articles in leading organisational behaviour and qualitative-methods journals, conference presentations, and practitioner-facing materials for veteran-support organisations and policymakers.
Dr June Cao
SRG26\261748
Co-applicant(s): Dr Runqi Zhang, Dr Jingyuan Zhao
Project Title: Disclosure-Based Institutional Signaling and Global Green Sourcing: Evidence from ESG Disclosure Mandates around the World
University of Southampton
Value awarded: £9999.06
Funded by: BIST
Governments worldwide are increasingly requiring firms to disclose information about their environmental, social and governance practices. This project examines whether such disclosure rules influence where international buyers source environmentally friendly products. It develops the idea that mandatory ESG disclosure can act as an institutional signal: by making corporate sustainability practices more visible, these rules may strengthen a country’s credibility and attractiveness as a supplier in global value chains. The study will combine cross-country data on ESG disclosure mandates with international trade data on green products to assess whether countries introducing such mandates subsequently receive more foreign demand for green goods. It will also investigate possible channels, including cross-border investment links, and conditions under which disclosure rules matter more or less, such as buyers’ environmental awareness and exporters’ existing environmental standards. The project will contribute to debates on how sustainability regulation shapes international trade, investment and greener global supply chains.
Dr Rahul Chawdhary
SRG26\262349
Project Title: From Temptation to Restraint: Moral Deliberation as a Demand-Side Intervention in UK Counterfeit Luxury Markets
Kingston University
Value awarded: £9762.55
Funded by: BIST
The global trade in counterfeit luxury goods poses significant economic, social, and environmental challenges. This project examines whether encouraging consumers to engage in moral deliberation can reduce their intentions to purchase counterfeit luxury products. Using a structured writing task, consumers in the United Kingdom who have previously purchased counterfeit luxury goods will be prompted to reflect on the ethical implications of such purchases before their purchase intentions are measured. Drawing on Self-Perception Theory, I propose that moral deliberation strengthens moral identity, which subsequently shapes attitudes towards counterfeit products and reduces purchase intentions. The study makes an original scholarly contribution by introducing moral deliberation as a novel demand-side deterrence mechanism and identifying the psychological processes through which ethical reflection influences consumer behaviour. Findings will provide actionable insights for luxury brands and policymakers seeking to reduce counterfeit consumption while contributing to broader sustainability and responsible consumption objectives.
Monika Chwalczuk
SRG26\260946
Project Title: The Effects of Gestural Style on Interpreting Performance and Quality Perception in Dialogue Interpreting across European and East Asian Languages
University of East Anglia
Value awarded: £9990.14
Funded by: BIST
Interpreting is essential for ensuring access to public services such as healthcare, policing, and education for residents not yet proficient in English. Despite advances in language-processing technologies, ethical concerns require that this work rely on human interpreters. Dialogue interpreting – bidirectional spoken translation – places a heavy cognitive load, especially on novice interpreters. To date, many training programmes discourage hand gestures, viewing them as unprofessional. However, recent research in Multimodal Interpreting Studies suggests suppressing spontaneous gestures increases mental fatigue and reduces fluency, and in reality users perceive naturally gesturing interpreters as more proficient. Existing studies nevertheless remain largely Eurocentric despite growing demand for Asian languages in the UK and internationally. Expanding previous research to Japanese and Cantonese, which show different gestural patterns, this study will create the largest existing comparative dataset on gesture production in interpreting across European and East Asian languages, informing culturally nuanced, decolonised interpreter training and practice.
Dr Abdusselam Cifter
SRG26\260411
Co-applicant(s): Dr Aylin Ayna, Dr Inci Olgun
Project Title: Creating a more interactive art/museum experience for young visitors by utilising new digital technologies and AI-supported tools
Brunel University London
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Art plays an important role in our daily lives, connecting generations and cultures. Museums are key in fostering interaction and transmitting artistic knowledge to future generations; however, engagement with art is changing significantly due to social media and digital technologies. To address this shift, this project investigates how new digital and AI-supported technologies can enhance younger audiences' engagement with art. The study develops and tests an innovative co-creation workshop model, InspAIred, which combines AI tools with expert-informed prompting to ensure historically grounded and critically engaged outputs. Brunel University of London and Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University will collaborate to examine UK best practices, develop the InspAIred methodology, and apply it to a small selection of 19th-20th century artworks by female artists in Turkish art history as the primary case study. Combining best practices, interdisciplinary co-creation workshops, and digital and AI-supported tools, the project will deliver an innovative and scalable framework.
Miss Debbie Clarke
SRG26\261911
Co-applicant(s): Professor Seamus Allison, Dr Seamus Allison
Project Title: Unlocking Investment: Exploring Women Entrepreneurs’ Access To SEIS/EIS Tax Relief Schemes In The UK
Nottingham Trent University
Value awarded: £9905
Funded by: BIST
UK female entrepreneurs experience barriers to access to finance. The 2019 Rose Review estimates an £250 billion economic benefit if women matched men in entrepreneurship. Despite government-backed tax reliefs through the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) and Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), women secure only 1.8% of total investment of all forms (DfBT, 2025).
The overarching aim of this project is to uncover why women remain underrepresented in SEIS/EIS, identifying the structural, informational, cultural, and investor-related barriers that limit access, and to generate insights that can help increase women’s engagement with these schemes
To address this, we will conduct a national survey of 400 female entrepreneurs, complemented by in-depth interviews with 20–30 female entrepreneurs and 10–15 investors, alongside policy analysis.
Outputs will include academic publications, policy briefs, and illustrated toolkits, with dissemination via partner networks, government bodies, and practitioner channels, aiming to increase knowledge and adoption of SEIS/EIS funding amongst female.
Dr Sarah Cooper
SRG26\260223
Project Title: Welsh in all its voices: accent, speaker backgrounds and language attitudes in Wales
Bangor University
Value awarded: £9449.55
Funded by: BIST
The Welsh Government’s Cymraeg 2050 strategy aims to reach one million Welsh speakers by 2050, relying on new speakers from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Although the policy promotes an inclusive vision of linguistic belonging, little empirical research has examined whether this is reflected in community evaluations of speakers from different backgrounds.
This project investigates how Welsh-speaking listeners evaluate speech from three groups: home Welsh speakers, speakers whose first language is English, and speakers whose first language is neither Welsh nor English. Participants will listen to short speech samples and rate speakers on dimensions including competence, friendliness, and belonging, without being asked directly about their attitudes. The study will examine whether evaluations differ across groups, and whether the Welsh minority language context produces patterns distinct from those for majority languages. Findings will be shared with the Welsh Government and the Athrofa Dysgu Cymraeg Genedlaethol which will be established in August 2027.
Dr Luis Cornago-Bonal
SRG26\262317
Co-applicant(s): Dr Briitta van Staalduinen
Project Title: A New Divide Within the Educated Elite? Social Segregation and Political Divergence Between Sociocultural and Business Professionals
Independent Scholar
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Educated elites have long been divided politically, but this divide is changing in ways that warrant new attention. We argue that, after a first stage of the knowledge economy in which sociocultural and business elites were engaged in a symbiotic relationship sustained by a shared progressive consensus, democracies have more recently entered a second stage marked by their economic and social fragmentation and growing mutual contestation. This project examines the political consequences of the widening earnings gap between sociocultural and business elites, and the growing segregation of their social spaces. The project will field a UK pilot elite survey and a parallel general-population benchmark survey, setting the ground for a larger external application covering four additional countries. The project contributes to debates on political transformation in the US and Europe by shifting attention from divides between graduates and non-graduates to growing political differences within the educated elite itself.
Dr Megan Crawford
SRG26\261096
Co-applicant(s): Dr Nader Seyedkalali
Project Title: Industry Mapping and Planning for AI Capabilities & Technologies sandpit (IMPACTs)
Edinburgh Napier University
Value awarded: £8464
Funded by: BIST
The foundational contribution of this project is to evidence how perspectives of AI-integrated futures are impacting current industry strategies for the future. To achieve this, we propose to measure industry foresight within the context of AI Futures. We will use an innovative method for data gathering: sandpits designed around industry impact, aimed at industry-specific practitioners. Understanding this level of data has several points of value. It will provide a cross-section of evidence on how AI technologies are impacting industry strategies by analysing practitioners’ foresight. This will have cross-disciplinary value for further research and developments. A roadmap will be created that shows future goals, destinations, and signals that can serve as wayfinding guides for strategic developments. Government guidance aimed at AI-integrated futures will be empirically supported, including UK Government’s AI Knowledge Hub and Artificial Intelligence Playbook. Finally, the validity of sandpits as a legitimate research tool will be further evidenced.
Dr Nadeen Dakkak
SRG26\261309
Co-applicant(s): Dr Claire French, Dr Bharti Arora
Project Title: Forging decolonial solidarities: Countering Europe’s crises of bordering (FDS)
University of Exeter
Value awarded: £9970
Funded by: BIST
FDS mobilises the inter-institutional and transdisciplinary research platform for advanced study, Reading Decoloniality (RD), to investigate discourses of decoloniality towards possibilities of solidarity in the face of bordering crises in the UK and Denmark. Leading RD members at Exeter, Aarhus and Delhi Universities ask: What are the opportunities of decoloniality when conceptualising bordering crises in Western Europe? How do decolonial processes of reading world literatures, performance and dramaturgy mobilize methodologies for scholars of other disciplines to tackle discourses of crisis and solidarity? And, how do these processes overcome the limits of decolonial approaches? FDS pairs decoloniality with a transdisciplinary and reflexive methodology to forge solidarities between so-called global South-North scholars and discourses. Forging solidarities is defined as practices of listening, care, accountability and allyship. Connecting to RD’s transnational network of members, FDS will organize residencies and workshops in Aarhus and Exeter to develop new, shared, decolonial methodologies and solidarity praxes.
Dr Francesco D'Alema
SRG26\262571
Project Title: The Symbolic Power of Expertise: Think Tanks and British Middle East Policy
Durham University
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This project examines how British think tanks shape and legitimise knowledge about the Middle East and how this influences UK foreign policy. Focusing on five major institutions—Chatham House, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Royal United Services Institute, the Henry Jackson Society, and the Foreign Policy Centre—it analyses their positions on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and relations with the Gulf states.
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of power and knowledge, and combining critical discourse analysis of reports and policy documents with semi-structured interviews with key actors, the research investigates how mechanisms of influence of expertise and authority are socially constructed, and how think tanks' ideas are legitimised and transmitted to foreign policy circles. In doing so, it will offer a timely and critical contribution to ongoing debates on the role of expertise and knowledge production in shaping foreign policy behaviour.
Dr Deborah Darling
SRG26\261127
Project Title: Plurilingual Education for All in Higher Education: A Pilot Study
Queen Mary University of London
Value awarded: £7829.78
Funded by: BIST
Higher education delivered solely through a single language legitimises stigmatising language ideologies and misses opportunities for enriching teaching and learning through the inclusion of knowledge produced in different contexts and/or through different languages. This pilot study addresses this by examining existing attitudes to language in education, and by testing, evaluating and providing a worked blueprint for a plurilingual approach to higher education. The study aims to show how a plurilingual module can be implemented without jeopardising quality in education. Drawing on students and lecturers at Queen Mary University of London and through an explanatory research design, this study will conduct a survey, produce field notes of a pedagogic intervention and analyse reflexive interviews to evaluate the efficacy of the approach. The findings from the pilot study will provide a template for a plurilingual approach that can be adapted and used in other English-medium instruction academic programmes.
Dr Lin Dong
SRG26\261189
Project Title: Hope in Action: How NGOs Construct and Communicate Hope Among Marginalised Communities
University of Birmingham
Value awarded: £9394
Funded by: BIST
The desire for a better life is not always enough to bring about real change. For marginalised groups, even when non-governmental organisations (NGOs) offer well-intentioned support, change requires not only resources but also the hope to imagine and engage with a different future, a hope that is not easily created or sustained among those facing marginalisation. Yet how NGOs construct and communicate this much-needed hope remains underexamined. To address this gap, the project focuses on refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, using a qualitative approach combining interviews, observation, and analysis of archival data. It aims to contribute to theoretical understanding of how collective hope is constructed in the context of marginalisation. For practitioners, it offers critical awareness of how the hope they communicate is shaped, whose voices define it, who imagines the future it offers, and how it engages the realities they confront.
Dr Lewis Doyle
SRG26\261735
Co-applicant(s): Dr Fabio Fasoli
Project Title: Accent Bias in Education
University of Surrey
Value awarded: £9972.04
Funded by: BIST
Non-standard forms of English (including regional accents) are often perceived as impoverished, deficient, and unsuitable for school. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, many students and teachers have concerns around how their accents are perceived. However, very little research has directly tested whether their accents do indeed influence perceivers’ evaluative judgements in education. This project will use experimental methods to investigate the prevalence of accent bias via two work packages (WP). In WP1, we will use Mousetracker software to measure teachers’ speed and indecision when evaluating responses of students who speak in different accents. In WP2, students, parents, and teaching peers will listen to audio recordings of teacher presentations in different accents before providing evaluative judgements around the domains of warmth and competence. Highlighting accent-related inequalities in this way is essential for our understanding of the experiences of lower-status groups in schools and our ability to combat inequalities in education.
Dr Jane Frances Dunlop
SRG26\262176
Project Title: Small gauge to small screen: technocultures of moving image from 8mm to smart phones
University of Greenwich
Value awarded: £9523
Funded by: BIST
This research project investigates the cultural and material histories of personal moving image technologies in the 20th and 21st centuries. It focuses on the influence, impact, and interconnection between early personal film formats (Double 8mm and Super 8) and present-day videomaking on personal devices. Through archival research, interviews, and artistic practice, Small Gauge to Small Screen explores the material processes of these modes alongside a range of moviemaking practices, spanning the personal to the professional.
The project aims to offer a new history of the technocultures of the moving image across the 20th and 21st centuries, making explicit the connections between personal moviemaking and the accelerating visual logic of contemporary culture. As GenAI introduces a new technological dimension to amateur moviemaking, understanding the technocultural impact of moving images over the past century provides a means of interrogating the role these images play in social practice and truth-making within visual cultures.
Professor Can Eken
SRG26\260212
Project Title: Climate Change Disputes and Third-Party Funding: Can TPF Democratize Access to Environmental Justice in Developing Countries?
Durham University
Value awarded: £9996.96
Funded by: BIST
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, with consequences that will affect generations to come. While the Paris Agreement reflects a global commitment to addressing this crisis, compliance remains uneven and enforcement mechanisms are limited. In 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its landmark Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change, providing the first comprehensive articulation of States’ legal responsibilities in this area. Although non-binding, the opinion represents a significant development in international law.
Despite these advances, many developing States face substantial obstacles in implementing environmental obligations. The risk of costly investment arbitration claims discourages governments from adopting robust climate policies. This research examines whether Third-Party Funding (TPF), traditionally used by investors, may help States finance environmental counterclaims, strengthen regulatory autonomy and climate accountability, and enable States to hold polluting investors financially responsible.
Dr Samah El Hajjar
SRG26\260014
Co-applicant(s): Professor Chris Brooks
Project Title: Global Political Cycles and Firms’ Capital Investments
University of Reading
Value awarded: £9857.30
Funded by: BIST
Corporate investment decisions shape employment, community economic vitality, and long-term productivity. The existing literature shows that firms postpone capital expenditures when faced with heightened uncertainty. An important form of uncertainty arises from political cycles, as shifts in ruling ideology signal potential changes in policies affecting future profits from capital investment. Yet there is scant existing evidence regarding how different ideologies affect corporate investment. This study will be the first to investigate comprehensively how the political leanings of incumbent administrations influence capital expenditure and to conduct a global study on the effect of political polarisation. The research will draw on a comprehensive electoral dataset from the ParlGov project, which spans incumbent governments and presidential offices from 1800 to 2025, providing extensive coverage of political cycles. The analysis will examine how perceived political ideology influences corporate capital expenditures, using variables such as political orientation, extremism, polarisation, government size, and fragmentation.
Dr Jacob Eriksson
SRG26\261451
Co-applicant(s): Mr Luiz Vieira, Dr Rebecca Ellen Engel
Project Title: Neoliberalism meets national liberation: evaluating the socio-economic and political impact of neoliberal economic reform in Kosovo and Timor-Leste
University of York
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Externally imposed neoliberal economic reforms have typically been part of international peacebuilding interventions, and are often treated by their advocates as mere technocratic adjustments. However, these are far from neutral and do not necessarily correspond to the political and social values of the target states, particularly in cases where socialist national liberation movements dominate post-war politics. The longer term grassroots socio-economic impacts of neoliberal peace and their effects on the legitimacy of the new state and peace in such cases are poorly understood. This project analyses two such cases, Kosovo and Timor-Leste. Although widely considered success stories, the socio-economic and political effects of neoliberal policies like privatisation and marketisation created significant social tensions, political conflicts, and even violence. Through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders and affected communities in both countries, this project will shed new light on the longer-term peace and development impacts roughly 25 years later.
Dr David Escamilla-Guerrero
SRG26\261972
Co-applicant(s): Dr Hannah Postel
Project Title: The Impact of Immigration Restrictions on Third-Country Economies: Evidence from the Chinese Exclusion Act
University of St Andrews
Value awarded: £8837.60
Funded by: BIST
Immigration restrictions are a central tool of labor market policy, yet their consequences for third-country economies remain largely unexplored. This project uses the diversion of Chinese migration to Mexico — induced by the exclusion of Chinese laborers from the United States — as a natural experiment to study how immigration restrictions shape labor markets in countries that are neither the origin nor the excluding economy. Using newly digitized administrative immigration records and district-level occupational counts from the Mexican census (1895–1930), the project exploits spatial variation in exposure to Chinese immigration across Mexican localities to examine whether diverted immigrant inflows contributed to structural transformation by shifting local occupational structures. It further studies whether the entrepreneurial and commercial culture of southern Chinese immigrants can account for labor market effects beyond what immigrant shares alone explain. The project provides new evidence on how immigration restrictions generate ripple effects in economies absorbing diverted migrants.
Professor Ian Forrest
SRG26\262453
Co-applicant(s): Professor John Hugh Arnold
Project Title: Unlocking the Medieval Visitations Archive: Methodological Horizons for Comparative European Social and Religious History
University of Glasgow
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Three major problems hinder our understanding of pre-Reformation Christianity: the fragmentary character of the sources; a tendency to generalize the nature of the ‘pre-Reformation Church’; insufficient integration of religious experience with social, institutional, and political histories. Visitation records – the product of inspections of parishes – exist in comparable form from Czechia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and elsewhere. However, despite recent advances in the social analysis of the content of visitations in particular locales (e.g. studies of clerical gender ), the assumptions and aims of what remain largely national historiographies have not been compared, and no comprehensive source critical methodology has been established by which their riches might be fully exploited. The present application will address that deficiency, forming the first phase of a larger pan-European comparative project. It will facilitate international comparison through network building, collaborative workshops, and a co-authored article.
Dr Wenying Fu
SRG26\260320
Co-applicant(s): Professor Shaowei He, Dr Viktor Eszterhai
Project Title: Strategic coupling with multiple global production networks amid volatile geopolitics: Chinese EV investments in Hungary
Northumbria University
Value awarded: £9933
Funded by: BIST
The accelerating electrification of the global automotive industry is radically restructuring its global production networks (GPNs), driven by the rise of Chinese lead firms (e.g., BYD, CATL, Nio, Sunwoda, Huayou). This interdisciplinary project brings together experts in economic geography, international business and international relations to critically examine the contested co-evolution of Chinese electric vehicle (EV) capital, domestic institutions and incumbent firm networks in Hungary, a semi-peripheral state increasingly positioned as a pivotal, yet vulnerable, gateway within global EV GPNs.
Drawing on rich qualitative data, we interrogate the multilevel socio-political frictions and alignments between investing firms and host-country stakeholders, including state apparatuses, incumbent automotive firms, and community groups. By moving beyond structural descriptions of investment, this research advances our theoretical understanding of multiple GPNs co-evolution under acute geopolitical volatility. Furthermore, it delivers actionable intelligence for regional policymakers to navigate structural GPN reconfiguration, leverage strategic opportunities, and mitigate supply chain dependence.
Dr Shilan Fuad Hussain
SRG26\262361
Project Title: Women, Honour, and Social Control after Conflict
Independent Researcher
Value awarded: £7055
Funded by: BIST
This project examines how women from Kurdish communities in Britain negotiate honour-based social control following conflict and displacement. Existing research on migration and gender inequality has paid limited attention to how conflict reshapes expectations surrounding women’s autonomy, sexuality, reputation, and family authority after migration. Using qualitative interviews and thematic analysis, the study investigates how honour is reproduced, negotiated, and contested within everyday social relations in Britain. Particular attention is paid to intergenerational tensions, community expectations, and pressures surrounding women’s behaviour and personal choices. The project argues that conflict continues beyond war zones through gendered forms of social regulation that shape women’s lives after displacement. By focusing on women’s lived experiences, the research contributes to debates on gender, migration, conflict, and social control in contemporary Britain.
Dr Sabrina Furtado
SRG26\261089
Co-applicant(s): Dr Joe Piggin
Project Title: Safeguarding Practices and Capacity Building in Grassroots Girls’ Football: A Pilot Study of the 2027 FIFA Women World Cup host
Loughborough University
Value awarded: £8520
Funded by: BIST
This pilot research programme examines safeguarding policies and practices within grassroots girls’ football clubs in Brazil, where safeguarding remains underdeveloped despite growing international recognition of its importance in sport. Grassroots sport organisations in Brazil often face financial, structural, and governance challenges that may limit their ability to implement effective safeguarding measures, creating vulnerabilities for young athletes, particularly girls. The study aims to investigate the existence and implementation of safeguarding policies, identify organisational and cultural barriers influencing safe sport practices, and develop educational initiatives to strengthen safeguarding capacity among young female football leaders. Positioned within the broader context of Brazil’s evolving sport system and the upcoming 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup, the project seeks to promote safer, more inclusive community football environments. By combining research and capacity-building activities, the study will generate evidence to support future safeguarding strategies and contribute to international discussions on safe sport governance and gender-inclusive.
Dr Eman Gadalla
SRG26\261119
Co-applicant(s): Professor Ahmad Daryanto, Dr Hina Khan
Project Title: Leveling Up Sustainability Engagement: Gamification, Agency, and Human Flourishing among University Students
Lancaster University
Value awarded: £9988
Funded by: BIST
Despite growing environmental awareness among young adults, a persistent intention–action gap continues to limit sustainable consumption practices. Universities are increasingly challenged to promote forms of sustainability engagement that support not only behavioural change, but also human flourishing through autonomy, competence, social connection, and future-oriented aspirations. Existing digital behaviour-change interventions often prioritise short-term compliance and measurable outcomes, with limited attention to meaningful and self-directed engagement.
This project investigates whether gamified interventions can encourage sustainable consumption while strengthening sustainability awareness and engagement with potential green career futures among university students. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, it explores how gamification can foster autonomy, competence, and relatedness to support more meaningful participation in sustainability practices. Using a mixed-methods design, the study combines surveys, a three-week gamified challenge, focus groups, and interviews. The project contributes to debates on ethical gamification, sustainability education, and human flourishing, while producing practical guidance for more human-centred sustainability interventions.
Professor Jamie Gaskarth
SRG26\261294
Project Title: Evaluating the implementation of UK defence and security reviews: a comparative analysis
The Open University
Value awarded: £5698
Funded by: BIST
This project responds to an identified need within the UK security community for detailed empirical understanding of strategy implementation and how it can be improved. Analysing four landmark defence and security review case studies (the 1998 SDR, the 2010 SDSR, the 2015 NSS/SDSR and the Integrated Review 2021), this study has four objectives: 1.) to ascertain the reasons why these reviews were formulated; 2.) to understand what implementation structures and practices were put in place and how they operated in practice; 3.) to analyse the relationship between intent and implementation and how this affects perceptions of success/failure; 4.) to set out a conceptual framework for evaluating the implementation of national strategies.
Using qualitative, interpretive research methods, and interdisciplinary insights from public policy, management and organizational theory, and strategic studies, it promises to generate new data and provide original, theoretically-informed analysis of a site of recurring policy failure.
Professor David Gellner
SRG26\262357
Co-applicant(s): Professor Sanjay Kumar Pandey, Dr Shashank Chaturvedi
Project Title: Brahmin Politics Recast: Domination, Decline, and Mobilization in Eastern Uttar Pradesh (1950-2027)
Independent Scholar
Value awarded: £9814.45
Funded by: BIST
The proposed research seeks to understand the changing forms of Brahmin self-perception and self-assertion since Indian independence, focusing on eastern Uttar Pradesh, the cultural heartland (so locals firmly believe) of northern India. By combining archival research going back to 1950 with field research on contemporary trends, and especially the heightened discussions and debates over Brahmin identity at the time of the 2027 UP state elections, we hope to be able to provide a richer account of how Brahmins now see their place in society than his hitherto been possible. Brahmins have been prominent in all spheres of public life, but they can no longer take dominance for granted and indeed now find their position frequently challenged as never before.
Dr Sotiris Georganas
SRG26\261187
Co-applicant(s): Dr Alina Velias
Project Title: Who to Blame? Inflationary Shocks, Voter Misperceptions, and Political Accountability
City St George's, University of London
Value awarded: £9915.10
Funded by: BIST
Inflation is one of the most salient and widely discussed economic phenomena, shaping both household expectations and policy debates. Recent research shows that citizens’ perceptions of inflation are strongly shaped by partisan bias and beliefs about government performance rather than objective economic conditions (Bartels, 2002; Bachmann et al., 2021; Stantcheva, 2024). Preliminary cross-country evidence suggests that voters often attribute responsibility for inflation to incumbent governments even when inflation is driven by external shocks such as wars, supply-chain disruptions, or energy crises. Our goals are to (i) measure how citizens assign blame for inflation, (ii) identify the role of partisan beliefs and perceptions of political control, and (iii) examine whether voters systematically overreact to inflationary shocks beyond government control. This work will provide new insights into economic voting, political misperceptions, and democratic accountability in periods of economic uncertainty.
Professor Georgios Gerasimou
SRG26\260544
Project Title: Scoring and augmented ranking methods to elicit preference intensities
University of Glasgow
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Products, services, research outputs and election candidates are often evaluated with ranking or scoring methods. While both methods generate a preference ordering, scoring may also provide information about preference intensities, although potentially with "noise". This study investigates how such intensity‑relevant inferences compare with those that can be obtained via a novel augmented ranking method that is designed to be less cognitively demanding. In addition to eliciting a standard preference ranking, the method gathers ordinal intensity information through simple follow‑up queries. For example, in addition to submitting a preference ordering that may suggest Art > Biology > Chemistry, students are asked whether the Art–Biology preference gap is smaller/larger than the Biology–Chemistry gap. The study will assess whether systematic discrepancies arise between scoring and augmented ranking; which method is more reliable ex post; and when. The findings will be informative and practically relevant regardless of the direction they point to.
Dr Atif Ghani
SRG26\260552
Project Title: Digital Heritage as Engineering Pedagogy: A Mixed Methods Study Using the Airships XR Learning Environment
Royal College of Art
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates how immersive digital heritage experiences can strengthen engineering learning, confidence and curiosity among young people. Building on two earlier phases of Airships XR, the research examines how historically grounded, interactive environments can support understanding of engineering principles while widening participation in STEM. Working with schools, colleges and museum partners in Bedfordshire, the study will use a series of structured Airships XR learning sessions as research interventions. Through mixed‑methods data collection—observations, interviews, learner artefacts and engagement analytics—the project will analyse how students make sense of engineering concepts, how they relate these to local heritage, and how immersive media shapes their sense of engineering identity. The findings will contribute new evidence on the role of digital heritage in engineering education, producing peer‑reviewed publications, a methodological toolkit for immersive learning research, and practical insights for educators, museums and policymakers seeking to engage diverse young audiences.
Dr Francesco Goglia
SRG26\262436
Project Title: Onward Migration from Italy to the UK: language practices and language maintenance within the family
University of Exeter
Value awarded: £7085.64
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates language practices among Italian families with diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds who engaged in onward migration from Italy to the UK after acquiring Italian citizenship. While considerable research has explored the motivations and dynamics of onward migration, linguistic and educational studies remain limited and are largely based on self-reported language use and attitudes collected through questionnaires, sociolinguistic interviews, and focus groups. To date, no studies have examined actual language practices within these families. The linguistic repertoires of Italian onward-migrant families typically include Italian, Italian dialects, English, and other heritage languages. This project will analyse how speakers across generations use these languages in everyday family interactions. Four families with Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and Ghanaian backgrounds respectively will be involved. Data will be collected through recordings of spontaneous speech in a range of family contexts, carried out by four research assistants who are the children of these families.
Professor Eric Golson
SRG26\262211
Co-applicant(s): Dr Sebastian Hager
Project Title: Do European language and ethnicity differences in military command result in less unit cohesion and higher losses of personnel? Lessons for the EU from the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
University of Surrey
Value awarded: £8419
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates whether linguistic and ethnic divisions between command and rank-and-file undermine military cohesion, using the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army in World War I as a historical analogue for a prospective EU army or US-less NATO. The Austro-Hungarian Army was the last truly multi-ethnic army in Europe. Combining digitised Austrian casualty records, pre-war census data, and the Imperial Army's order of battle, we match individuals across sources to estimate casualty rates by ethnicity, religion, and language at regimental level. We tie these casualties to the ethnicity, religion and language spoken by the commanders. Findings will inform debates on European defence integration through articles in leading economics and history journals, alongside dissemination at academic, policy, and military conferences.
Dr Eva E. Gutierrez Sigut
SRG26\260032
Co-applicant(s): Dr Megan Klabunde
Project Title: Decoding Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD, aka dyspraxia): Eye Movements and Executive Function Role in Reading Difficulties
University of Essex
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD; aka dyspraxia) affects up to 10% of the population and although typically diagnosed in childhood, it persists into adulthood. DCD’s impact on adults, however, remains poorly understood. In addition to impacting motor movements and coordination, reading difficulties are often present. However, little is known about the mechanisms that contribute to the reading problems in DCD. In children with DCD, eye movement inefficiencies and executive function (EF) challenges likely contribute to poor reading fluency and accuracy. However, since EF develops during adolescence, it is not known if it impacts adults with DCD. The current project aims to identify mechanisms that drive reading difficulties in adults with DCD by examining eye movements during reading, their corresponding brain activity (EEG) and EF difficulties. Combining eye-tracking and EEG uniquely reveals when and why reading breaks down. Findings will inform targeted support for DCD adults, such as accessible text design.
Dr Sophie Haspeslagh
SRG26\260827
Co-applicant(s): Dr Kodili Henry Chukwuma
Project Title: Everyday Security: Proscription and Advocacy Rights in the UK
King's College London
Value awarded: £9580.40
Funded by: BIST
This project examines how advocacy groups in the UK understand, experience, and evaluate proscription; a counterterrorism tool increasingly used across geopolitical contexts. It is the first cross-organisational study of proscription, utilising semi-structured interviews and focus groups with nine civil society organisations across England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The research moves beyond legal and institutional analyses of proscription by exploring the experiences of groups working at the intersection of security and human rights. These organisations are categorised into four types: religious and community-based, nationalist, and ideologically left-leaning and right-leaning. While officially (de)proscribed groups are excluded, the study includes organisations, such as Scotland Against Criminality Communities, that are likely to encounter proscription through their work with individuals charged with terrorism-related offences or by working within communities disproportionately affected by counterterrorism measures. The project will generate new knowledge and contribute to advocacy efforts through academic publications and collaborative engagements.
Dr Binesh Hass
SRG26\262319
Project Title: Mental Capacity and the Rule of Law
University of Oxford
Value awarded: £9909.25
Funded by: BIST
Mental capacity is a legal precondition for valid decision-making in relation to medical treatment, sex, property, care, and many other domains. Yet capacity statutes in common law countries leave judges with wide discretion. No explicit standard governs the reasons courts must give when moving from evidence about a person’s beliefs, reasoning, or behaviour to a legal conclusion of incapacity. This nine-month project develops a rule-of-law framework requiring courts to make explicit the premises connecting such evidence to incapacity findings. It calls this requirement deliberative transparency. Combining doctrinal research, structured case-law analysis, and conceptual analysis, the project will produce a framework that is philosophically rigorous and legally practicable. The framework seeks to limit discretion, improve consistency between cases, and reduce the discriminatory biases that flourish under expansive judicial discretion. Outputs include an open-access article and a practitioner report.
Ms Dominique Heyse-Moore
SRG26\262025
Project Title: From Studio Networks to National Collecting: Embedding Artist Support Studios in UK Museum Acquisition and Curatorial Practice
Tate
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates how artist Support Studios — organisations that sustain the creative practices of learning-disabled and neurodivergent artists — can inform museum acquisition and curatorial frameworks to advance equitable inclusion in the national collection. Through comparative, co produced case studies of three UK studios (Project Art Works, ActionSpace, and Venture Arts) and the acquisitions and curatorial partnership between Creative Growth and SFMOMA, USA, the research combines artist-centred observation and liaison, interviews (or non-verbal alternatives), participatory workshops, and organisational analysis. Outputs include accessible case reports, an open access research toolkit for artist/studio engagement, a synthesis report and policy brief for Tate, and a peer review ready academic paper. The study maps collaborative support practices, identifies adaptable acquisition pathways (including funding), and offers evidence-based recommendations for formalising Tate’s engagement with studios (including exhibition-making) — addressing persistent underrepresentation in the national collection and proposing practical mechanisms to embed sustained engagement.
Dr Sinem Hizli ALkan
SRG26\261837
Project Title: The role of ego-networks in mathematics educators’ sense-making of Scotland evolving curriculum
Anglia Ruskin University
Value awarded: £9878.80
Funded by: BIST
Scotland’s mathematics curriculum is evolving through a Curriculum Improvement Cycle (CIC), reflecting wider international efforts to design mathematics curricula around Big Ideas. While policy offers guidance, educators’ interpretations are often shaped by the networks they draw upon for advice, resources, reassurance and validation. However, in Scotland and internationally, little is known about how such networks are structured and composed, or how they influence educators’ sense-making during the early stages of a mathematics curriculum reform.
This project investigates the structural, compositional and relational characteristics of mathematics educators’ networks. Using a longitudinal qualitative ego-network approach, it will map the formal and informal connections educators draw upon and examine the quality of ties, emotional support, the content of interactions and their influence on sense-making over time. The study will generate insights into the relational infrastructure of mathematics curriculum reform and identify network typologies that can inform constructive curriculum making in Scotland and beyond.
Dr Afiya Holder
SRG26\262015
Project Title: Healing Histories, Restoring Futures: countering anti-Blackness with counter-narratives, recognitive justice and memory in Scotland’s heritage tourism.
Edinburgh Napier University
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Healing Histories, Restoring Futures addresses the intensified marginalisation of African Caribbean cultural heritage, memory, history, and legacies, and their impact on Scotland's heritage and tourism sector. It examines cultural heritage tourism as a vehicle for restoration, recognitive justice, and reconciliation. Responding to the upsurge of anti-Blackness reforms and public reports, the project explores how counter-narratives, reinterpretation and just representation of African Caribbean cultural heritage can transform visitor interest and engagement. Using discourse and visual analysis, participatory co-creative workshops and live interpretative prototypes, this research will develop an inclusive heritage tourism framework that centres recognition, remembrance and reconciliation. Collaborating with African and Caribbean communities, the heritage and tourism sector and policymakers, the research advances academic contributions to inform inclusive practice and policy. Overall, responding to calls that support Scotland’s inclusive heritage tourism agenda and foster belonging and cultural pride among marginalised communities, diaspora tourists and the wider Scottish society.
Professor Camille Kandiko Howson
SRG26\262441
Co-applicant(s): Dr Sayantan Mandal, Dr Sheriya Sareen
Project Title: Exploring how STEM students learn using AI: Towards an AI learning-belonging-entrepreneurial framework
Imperial College London
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This project explores how higher education STEM students learn using AI, understanding how (or whether) the learning process fosters a sense of engagement and belonging. Calls continue for AI-literate graduates, but there is limited research on how students gain discipline-specific AI skills and capabilities and what supports their learning. STEM belongingness is important for fostering learning outcomes, achievements, and learners’ progress, thereby enriching students’ engagement, motivation, and educational persistence, its application within AI-driven environments remains under-explored. Further, the innovative and entrepreneurial capabilities that AI-driven STEM HE could achieve by addressing existing barriers through scalability, personalisation, and the application of technologies in STEM curricula are under-researched. This project uses hackathons as pedagogical tools, entrepreneurship hubs and research sites in the UK and India to construct a discipline-specific understanding of AI concepts; explore what processes shape students' STEM identity and belonging; and ask how this supports students’ entrepreneurial capacity building.
Dr Mostafa Hussien
SRG26\262443
Co-applicant(s): Professor Alaa Zalata, Dr Ibrahim Kalaji
Project Title: Digital Financial Reporting, Tagged IFRS Data, and Investor Use: How Digitization and Data Aggregators Reshape the Consumption of Financial Statements
University of Westminster
Value awarded: £9900
Funded by: BIST
This project examines how digital financial reporting reshapes the information environment of professional users in the UK IFRS setting. The study examines a clearly defined sample of UK listed IFRS-reporting firms, concentrates on selected disclosure categories, and compares the visibility of those disclosures across corporate digital filings and one or two commercial data platforms. The core argument is that professional users increasingly access financial information through tagged filings and commercial data aggregators rather than through the full published annual report, creating a potentially important “translation layer” between what IFRS requires firms to disclose and what end-users actually see, compare, and rely upon in decision-making (Schaub, 2018; Troshani, Locke, and Rowbottom, 2019). Methodologically, the project combines three linked empirical stages: archival mapping, a targeted survey of professional users, and semi-structured interviews. The output will be a high-value social science project in accounting and finance, with clear scholarly and policy relevance.
Dr Sazana Jayadeva
SRG26\260238
Co-applicant(s): Dr Annette Bamberger, Dr Evelyn Min Ji Kim
Project Title: Competing for International Students: Actors, Processes, and Communication Strategies Underpinning National Higher Education Brands
University of Surrey
Value awarded: £9821.60
Funded by: BIST
As international student mobility expands beyond traditional Anglophone/Western destinations, states are developing coordinated branding initiatives to attract students and enhance global visibility. We examine how national higher education brands are constructed, coordinated, and communicated in an increasingly multipolar global higher education system shaped by geopolitical and economic competition. Focusing on the ‘Study in Korea’, ‘Study in Israel’, and ‘Study in India’ initiatives, we investigate the actors, processes, and communication strategies underpinning national higher education branding. We adopt a comparative, qualitative design, combining semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and analysis of official social media accounts over time. Moving beyond state-centric, static and output-oriented approaches, we conceptualise national higher education branding as a multi-actor, mediated and temporal process. Thus, we advance a framework for understanding how states position higher education systems under conditions of intensified geopolitical competition, while generating practical insights for policymakers and institutions seeking to design effective internationalisation strategies.
Dr Karen Jeffrey
SRG26\261210
Co-applicant(s): Professor Eugenio Proto
Project Title: How Do Voters Reason? Political Framing and Preferences in the Age of AI
University of Glasgow
Value awarded: £9998.95
Funded by: BIST
In times of economic upheaval, why do some voters reject policies they might benefit from? A well-established explanation is motivated reasoning: rather than weighing potential outcomes, some voters support policies that align with their political identity. This study investigates that possibility in a domain where it matters urgently and where partisan lines have not yet crystallised: AI-driven disruption of work. In a survey experiment, 3,100 UK residents who regularly use generative AI at work will converse with a large language model (LLM) about AI’s implications for workers and how governments should respond. Respondents will be randomly assigned to converse with an LLM that frames AI as growth-enhancing, labour-displacing, or a balanced control. The conversations will provide causal insights into how voters across the political spectrum engage with and reason about political issues, and to what extent policies’ political viability depends on how issues are framed, versus what policies will deliver.
Dr Ara Jo
SRG26\260280
Project Title: Achieving Net Zero When Market Concentration is Rising
University of Bath
Value awarded: £9950
Funded by: BIST
This proposal investigates the implications of rising market concentration on the decarbonisation process with three research objectives. First, I will empirically examine the relationship between market concentration and carbon intensity at the industry level. Second, I will develop a theoretical model that rationalises the empirical findings. Finally, I will structurally estimate the key parameters of the model for counterfactual policy experiments. Importantly, the counterfactual analysis will compare alternative policy approaches, such as a stand-alone carbon tax versus a carbon tax combined with entry subsidies that lower firms’ entry costs and reduce market concentration. This research will open up a novel policy debate on whether two policy areas that have been hitherto considered separately, namely, competition and climate change, need to be coordinated to accelerate decarbonisation.
Professor Helen Johnston
SRG26\260065
Project Title: 'Halfway house to freedom': The evolution of open or minimum security prisons in the twentieth century
University of Hull
Value awarded: £9725
Funded by: BIST
This research will uncover and explore the development of open or minimum-security prisons in England & Wales in the twentieth century. Since the first open borstal was established at Lowdham Grange in 1930 and then, the first adult open prison at New Hall Camp in West Yorkshire in 1938, the open estate developed quickly in the post war period. The use of such open prisons or camps were part of the training of prisoners and their return to normal life, a ‘half-way house to freedom’ as Chairman of the Prison Commission, Lionel Fox expressed it (Fox, 1952). Open prisons or minimum security, Category D prisons remain a crucial part of the prison estate, supporting rehabilitation and resettling people back into wider society as they progress through prison sentences. This original research will interrogate the evolution of this part of the prison estate across the twentieth century.
Dr Lipika Kamra
SRG26\261215
Co-applicant(s): Dr Ritanjan Das
Project Title: Cash for Women's Votes? Gender, Welfare and Politics in the World's Largest Democracy
University of Birmingham
Value awarded: £9900
Funded by: BIST
Across the Global South, cash transfer programmes have become a central instrument of poverty reduction and women’s welfare. Yet while widely studied as development tools, their implications for women’s democratic participation remain underexplored. This project examines the growing use of women-targeted cash transfers in India, where governments increasingly treat women as a distinct political constituency and welfare provision becomes intertwined with democratic competition.
Through a comparative study of Punjab and West Bengal (Indian states/regional provinces), the project investigates how such programmes are politically framed, institutionally implemented, and experienced by women recipients. Combining feminist political economy with welfare politics scholarship, it develops the concept of paradoxical empowerment to explore how welfare programmes may simultaneously expand women’s agency, recognition, and political participation while generating new forms of dependency and political incorporation. The project advances new understandings of the relationship between welfare, democracy, and women’s empowerment in contemporary democracies across the Global South.
Dr Stephen Kastoryano
SRG26\260935
Co-applicant(s): Professor Giovanni Mastrobuoni, Professor Giovanni Mastrobuoni
Project Title: Expertise and Error in Criminal Adjudication: Evidence from US Death Investigation Reform
University of Reading
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Judicial processes rely on expert assessments. While employing non-experts may reduce short-term costs, it may also increase the risk of serious judicial errors. This project studies this trade-off in US death investigation systems, where some jurisdictions rely on coroners with no medical training while others use medically qualified medical examiners. Its central aim is to determine whether professionalised death investigation reduces wrongful homicide convictions, and whether the resulting reduction in judicial error justifies the fiscal cost of replacing lay coroners with medical examiners. Preliminary county-level difference-in-differences estimates suggest that introducing medical examiners reduces wrongful murder convictions by 50-60%. The grant proposal requests funding for archival research to verify county-level reform dates in states with mixed systems, document motivations behind reforms, and assemble fiscal data needed to calibrate the conditions under which adopting a medical examiner system becomes cost-effective.
Professor Nitasha Kaul
SRG26\261101
Project Title: The Small State 'Diamond Strategy': Nation-Building, Assertion, and Innovation in Bhutan's Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC)
University of Westminster
Value awarded: £6639.93
Funded by: BIST
This project analyses the strategic implications of Bhutan's new Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC), the most significant initiative since the country's democratic transition in 2008. GMC is a Special Administrative Region in Bhutan's southern borderlands with its own laws and governance, announced in 2023 by the head of state as a 'diamond strategy' through which a small state offers big solutions to the world. Drawing on two decades of fieldwork and networks in Bhutan, plus a 2025 scoping visit to the GMC area, this project examines GMC as: (a) a strategic nation-building initiative redefining collective belonging through unprecedented civic mobilisation; (b) a bold assertion of small-state confidence through an autonomous zone with its own legal and financial architecture; (c) an experiment in alternative modernity combining financial innovation with indigenisation of capitalism through Buddhist-inspired values. It will produce a pioneering international scholarly analysis of GMC, grounded in unrivalled direct engagement with Bhutan.
Dr Stephanie King
SRG26\261821
Project Title: Investigating school suspensions with children with a social worker
University of Derby
Value awarded: £6260
Funded by: BIST
Despite several government reports and policy changes, school suspensions in England continue to rise. Suspension is a disciplinary sanction used in schools to manage behaviour and is linked to a number of poor outcomes related to academic attainment and future prospects. There are persistent patterns of inequalities in who gets suspended from school, which adds to a cycle of marginalisation. In particular, this study is to explore the link between social care groups, specifically children with a social worker, and suspension from school.
This proposal forms part one of a two part project. The aim of this first part is to co-produce a research plan and research questions with young people which will form part two of the project. Co-production is a key aspect of the approach, in order to be guided by the perspectives and insights of those with lived experience of the question being explored.
Dr Matthew King-Parker
SRG26\261068
Co-applicant(s): Dr Ross Bartels
Project Title: Understanding the Proclivity to Offend in the General Community
University of Lincoln
Value awarded: £7782
Funded by: BIST
Evidence shows that general criminality underpins all forms of offending behaviour, with most people engaging in multiple types of crime as opposed to one specific type, such as acquisitive and violent offences. Forensic-based interventions have begun to address offending behaviour in a more generalised manner. This line of thinking should be applied to the understanding of offending proclivity, defined as the self-reported likelihood to engage in a first-time crime, as this has only been examined in relation to specific forms of offending. This study, therefore, aims to bridge this gap by examining whether scores on multiple proclivity measures for different offence types (1) are interrelated and associated with indicators of general criminality in an online community-based sample and (2) differ between different demographic groups. The results will help develop an understanding of offending behaviour, identify those at risk of offending, and contribute to the prevention of first-time offences.
Professor Brian Klaas
SRG26\260718
Project Title: Cultural Evolution and Selection Pressures in London's Metropolitan Police
University College London (UCL)
Value awarded: £9882.85
Funded by: BIST
Emergency response police officers routinely make consequential decisions under extreme psychological uncertainty. Response policing is shaped by three overlapping challenges: information distortion occurs as details are relayed from caller to dispatchers to response officers; officers operate within a costly, heavily scrutinised oversight environment that may push effective officers away from frontline roles; and officers fear multi-year career-ending investigations when incidents end poorly, even when they behave properly. Scholarly literature has not examined how these dynamics create evolutionary-style selection pressures within policing. Combining evolutionary theory and ethnographic observation of emergency response officers and dispatchers, this project investigates how information distortion occurs in call handling around specific trigger words that are "selected for" in the information chain; whether oversight methods aimed at detecting and deterring abuse can inadvertently cause effective officers to self-select away from frontline policing; and whether impersonal institutional responses to officer investigations can exacerbate "good apple" flight.
Dr Santosh Koirala
SRG26\261063
Co-applicant(s): Dr Anandadeep Mandal, Dr Partha Roy
Project Title: The Political Economy of Climate Laws: Distributive Consequences, Capital Allocation, and Regulatory Credibility
University of Birmingham
Value awarded: £9500
Funded by: BIST
Climate governance is expanding rapidly: Climate Change Laws of the World provides access to more than 7000 climate laws, policies and UNFCCC submissions, including more than 1500 climate laws. Sustainability reporting is used by 96 per cent of the world largest 250 companies. This project examines when climate laws generate real transition and when they produce symbolic compliance. It develops a political economy framework linking legal stringency, enforcement credibility, compliance costs and firm responses. The empirical analysis will combine climate law texts with University of Birmingham subscribed data from Worldscope, Datastream, Refinitiv and Trucost. Natural language processing and manual validation will create indices of disclosure strength, enforcement credibility and regulatory scope. Difference in differences and event study methods will test effects on capital allocation, firm value, investment, emissions intensity and disclosure behaviour. It will produce one article, one policy brief and one reusable legal index dataset.
Dr Anna Kotova
SRG26\260651
Project Title: The Social Production of Stigma: Interpretation, Public Narrative, and Prisoners’ Families
University of Birmingham
Value awarded: £8177.60
Funded by: BIST
Existing research on stigma on prisoners’ families has largely focused on stigma as a relational label or a consequence of negative representation, paying less attention to the interpretive processes through which stigma is produced and reproduced in everyday life. This project examines how public narratives about prisoners’ families are represented, interpreted, and experienced across three connected domains: media discourse, public interpretation, and lived experience. Combining media discourse analysis, public focus groups, and interviews with family members of people in prison, the project investigates how crime-related narratives are negotiated in social interaction and how they shape experiences of stigma, exclusion, and social judgement. The project advances stigma theory by conceptualising stigma not as a fixed label or direct media effect, but as a socio-cultural process produced through interpretation. As a theory-building pilot study, it will provide a foundation for future comparative and cross-national research on stigma, punishment, and public meaning-making.
Professor Kostas Koufopoulos
SRG26\261728
Co-applicant(s): Dr Sonny Biswas, Professor Anjan Thakor
Project Title: Why do banks rarely acquire fintechs? The role of credit market competition
University of Sussex
Value awarded: £9850
Funded by: BIST
Online lenders that use proprietary computer algorithms — often called “fintechs” — have grown rapidly over the past decade. Surprisingly, traditional banks almost never acquire fintech firms. This pattern is widely observed but not well-understood. The project develops an economic theory explaining why acquisitions are rare and provides a preliminary empirical exploration of the main predictions. The central insight is that when a bank acquires a fintech, borrowers may switch to a rival bank to avoid fintech scrutiny, eroding the merged firm’s profits. The model formalises this insight and derives the precise conditions under which acquisitions arise. It also characterises the circumstances under which acquisitions are socially undesirable — for instance, when a bank acquires a fintech not to use the technology but to shut it down. The findings will give regulators a clearer basis for distinguishing bank–fintech arrangements that serve the public interest from those that warrant closer scrutiny.
Dr Anna Lambrechts
SRG26\262419
Co-applicant(s): Dr Ali Mair
Project Title: Camera-supported Autobiographical MEmory RecAll (CAMERA)
City St George's, University of London
Value awarded: £9993.28
Funded by: BIST
“SenseCam” is an automatic wearable camera which captures wide-angle, time-lapsed images from the perspective of the wearer. Although shown to effectively support everyday memory in people with and without memory impairments, its adoption for therapeutic use has been impeded by the large number of photos generated, which makes daily review burdensome. To unlock its potential, it is essential to understand how specific photos, or sequences of photos, trigger the “SenseCam effect”, enabling targeted review for users.
The proposed project uses a novel methodological approach drawing from established eye-tracking technology to identify which images drive SenseCam’s success as a memory aid, and which features of visual exploration predict subsequent memory performance. This project will form part of our broader research exploring how SenseCam can benefit memory and everyday function in people with autism, though the findings will be equally applicable to other populations, such as people with Alzheimer’s disease and amnesia.
Dr Harin Lee
SRG26\261996
Co-applicant(s): Dr Khwan Kim
Project Title: How AI distorts the perceived value of artistic creation
University of Cambridge
Value awarded: £9767
Funded by: BIST
Music produced through generative AI is beginning to flood mainstream platforms, but we still know little about how authorship information changes listener judgment. This project asks whether the same musical material is valued differently when listeners realise the song was made by a human, by AI, or by a combination of both. Using a curated dataset of 720 AI and human song pairs matched on popularity and musical profile, we will run a series of online listening experiments with UK participants. We will measure how liking changes when songs are heard without labels, with source labels, or with labels indicating that specific components such as voice, lyrics, composition, or instrumentation were AI-generated. The project will show which forms of musical labour listeners regard as most central to human creativity, and how this varies across genre, era, and demographic groups.
Dr Dongjun Li
SRG26\260647
Co-applicant(s): Professor Jingxin Dong
Project Title: GRACE – Geopolitical Risk and Adaptive Chain Evolution: Evidence from UK Trade Data
Northumbria University
Value awarded: £9909.60
Funded by: BIST
Global supply chains are increasingly shaped by geopolitical events. Brexit, rising United States–China tensions, and the Russia–Ukraine conflict have exposed the fragility of trade networks built around efficiency rather than resilience. The United Kingdom is particularly vulnerable. It depends heavily on international trade and faces acute risks in sectors where production is geographically concentrated.
This project focuses on the United Kingdom semiconductor sector. It examines how firms respond to geopolitical uncertainty through resilience strategies such as supplier diversification, reshoring, and stockpiling. Corporate annual reports and government policy documents from twelve to fifteen firms will be analysed using natural language processing techniques. This generates new indicators of geopolitical uncertainty that go beyond fixed-keyword approaches, linked to firm-level resilience responses and validated against independent trade and financial data. The findings will inform evidence-based policy recommendations for strengthening United Kingdom supply chain resilience.
Dr Yishun Lu
SRG26\262244
Co-applicant(s): Professor David De Roure
Project Title: Towards Scholarly RAG: Transferable and Cost-Aware Source-Grounded AI for Archival Research
University of Oxford
Value awarded: £9957.27
Funded by: BIST
This project asks how AI can help scholars work with large archival collections without weakening source criticism. It develops a transferable, cost-aware, and privacy-preserving workflow for AI-assisted archival research. An existing prototype already works on the Newton Project's MINT correspondence, generating source-grounded pedia-style person and topic pages with citations, evidential-status markers, and coverage reports. The next stage asks whether this workflow can be adapted to additional humanities corpora with different source formats, metadata conditions, permissions, research questions, and forms of incompleteness, inconsistency, and archival absence. The project will test cross-corpus transfer, compare hosted and local deployment options, and evaluate outputs for traceability, source fidelity, ambiguity, contradiction, evidential coverage, cost, usability, data privacy, AI safety, and scholarly validation. It will produce an improved prototype, an evaluation report, and practical guidance on when such systems succeed, fail, or require human correction.
Dr Alison Lui
SRG26\260817
Co-applicant(s): Professor Lawrence Ezemonye, Professor Deborah Odejimi
Project Title: Legal Frameworks, Peer Mentorship and Sustainable Digital Financial Practice in Nigeria
Liverpool John Moores University
Value awarded: £9918.26
Funded by: BIST
Despite rapid expansion of Nigeria’s digital payment infrastructure, women market traders in the informal economy remain disproportionately excluded from sustained digital financial participation. Existing scholarship on financial inclusion is dominated by development economics and sociology. Legal and regulatory questions such as how consumer protection frameworks and gendered property rights shape women’s durable adoption of digital payments are largely unexamined.
This project draws on original quantitative and qualitative data gathered across Nigeria’s South-South, South-West, and North-Central geo-political zones. It investigates how legal and regulatory frameworks interact with peer-led financial literacy interventions to shape behaviour change among women market traders. Through fieldwork, regulatory stakeholder interviews, and peer mentor training workshops incorporating a legal rights awareness module, it asks: under what conditions can peer mentorship bridge the gap between formal legal frameworks and women market traders’ lived financial practice? The findings will identify legally grounded intervention points that support sustained digital payment use.
Dr Ha-Phuong Luong
SRG26\261923
Co-applicant(s): Professor Chris Jones
Project Title: Navigating Informality: How Provincial Institutions in Vietnam Shape the Global Apparel Industry.
University of Reading
Value awarded: £9990
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates how sub-national informal institutions—such as local approaches to labour training and environmental protection—shape Vietnamese apparel firms’ ability to engage successfully in global value chains (GVCs). As global firms seek to diversify their supply chains and enhance resilience, Vietnam has emerged as a pivotal production hub, particularly in the apparel sector. Situated both geographically and economically between major powers, Vietnam faces the challenge of navigating a complex strategic environment while seeking to strengthen its role as a reliable production base for global companies. Although prior research often treats countries as institutionally uniform production locations, this project highlights informal institutional differences across sub-national regions in Vietnam, identifying whether and how they shape firms’ internationalization within GVCs. We expect our findings to have significant managerial and policy implications for Vietnamese firms seeking to strengthen their international competitiveness and for global companies assessing Vietnam as a resilient production base.
Dr Deborah Madden
SRG26\261971
Co-applicant(s): Dr Abigail Ruth Loxham
Project Title: Abortion in Hispanic Imaginations: The Personal and the Political in Popular Culture
Lancaster University
Value awarded: £9972.24
Funded by: BIST
With abortion rights, laws and access at the forefront of social, political, medical, legal and cultural discourses globally, Abortion in Hispanic Imaginations will interrogate how popular culture informs, facilitates and responds to reproductive rights across Spain and Latin America. While Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Spain have introduced and/or liberalised legislation in the past decade, provoking backlash from reactionary socio-political movements, strict bans continue to impede access in Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Peru, where feminist organisations push for access. Through a shared language and analogous cultural histories, discourses – of all ideological positionings – are interconnected across the diverse Hispanic world, with debates becoming increasingly polarised and transnational. The grant will fund a symposium and subsequent publication that will explore the affective, socio-political and revolutionary capital of cultural output on abortion, examining the ways in which media can engender understanding, disseminate information and help individuals navigate complex emotional experiences.
Dr Sara Mahdizadeh
SRG26\261031
Project Title: Mapping Lived Experience in Educational Landscapes: A Mixed-Methods Study of Spatial Behaviour and Microclimate Simulation in Leeds Campus, UK
Independent Scholar
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This interdisciplinary research investigates the relationship between biodiversity, microclimate, and users’ spatial behaviour in urban educational landscapes, using the University of Leeds campus as a case study. While urban landscapes are recognised for their ecological value, limited research examines how spatial configuration and microclimatic conditions, including thermal comfort, shape everyday experiences. Employing a mixed-methods approach combining time-lapse behavioural mapping, qualitative methods, and ENVI-met microclimate simulation, the study explores the relationship between environmental performance and lived spatial experience from the perspective of campus users (e.g., students, staff, and visitors). It also examines how environmental conditions interact with spatial use, movement, and social activities, and how educational landscapes and biodiversity mutually shape and are shaped by users’ interactions during seasonal cycles. The results will provide evidence-based design recommendations for landscape designers and urban planners to support the development of educational campuses, reflecting users’ spatial experiences while enhancing environmental comfort and biodiversity.
Dr Bansi Malde
SRG26\261258
Project Title: Drivers Of Gender Gaps In Financial Product Use In Low-income Settings
City St George's, University of London
Value awarded: £9999.52
Funded by: BIST
Workers in low-income countries are increasingly offered digital financial products through their employers, but women are far less likely to use them than men. This project investigates why, focusing on earned wage access (EWA): a product that lets workers withdraw wages they have already earned before their monthly payday. We will combine three years of detailed administrative records on EWA usage among workers at a large Bangladeshi garment factory with a new survey of 800 workers to (i) document the emergence and evolution of gender gaps in EWA usage over a 36+ month period; (ii) identify what drives this gap, focusing on differences in information, preferences, intra-household agency, liquidity needs and networks; and (iii) use quasi-experimental variation to study causal relevance of liquidity needs. The answers will directly inform the design of policies to close the gap, improving women's financial resilience in some of the world's most precarious jobs.
Dr Sabira Mannan
SRG26\262518
Co-applicant(s): Dr Mohamed Nurullah
Project Title: Question Order Effects in Investment Judgements Under Ambiguity: A Behavioural and Eye Movement Study
Kingston University
Value awarded: £7690.45
Funded by: BIST
When people evaluate an investment opportunity, the order in which they are asked questions can influence the conclusion they reach. Such question-order effects have been documented across many areas of decision-making, but little is known about the cognitive processes that produce them.
This project investigates how financial judgements are formed under ambiguity and uncertainty. It combines a large online study with a laboratory eye-tracking experiment to examine how people evaluate information before making a decision. The research will also test predictions from quantum cognition, an emerging approach that uses the mathematics of quantum probability theory to explain why the order of questions can influence human judgement.
The findings will improve understanding of how decisions are formed in uncertain situations and may have implications for investment communication and financial literacy. By combining eye tracking with quantum cognition, the project will provide direct evidence of how question-order effects emerge during financial decision-making.
Professor Yaron Matras
SRG26\261038
Project Title: Isoglosses and dialect classification in Domari, an endangered language of the Middle East
Independent Scholar
Value awarded: £9950
Funded by: BIST
The project will fill a gap in the study of the dialects, the dialect classification and the historical reconstruction of Domari, an endangered Indo-Aryan non-territorial minority language in the Middle East. The plan is to carry out structured elicitation of questionnaire-based and free speech material among members of four separate Domari-speaking populations to allow a systematic dialectological comparison. We will explore the hypothesis of the north-south gradual spread of isoglosses that separate the Domari varieties of Anatolia, via Syria and Lebanon, from those of Palestine and Jordan. The project will engage a native speaker community member who is trained in the dialect documentation of the language and with whom the project lead has collaborated in the past. Outputs will include journal articles and digital datasets.
Dr Omar McDoom
SRG26\261103
Project Title: Political Elites and Illicit Finance: Building a Global Evidence Base on Elite Corruption and Accountability
London School of Economics and Political Science
Value awarded: £9974
Funded by: BIST
This project builds a systematic, evidence-graded dataset on financial corruption among heads of government and the professional intermediaries who enable their crimes. Expanding on a 2024–25 pilot of 50 leaders, it will document approximately 550 leaders from the 100 countries with the highest perceived corruption risk. The dataset records allegations, investigations, trials, and sanctions, identifying patterns of impunity and accountability at the apex of political power. A key innovation is the inclusion of professional intermediaries -lawyers, bankers, and accountants, often from major financial centres such as London, New York, Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong - whose expertise makes kleptocracy technically feasible and reputationally defensible. Generative AI tools will assist in sourcing and translating material from local-language media, court records, and NGO reports, paired with manual verification and evidence grading. The resulting dataset will provide an unprecedented empirical foundation for systematic comparative research on elite corruption, transnational finance, and global governance.
Dr Annapurna Menon
SRG26\262019
Project Title: How are migrant Kashmiri scholars navigating dual challenges of Indian state surveillance and restrictive immigration policies in the UK?
University of Sheffield
Value awarded: £6990
Funded by: BIST
The abrogation of Kashmir’s regional limited autonomy has intensified militarization and extensive surveillance, severely restricting knowledge production. Amidst thisclimate and ongoing harassment of Kashmiri students in Indian universities, an undocumented exodus of Kashmiri students is underway, with many seeking academic freedom in places like theUK. This research centers the lived experiences of these migrant scholars, examining how theynavigate the persistent censorship and surveillance of the Indian state while they face increasingly restrictive immigration policies in their new home. Through focus groups and semi-structuredinterviews, this research sheds light on the lived impact of repressive state policies on Kashmiri
scholars exploring actionable recommendations for British universities and advocacy groups tosupport Kashmiri scholars in the UK. This research will enhance our understanding of migratory patterns to the UK, explore its impact on knowledge production on Kashmir and will be relevant for scholars researching the relationship between state policies, academic freedom and migration.
Dr Vittorio Merola Marotta
SRG26\261645
Co-applicant(s): Dr Jeanne Bovet
Project Title: What Is Copartisan Is Good, but What Is Good Is Also Copartisan: Partisan Halo Effects in Facial Perception
Durham University
Value awarded: £9966
Funded by: BIST
How do individuals form impressions about people’s partisanship without direct political cues? We propose a novel theoretical framework: the partisan halo effect, whereby individuals infer that people with more positive traits are more likely to be copartisan, regardless of the truth. This halo effect might be bidirectional, like the attractiveness halo, such that the same identity mechanism also makes people infer that copartisans possess more positive traits.
We test this using facial first impressions—based on standardised faces of ordinary residents and political candidates—where automatic and subtle identity effects are common. Employing a pre-registered experimental design across two nationally representative surveys of American partisans, we compare our novel hypothesis with the main alternative explanation that shared cultural stereotypes drive facial perceptions.
By exploring the biasing role of facial first impressions in public opinion, this project advances our understanding of the nature and consequences of political identity and polarisation in politics.
Dr Mila Mileva
SRG26\261226
Co-applicant(s): Dr Sarah Laurence
Project Title: Mental representations of familiar faces across age
University of Plymouth
Value awarded: £9641
Funded by: BIST
Human faces change substantially with age, yet current face recognition theories often disregard this important source of variability. Recently, we found evidence that people value information about the most current appearance of familiar identities more highly than expected, demonstrating the key role of natural chronology in face recognition. Here, we propose to explore the limits of this bias and the conditions under which it occurs. Participants will be familiarised with identities by watching video clips taken across time, at different ages and their recognition will then be tested with novel images within and outside the exposure period. We will also use technological advancements in mouse-tracking to capture how this current appearance bias evolves in real-time using more implicit decision-making. This will deepen our understanding of the processes involved in the transition from unfamiliar to familiar face recognition and how the way we think of familiar identities changes as we age.
Dr Ariana Modirrousta-Galian
SRG26\262110
Co-applicant(s): Dr Yu Heng Daryl Lee, Professor David Shanks
Project Title: Test-Enhanced Learning with Artificial Intelligence
University of Kent
Value awarded: £7011
Funded by: BIST
Over a century of research shows that retrieval practice (taking tests) consolidates learning and comprehension and slows the rate of forgetting. That is, tests do not just measure what you know, they also help you learn—a phenomenon known as test-enhanced learning (TEL). Despite this, TEL is underused in educational settings. One potential reason for this is increased workload as it is time-consuming and cognitively demanding to create, administer and score practice tests.
This research will explore whether artificial intelligence (AI)-generated practice tests can promote TEL as effectively as educator-generated ones, and whether AI offers meaningful reductions in the time and effort required to create, administer and score them. We will also survey students, educators, and the general public to gain insight into their views on the use of AI for TEL. By combining experimental evidence and stakeholder perspectives, we aim to inform a novel application of AI in education.
Dr Sally Morfill
SRG26\262544
Project Title: Online Offline: 3D scanning, motion capture and material translationsine
Manchester Metropolitan University
Value awarded: £9997.38
Funded by: BIST
Since the advent of the camera obscura, visual recording devices have mediated our perception of the world. 3D scanning is part of this continuum, made widely available to the public through mobile phone apps. These tools shift observation from a static experience to one requiring corporeal movement around the subject, producing scans that contain the trace of their maker. Drawing on principles from visual and critical studies in relation to the non-neutral observer (Crary), this international collaborative project investigates ways in which embodied acts of visual recording using 3D scanning apps can be interpreted or materially translated into tangible representations. We investigate how this perceptual mode can be expressed through material translations of low-tech, incomplete and sometimes glitchy 3D scans at a point where this technology is rapidly changing. The research connects the embodied experience of scanning and processes of representation through perceptual material artefacts as multi-sensory forms of knowledge.
Dr Julia Morgan
SRG26\260048
Co-applicant(s): Dr Sally Bashford-Squires
Project Title: Co-producing a children’s book with Roma families: participatory storytelling, representation and inclusive learning in primary education
University of Greenwich
Value awarded: £8263
Funded by: BIST
This project explores co-production with Roma families in Glasgow to develop an inclusive children’s book for primary aged pupils. Working with a Roma-led NGO, a Roma professional illustrator, a Roma translator and eight Roma families, the research will examine how collaborative storytelling can support representation, community capacity building, and foster culturally relevant learning resources. Through a series of four co-production workshops, children and families will shape the narrative, themes/words, and visual content of the book, drawing on their lived experiences. The stories in the book will reflect the rich oral storytelling traditions of Roma communities. The project is grounded in participatory and decolonial methodologies, foregrounding intergenerational (children/families) community voices. The final version of the book will be evaluated by primary school teachers/headteachers across Glasgow via an online feedback link. This 12-month study contributes to debates on equity, representation, and co-production in education, with wider relevance for working with minoritised communities.
Dr Eleanor Munro
SRG26\261593
Project Title: Charity and The State in the 20th Century and Today: Exploring the Voluntary Services Unit archives
Sheffield Hallam University
Value awarded: £9752
Funded by: BIST
This research project sets out to explore the historical and contemporary relationship between UK governments and the voluntary sector in England, from the perspective of government units and the civil servants who work for them. It will explore the archives of the Voluntary Service Unit, the first government unit responsible for relations between the government and the voluntary sector, established in 1972, with records until the early 2000s held by The National Archives (TNA). Insights from this archival material will form the basis of a workshop with current civil servants to explore historical government approaches to voluntary sector relations, in order to reflect on the current and potential future ways of working with charities. The project will culminate in an open learning event for public and voluntary sector professionals and researchers to share insights and facilitate discussion about the past, present and future of government-voluntary sector relationships.
Dr Luz Navarro Eslava
SRG26\260729
Project Title: Climate Urbanism in the Margins: Participatory Mapping with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Communities in London
University of Westminster
Value awarded: £9784
Funded by: BIST
This project examines how climate vulnerability is produced through planning governance, infrastructure provision, and spatial precarity affecting Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities in London. Grounded in critical urban theory, climate urbanism, and agonistic planning theory, it approaches vulnerability not as an environmental condition but as a socio-spatial process. The research focuses on two authorised Traveller sites in Southwark, Ilderton Road and Burnhill Close,and is co-developed with Southwark Travellers' Action Group. Through participatory mapping workshops, walk-along interviews, and policy review, it foregrounds participant knowledge of flooding, heat, drainage, repair, and place attachment. The project examines how site scarcity, housing and tenure precarity, and environmental risk are interconnected, and how they are rendered visible or invisible within Southwark planning frameworks. Building on previous participatory work, it contributes to debates on climate justice, planning injustice, and minoritised urbanisms, while supporting more inclusive approaches to climate adaptation in UK cities.
Dr Thang Nguyen
SRG26\261467
Co-applicant(s): Professor Yilmaz Guney
Project Title: Toward a Stronger and Fairer Britain: Financial Innovation and Gender Equality in Access to Entrepreneurial Finance
Coventry University
Value awarded: £6848.85
Funded by: BIST
This project contributes to academic and policy debates on financial technology (fintech) and gender inequality in entrepreneurial finance by examining whether financial innovations reduce or reproduce gender disparities in access to finance for entrepreneurs in the UK. Using data from the SME Finance Monitor, which surveys approximately 4,500 UK micro and small businesses quarterly between 2011 and 2024, the study will aim at providing empirical evidence on the impacts of financial innovation on women entrepreneurs’ access to finance. The research has strong economic relevance as the 2019 Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship estimates that reducing gender disparities in entrepreneurship could add up to £250 billion to the UK.
Dr Angela Nyhout
SRG26\262527
Co-applicant(s): Dr David Kelly
Project Title: From Prediction To Possibility: The Role Of Expectation Violation In The Development Of Possibility Reasoning
University of Kent
Value awarded: £9998.52
Funded by: BIST
Counterfactual thinking—the ability to imagine how the past could have turned out differently—is a cornerstone of human cognition. Yet its developmental origins are strongly debated. Some argue it requires late-developing executive and conceptual skills, while others find early signs in young children. This project proposes a new framework that resolves this debate by situating counterfactual reasoning within the mind’s capacity for prediction. We argue that early moments of surprise—when reality violates expectation—train children to represent and compare alternative outcomes, laying the foundation for counterfactual thought. Across two pre-registered studies with 3–5-year-olds, we will test whether prediction errors elicit early markers of counterfactual reasoning, and whether actively generating predictions strengthens this effect. By combining eye-tracking and verbal responses, this work will provide the first mechanistic test of how counterfactual reasoning develops from everyday experiences of prediction and surprise.
Dr Daniel Ogunniyi
SRG26\261528
Project Title: The Non-punishment Principle and Legal Protection Limits for Nigerian Cyber-trafficking Victims in Ghana
University of Hull
Value awarded: £9519.78
Funded by: BIST
A new form of human trafficking has emerged in West Africa. In recent years, hundreds of Nigerian nationals, including women and children, have been trafficked to Ghana where they are coerced into cyber-fraud, romance scams, and online gold-trading schemes. When Ghanaian authorities raid these operations, victims are detained, prosecuted, or deported without any systematic screening for trafficking victimhood. Although the Nigerian antitrafficking authority, NAPTIP, traditionally receives and supports victims whenever they are repatriated from abroad, the legal mechanisms for victim recognition and access to remedy for Ghana returnees remain opaque. Thus, underpinned by the non-punishment principle, this project investigates the extent to which Ghana and Nigeria’s antitrafficking framework protect this population at every stage of the detention–deportation–repatriation pathway. Through legal documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, the project produces the first socio-legal research applying the non-punishment principle to victims of cyber-related trafficking in West Africa.
Dr Josue Ortega
SRG26\260050
Project Title: Justifiable Priority Violations in School Choice
Queen's University Belfast
Value awarded: £5850
Funded by: BIST
This project develops a new theoretical framework for improving on Deferred Acceptance in school choice while tightly restricting which priority violations may occur. The core idea is that a priority violation is justifiable only if it affects a student who either benefits from the change or could not have benefited under any Pareto improvement over Deferred Acceptance. Building on this idea, the project studies the existence and structure of justifiable improvements, develops methods for constructing them, and clarifies their relation to existing approaches based on ex-ante consent. The project is joint work with Dr R. Pablo Arribillaga and builds on an already productive collaboration that has generated publications in Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics and Economics Letters, as well as a revise-and-resubmit at Theoretical Economics. The award will support a one-month research visit to complete the theory paper and prepare it for journal submission.
Dr Ian Pennock
SRG26\261275
Co-applicant(s): Dr Jenny Bosten
Project Title: Do food-selective brain regions have colour tuning curves to specific food objects?
University of Sussex
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
In a previous study we found that the brain has specific regions that respond selectively to food objects (Pennock et al., 2023, Current Biology). These regions also respond to saturated (colourful) images but to a lesser degree than to food images. When we see a food object, the colour of the food object is informative to us. It can inform us about its ripeness and edibleness. We therefore believe that these brain regions might respond to the relationship between food and colour: for example, specifically to yellow bananas. We want to investigate whether these regions have colour tuning curves for specific food objects. If these exist, brain responses to images of bananas in these regions would be expected to be strongest for yellow bananas. This study would allow us to get a better understanding of how the brain integrates colour and object representations during food perception.
Dr Marco Perolini
SRG26\261915
Project Title: Climate-migrant solidarities and reparative justice: comparative perspectives from London and Lima
Independent Scholar
Value awarded: £9958
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates how climate and migrant justice movements use reparative justice in response to the enduring harms of colonialism and slavery, including climate change and global inequalities. While reparative justice has become increasingly central to both climate and migrant justice activism, limited research has examined how these movements conceptualize reparations and whether reparative claims foster solidarity across movements.
Bringing together rarely intersecting fields—critical migration studies, environmental justice scholarship, social movement studies, and urban studies—the project significantly contributes to developing a theory of reparative solidarity between climate and migrant justice movements. Drawing on comparative research in London and Lima, both involved in local migrant and climate governance initiatives but influenced by different colonial and social movement histories, the project examines how collective resistance may reshape cities’ postcolonial legacies and have an impact on local migration and climate governance.
Dr Sofia Persson
SRG26\261394
Co-applicant(s): Dr Thomas Hostler
Project Title: Do current campaigns to reduce rape stigma in fact reinforce it?
Leeds Beckett University
Value awarded: £9720
Funded by: BIST
Sexual violence against women is largely attributed to the widespread belief in “rape myths” (stereotypes/misconceptions about rape), making challenging these myths a key priority for anti-rape charity campaigns. These campaigns typically present rape myths alongside facts that challenge them; however, according to the “illusory truth effect”, presenting myths alongside truths may backfire, as repeatedly presenting false information may re-enforce its spread and popularity. This project will be the first to empirically test the long-term effectiveness of this “myths versus facts approach”, and to consider potential mechanisms behind any effects. Recruiting a large sample of 700 participants, the study will examine how varying the presentation of real-life rape myth-busting material according to psychological factors underpinning the illusory truth effect (psychological reactance, believability, source monitoring) impacts rape myth beliefs over 6 months. Through an ongoing collaboration with Rape Crisis England and Wales, findings will directly inform future interventions to reduce rape myths.
Dr Christopher Pich
SRG26\261073
Co-applicant(s): Dr Marwa Tourky
Project Title: Assessing the management, co-creation and long-term impact of the UK Parliament Teacher Ambassador Programme
University of Nottingham
Value awarded: £9244.81
Funded by: BIST
Voter disconnection is a huge issue increasingly affecting democracy. This is especially prevalent amongst young people. There is a timely opportunity to understand the role of educators in addressing this problem by studying the Teacher Ambassador Programme, a unique parliamentary initiative with 20 years of heritage which is unprecedented and has to-date not been deployed the shed light on this issue. This will be the first project to investigate the management, and efficacy of the UK Parliament Teacher Ambassador Programme through the theory of value co-creation understood from the perspective of internal specialists (programme managers), prospective-accredited representatives (educators) and recipients (young learners). Further, this study will develop a systematic toolkit to guide stakeholders as they co-design, implement and assess the impact of democratic engagement programmes. This project will serve as a pilot to upscale and apply to nationalinternational contexts as a framework to co-develop sustained strategies to strengthen democratic engagement.
Dr Martin Pritchard
SRG26\261434
Project Title: Beyond Technical Solutions: Developing a Socio-Technical Framework for Water Infrastructure Adoption in Informal Urban Settlements
Leeds Beckett University
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Why do technically viable decentralised water systems often fail to achieve sustained adoption in informal urban settlements? Existing research offers partial explanations, but is fragmented across socio-technical, institutional, and behavioural perspectives. This project addresses that gap by developing a Socio-Technical Adoption Framework to explain how infrastructure is adopted, adapted, contested, or rejected under conditions of informality, inequality, and fragmented governance.
Using Makoko, Lagos, Nigeria, as a case study, the research combines household surveys, stakeholder interviews, and institutional mapping to examine how trust, affordability, perceived water quality, governance relationships, and everyday practices shape engagement with decentralised water systems. Makoko is significant because its informal water economies, environmental vulnerability, limited formal infrastructure, and hybrid governance arrangements reflect challenges across rapidly urbanising informal settlements.
By connecting household-level behaviour with institutional and governance dynamics, the project will advance an empirically grounded model of infrastructure adoption and inform context-sensitive approaches to infrastructure policy and planning.
Dr Amir Raki
SRG26\261410
Co-applicant(s): Dr Ahmed Al-Abdin
Project Title: Vulnerability Allocation Ecosystems: Essential Service Ecosystems in Conflict Contexts
University of Liverpool
Value awarded: £9477
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates how essential service ecosystems allocate vulnerability during conflict. Existing research has primarily identified vulnerable groups, but has paid less attention to how service ecosystems shape who becomes visible, prioritised, delayed or excluded under conditions of crisis and infrastructural disruption.
Focusing on Gaza following the outbreak of war in October 2023, the project examines how access to healthcare, humanitarian aid, food distribution, telecommunications, shelter and financial support is selectively organised through systems of eligibility, prioritisation, visibility and infrastructural control.
Using qualitative analysis of organisational communications, humanitarian reports, digital materials and audiovisual data, the project develops the concept of “vulnerability allocation ecosystems” to explain how essential service ecosystems distribute exposure and protection across populations.
The project will produce a conceptual framework, comparative qualitative evidence base and practical insights for humanitarian organisations, policymakers and researchers concerned with equitable access to essential services during crises within rapidly evolving crisis environments globally.
Dr Shrishti Rana
SRG26\261417
Project Title: Digital Gen Z Revolutions in Global South Democracies: A Comparative Analysis of Nepal and Bangladesh
University of Manchester
Value awarded: £8120
Funded by: BIST
Existing theories of revolution assume that revolutionary situations emerge under authoritarian or semi-authoritarian rule. Yet Gen Z-led mobilisations in Nepal and Bangladesh, which overthrew democratically elected governments commanding substantial parliamentary majorities, present a theoretical puzzle that existing scholarship has not adequately addressed. This project investigates the mechanisms and processes through which digitally organised youth protests generated revolutionary outcomes within democratic systems, through a qualitative comparative study of Nepal and Bangladesh. Conceptualising these cases as digital Gen Z revolutions, the study draws on postcolonial and decolonial perspectives to analyse them as forms of resistance to enduring colonial structures of power and inequality, and as expressions of emergent political imaginaries rooted in locally grounded aspirations for justice and democratic transformation. The project contributes new conceptual frameworks to scholarship at the intersection of social movement studies and revolutionary theory, while generating policy-relevant insights for addressing political alienation among young people.
Dr Iffat Rashid
SRG26\262220
Project Title: A Nation Contested: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Belonging in Kashmir, c. 1930s-1980s
Independent Researcher
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Since the departure of the British and the partition of India in 1947, the Kashmir conflict has remained the world’s longest-running unresolved international dispute before the United Nations. Why does Kashmir, situated on the margins of the British Empire in India, continue to be a site of rival religious, regional, and secular nationalisms in South Asia? My project advances the argument that the genesis of the protracted conflict lies not merely in the territorial claims and counterclaims of India and Pakistan, nor, as most scholars contend, solely in the failure of India’s democratic institutions and norms or its inability to establish a genuine federalist structure post-independence. It demonstrates how Kashmiri political actors and intellectuals, often marginalised in the official nationalist discourses of South Asia, articulated a distinct regional conception of nationhood, rooted in asymmetrical federalism and constitutional autonomy that resisted incorporation into singular Indian or Pakistani nationalist horizons.
Dr Itzhak Rasooly
SRG26\260965
Project Title: Economic Pessimism and Support for Radical Change
City St George's, University of London
Value awarded: £9900
Funded by: BIST
British voters are increasingly pessimistic about the country’s economic trajectory, while support for the traditional two-party system has weakened. This project uses a large-scale survey experiment to investigate whether these trends may be connected. In the experiment, participants will first report their beliefs about how median real incomes and (absolute) poverty rates have evolved over the past 30 years. A subset of participants will then be randomly selected to receive information showing that both of these indicators have steadily improved over this period, albeit at a slowing rate in recent years. The study will then estimate whether this information reduces support for radical change to the UK’s economic system and whether it increases support for mainstream political parties. It will also examine which voters are most responsive to economic information, and which kinds of evidence most powerfully shape attitudes toward the economic status quo.
Dr Clare Rawdin
SRG26\260757
Project Title: Friction to fusion: Overcoming the challenges of a changing prison workforce.
Anglia Ruskin University
Value awarded: £9987.35
Funded by: BIST
The Prison Service workforce in England and Wales is changing, with younger officers increasingly being recruited. Effective working relationships and safe working environments underpin the smooth running of the prison estate, impacting upon on-the-job and formal learning, officer well-being and, subsequently, staff turnover. However, research suggests mistrust and friction is growing in the workforce and is associated with detrimental outcomes. While organisational research has examined officers’ ‘age’ as a demographic variable, little research has explored ‘generation’ as a more nuanced socio-cultural construct. This project will investigate generational differences by comparing ‘Generation X’ (born between 1965-1980) and ‘Generation Z’ (born between 1997 and 2012). Using a survey and interviews, this novel study will explore officers’ motivations and attitudes, along with their experiences of co-worker relationships. These findings and associated outputs will shape the research field and lead discussions on the challenges associated with a changing workforce for the future prison service.
Dr Boru Ren
SRG26\261711
Co-applicant(s): Dr Jiangtao Xie, Dr Prakriti Dasgupta
Project Title: How Generative AI Impacts Entry-Level Job Quality
Swansea University
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This project will examine how generative artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes labour markets by focusing on workers affected by AI-induced job displacement. While generative AI is triggering unprecedented worker displacement, current debates predominantly focus on the net quantity of jobs eliminated or created. This aggregate approach overlooks a critical consequence of AI-induced displacement, i.e., its impact on the quality of employment for entry-level workers and those re-entering the labour market. Focusing on entry-level jobs in the UK, this project investigates these changes by combining an analysis of job adverts over time with surveys of workers in AI-affected roles. Examining both how job quality is shifting and how workers experience these transitions will provide a complete picture of the changing job market. In doing so, this project will also shed light on whether AI might worsen workplace inequality and fundamentally alter how people build their careers.
Dr Lubna Rizvi
SRG26\261947
Co-applicant(s): Mrs Elizabeth Bridgen
Project Title: Academic Governance Under Financial Pressure: Counterproductive Behaviour, Dark Personality Traits, and Institutional Resilience in UK Higher Education
Buckinghamshire New University
Value awarded: £9500
Funded by: BIST
UK higher education is in its deepest financial crisis in a generation. The Office for Students reports that around 45% of providers in England could record deficits in 2025–26, and over 100 institutions have announced redundancies. Yet little is known about how staff actually behave under sustained organisational threat, or why some respond constructively while others disengage or act counterproductively.
This project examines how institutional governance, financial distress, and individual psychological differences shape counterproductive behaviour among staff in two contrasting types of UK university: Russell Group and post-92. Using public governance and financial data on 94 universities, a survey of 300 staff, and two focus groups, it integrates corporate governance theory with behavioural science to produce a multi-level account of crisis-period staff behaviour. Findings will inform regulators, governing bodies, and senior leaders seeking to stabilise institutions and rebuild trust during acute financial pressure.
Dr Justin Robinson
SRG26\261482
Project Title: Losing Faith in the Future? Understanding the Importance of Economic Expectations for Attitudes to Democracy in Britain
University of Oxford - Nuffield College
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
The macroeconomic outlook for Britain is negative. Inflationary pressures, global shocks and forecasts for slow economic growth provide a breeding ground for economic pessimism. This project seeks to test whether negative expectations for long-term economic performance weaken support for government and democracy among the British electorate. Put simply, democratic systems and the governments that lead them promise economic prosperity – if belief in this promise erodes, popular democratic support may disappear with it. Using a survey experiment to manipulate long-term expectations for economic growth, we will provide causal evidence of the effects of economic expectations on political support – and whether these effects are limited to the current government, or spill over to the system more generally. With post-industrial democracies like Britain facing an era of slow growth, understanding the consequences of this transformation are vital. This project asks whether slow growth threatens not just governing parties, but democracy itself.
Dr Ruben Ruiz-Rufino
SRG26\260449
Project Title: Economies of resentment: Labour-intensive industries and exclusionary politics (EconResent)
King's College London
Value awarded: £9872.16
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates the economic foundations of exclusionary politics by analysing how labour-intensive local economies influence support for radical-right parties. Departing from conventional explanations rooted in economic deprivation or geographic marginalisation, economies of resentment refer to the importance of economic structure as a key driver of political preference formation. The central hypothesis is that exposure to labour-intensive industries facilitates the development and expression of exclusionary attitudes. Using fine-grained geographical data drawn from publicly available datasets, the main goal of this project is to develop a new indicator of economic labour-intensity and applies it across the different UK census output areas. The resulting dataset enables both descriptive and causal analysis of the relationship between economic environments and radical-right support. The project contributes to academic and policy debates on political behaviour and democratic resilience. It also lays the foundation for a comparative European research agenda on the spatial dynamics of exclusionary politics.
Dr Jenny Russell
SRG26\261044
Co-applicant(s): Dr Lewis Graham
Project Title: Use Of Human Rights Defences In Possession Proceedings Brought By Social Landlords In England And Wales
King's College London
Value awarded: £9986.60
Funded by: BIST
In England and Wales, tens of thousands of families are affected by forced eviction every year, with significant implications for their physical and mental health, as well as disruption to their children’s education. Whilst the Supreme Court in Manchester City Council v Pinnock (2010) confirmed that occupiers of social housing can use human rights arguments to defend eviction proceedings, little is known about how frequently such arguments are actually used and succeed in practice. This is because most repossession cases are dealt with in the county courts, whose judgments typically go unreported. This empirical research project will uncover the "invisible law" of human rights defences to social landlord eviction proceedings via a mixed-methods study, combining doctrinal analysis of reported case law, quantitative analysis of the Ministry of Justice's Data First dataset on county courts, and interviews with district judges and practitioners working in county courts in London and Manchester.
Dr Abigail Schoneboom
SRG26\262066
Project Title: From the Ground Up: Mapping Soil, Struggle, and the Neighbourhood Commons in Western Queens
Newcastle University
Value awarded: £9990
Funded by: BIST
This project explores how community soil stewardship in Western Queens fosters ecological care, local resilience, and urban commoning. Through participatory mapping with student researchers from LaGuardia Community College’s Urban Agriculture Program, it will document the spatial and social life of community composting sites across a rapidly changing area of New York City. Combining co-produced maps and sensory ethnographic fieldwork, the research examines how urban soil-making connects land, labour, and collective life, showing how residents reclaim spaces threatened by development and ecological neglect. The project advances emerging work on the urban neighbourhood commons, developing a more-than-human account of soil as a medium of social and ecological repair. Outputs will include scholarly articles, a digital atlas, and a public multisensory exhibition that contribute to critical debates on environmental justice and participatory research.
Dr Sandy Schumann
SRG26\261880
Co-applicant(s): Dr Caitlin Siobahn Clemmow
Project Title: Mapping Children's and Young People's Patterns of Engagement with Gore Online
University College London (UCL)
Value awarded: £9854.09
Funded by: BIST
Following the 2024 Southport stabbings, concerns about children's and young people's (CYP) widespread exposure to graphic depictions of severe violence, injury, and death online have intensified. Beyond causing psychological or physical harms, gore content can serve as a gateway to broader harms ecosystems. To date, little is known about how CYP encounter gore online, which restricts ongoing safeguarding efforts. Refining the conceptual understanding of CYP's digital behaviour, we examine the extent to which CYP actively look for and/or are unintentionally exposed to gore. Crucially, we explore psychosocial, peer, familial, and platform-specific risk and protective factors of different patterns of engagement with gore content. To this end, we conduct an anonymous online survey with strong ethical safeguards, recruiting a representative sample of N=1,000 UK-based 13- 18-year-olds through a trusted panel provider. Results will point to urgently-needed practical recommendations; to facilitate their implementation, we lead a knowledge-exchange workshop with key UK stakeholders.
Dr Anita Sethi
SRG26\261325
Project Title: I Am Not An Object
School of Advanced Study, University of London
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
How does it feel to be objectified? This is a question I explore through a creative place-based approach to history. As a woman of colour descended from indentured labourers, I have been objectified and dehumanised throughout my life. This project mobilises the lived experience of racist abuse and colonial exploitation to interrogate the relationship between people, place and the natural world. It is organised around a reflexive journey through slices of familial history, moving from contemporary and twentieth-century racist violence to the indentured servitude of humans toiling on sugarcane plantations. At each stage I look outwards to formal and informal archives, including the colonial archives of natural history collections. I assess and interrogate archival gaps and explore creative ways of filling them. My methodology creates a research pathway to demonstrate the causes and effects of the objectification of both people of colour and the natural world.
Dr Desmond Sham
SRG26\260358
Co-applicant(s): Dr Ying-Fen Chen
Project Title: Creative practices of Hong Kong diaspora in the UK and Taiwan
University of Nottingham
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
This UK-Taiwan international collaborative project aims to foster a deeper, more nuanced understanding of cultural productions and creative practices among Hong Kong diaspora communities in the UK and Taiwan following the 2014 Umbrella Movement, as well as their implications for the two countries. Through policy review, observation, and interviews with the creative practitioners and their collaborators, we will examine how their creative practices contribute to the building of Hong Kong diaspora communities, safeguarding and preservation of Hong Kong culture and heritage, negotiation of cultural identities and engagement with the local communities in Taiwan and the UK, while taking local racial/ethnic politics and geopolitical concerns into consideration. We will also investigate how differences in physical and sociocultural infrastructure and in collaborative networks shape their creative practices in both countries. Ultimately, the project will inform government policies on the cultural production and creative practices of immigrants and diasporic communities.
Dr Kagari Shibazaki
SRG26\262312
Project Title: Developing stereotypical attitudes in the early years: A cross cultural study of parental perspectives
University of Portsmouth
Value awarded: £9101
Funded by: BIST
Parents gender ideology is culturally determined, and plays a key role in shaping which behaviours and attitudes children come to view as being gender congruent or incongruent. The development of these stereotypical attitudes during infancy shapes the educational experiences children choose to take part in, and how they engage with them, and this has been shown to influence their chances of reaching their full potential in adulthood. Existing research has predominantly focused on Western cultures, limiting our understanding of how these culturally determined dynamics function in other contexts. This cross-cultural study adopts a cultural psychology approach to examine how parents with infant children in England and Japan reproduce and sustain culturally specific, shared norms and practices that shape children’s early gender socialisation and development. Using interviews, the study will enable within and between culture comparisons, and provide a deeper understanding of how cultural contexts influence the development of gendered attitudes.
Dr Zahra Shirgholami
SRG26\260263
Project Title: Invisible Labour, Visible Power: Exploring Labour Agency in Social Media Content Moderation in the UK and Germany
University of Manchester
Value awarded: £9793.20
Funded by: BIST
Human labour remains essential to social media content moderation despite increasing automation. Content moderators make complex decisions under intense pressure, and their frontline position provides insight into systemic failures in platform governance critical for more effective regulatory frameworks.
While existing scholarship has documented the exploitative nature of content moderation and the psychological distress experienced by moderators, it has largely overlooked moderators’ agency and its interaction with the governance of social media value chains. Drawing on qualitative research in the UK and Germany, this project examines how labour agency is exercised within these value chains, and how it both shapes, and is shaped by, platform governance.
By analysing interactions between moderators, corporate actors, and the state, the research will inform approaches to platform governance that support public safety while recognising the agency of those who uphold it. The study contributes to debates on platform governance, labour agency, and decent digital work.
Professor Juliet Simpson
SRG26\261492
Project Title: Marianne Stokes - Art Beyond Borders
Independent Researcher
Value awarded: £9633
Funded by: BIST
The British, Austrian-born artist Marianne Stokes (1855-1927: née Preindlsberger), was hailed as a leading artist of her time in Britain and transnationally. Yet her work is still unknown to scholars, the art world and public. Building on the acclaimed exhibition Gothic Modern – Helsinki-Oslo-Vienna, 2024-26 (PI Juliet Simpson), which included works by Stokes generating global interest, ‘Marianne Stokes – Art Beyond Borders’ will be game-changing in its reach, vision and impact. As the first in-depth research project and international exhibition to bring her work to twenty-first-century scholars and the public, its key ambition is to put Marianne Stokes’s art on the international map of twentieth-century modernisms, to bring it to global visibility, new knowledge and attention. 'Art beyond Borders' showcases Stokes as the trailblazing transnational artist of her generation spanning 1880s-1920s, pioneering new identities, spaces and collaborative art practices as the major role model for women artists and cultural leaders.
Dr Michail Sotiropoulos
SRG26\262087
Project Title: Sovereignty and statehood in the Eastern Mediterranean during the long 19th century: the case of the Greek world
University of Edinburgh
Value awarded: £9970
Funded by: BIST
The project is the first step in a wider collaborative project that rethinks how states, sovereignty, and political authority were made in the modern Eastern Mediterranean. Focusing initially on the Greek world, it moves beyond the familiar story of the Greek nation-state to examine a broader landscape of political experimentation: the Kingdom of Greece, the Ionian Islands, Samos, Crete, Cyprus, Greek communities within the Ottoman Empire, and unrealised projects for autonomy or union. These cases reveal the Eastern Mediterranean as a space where empires, protectorates, autonomous provinces, international supervision, and local ambitions overlapped. The project asks how people understood new political concepts, how state-building worked in practice, and how institutions created new forms of belonging. This pilot phase will build an international research network and lay the groundwork for a larger comparative project (and a major grant proposal) on sovereignty and state formation across the Eastern Mediterranean.
Dr David Souto
SRG26\260401
Co-applicant(s): Dr Ascension Pagan, Dr Victoria Adedeji
Project Title: The importance of keeping track of word location on reading skill
University of Leicester
Value awarded: £9960.22
Funded by: BIST
Fluent reading relies heavily on accurate word localization—the ability to locate words within a text. The fact children begin reading by physically pointing at words highlights the importance of word localization in developing reading skill. Yet, current reading models fail to explain how readers build stable mental representations of text.
We will investigate word localization using a novel paradigm. Leveraging high-frequency eye-tracking, we will disrupt word localization by moving text precisely as the reader starts looking at a new word. Analysing subsequent changes in gaze behaviour, like prolonged pauses, will reveal general strategies used by the brain to localize words.
Our objectives are to: (1) establish the precision of word localization, (2) test whether word and sentence variability provide cues for word localization, and (3) develop a gamified version of the task suitable for children, to ultimately impact the assessment of visual and cognitive processes underlying reading development.
Dr Rachel Stenhouse
SRG26\260933
Project Title: Harnessing cultural capital: preparing state school students from a deprived area for entry to elite universities
Manchester Metropolitan University
Value awarded: £9891
Funded by: BIST
Despite numerous interventions aiming to foster inclusion, private school students continue to have higher chances of entry to elite universities than their state school peers. Private school culture and resources enable students to develop embodied forms of cultural capital, e.g. ‘showing one can think’, which significantly benefit them in the university admissions process. While state schools do not have the same resources (time, space, extra-curricular activities, teachers who are Oxbridge graduates) as private schools, some are offering bespoke enrichment programmes designed to develop cultural capital in their students, in an attempt to replicate the private school experience. This project will study one such programme in depth, focusing on the programme aims and structure, and student experience and engagement. It aims to understand the extent to which the programme might inculcate cultural dispositions which extend beyond the immediate input, and the nature of those dispositions.
Mr Piotr Swiatek
SRG26\261489
Project Title: From Advocacy to Policy: The Bureau of European Design Associations and European Design Policy, 2000–2025
Cardiff Metropolitan University
Value awarded: £8057
Funded by: BIST
Design has become an increasingly visible component of European public policy over the past two decades, yet the advocacy processes that drove this change remain poorly understood. This project investigates the role of the Bureau of European Design Associations (BEDA), Europe's principal pan-European design advocacy organisation, in shaping design policy at national and EU levels from 2000 to the present. Drawing on archival research and structured oral history interviews with former BEDA presidents spanning the period, the study produces the first systematic, evidence-based account of BEDA's policy influence. It examines how the organisation translated design advocacy into concrete policy outcomes, including the landmark inclusion of design in the EU's Innovation Union (2010) and New European Bauhaus more recently (2020). Findings will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed journal article and a public-facing publication aimed at policy and design communities.
Dr Christine Sylvester
SRG26\261079
Project Title: Adversarial Language Across Devolution: A Computational Analysis in Westminster and Holyrood
University of Strathclyde
Value awarded: £9971
Funded by: BIST
Parliamentary debate is widely seen as increasingly polarised, yet we know surprisingly little about how institutional and political contexts shape patterns of conflict between parties. This project examines how adversarial language varies across the Scottish Parliament and Westminster since 1999, focusing on the role of governing status, government type, and devolved policy authority in structuring parliamentary conflict. Using large language models, the project analyses debates in health, education and environment/energy policy to compare how parties communicate when in government or opposition, and how these dynamics differ across legislative settings. By linking patterns of adversarial language to institutional context, the study provides a new comparative account of how governing responsibilities, opposition incentives and devolution shape political conflict in parliamentary democracies. In doing so, it advances understanding of party behaviour, democratic deliberation, and the changing character of political debate in the UK and Scotland.
Dr Tobiasz Trawinski
SRG26\261625
Project Title: Who speaks, who is heard: source cues and young adults' trust in science-informed claims
Liverpool Hope University
Value awarded: £9947.60
Funded by: BIST
Public trust in science in the UK is declining, particularly when science-informed claims are associated with government or industry. Yet existing research has not examined how multiple messenger cues operate together, or how young adults attend to these cues when evaluating scientific evidence. This project tests whether trust depends not only on the content of science-informed claims but on who communicates it: whether a messenger's institutional affiliation and displayed credentials shape how believable young adults find a science-informed claim. It focuses on adults aged 16–24, the first cohort to have grown up with smartphones, algorithmic feeds and generative AI as everyday information environments. Two co-designed studies combine an online experiment with a laboratory eye-tracking follow-up across nuclear safety and air quality, capturing trust judgements and early attentional patterns that may precede them. Findings will offer practical guidance for regulators, councils and science communicators on presenting evidence to young publics.
Dr Lorna Treanor
SRG26\261395
Co-applicant(s): Professor Susan Marlow, Dr Susan Marlow
Project Title: What’s the real cost of women’s self-employment? Exploring Gendered Financial Precarity and Pension Poverty
University of Nottingham
Value awarded: £9249.26
Funded by: BIST
UK Government data highlights a gendered pension gap; self-employed women (SEW) are least likely to have a pension. The UK State pension does not provide a basic standard-of-living, meaning SEW are vulnerable to future pension-poverty. Research consensus exists around gendered attitudes to money but not gendered financial behaviours - but, if money represents security for women, why are they risking later-life financial security? Gender and entrepreneurship scholars highlight the household-embeddedness of women's enterprise and their marginal returns, potentially implying unexplored contextual and financial-precarity influences here. A qualitative gendered analysis, novelly deploying household and individual as analytical units, can advance theoretical understandings of SEW's financial decision-making at business, personal and household context levels. This study, comprising of personal interviews with thirty UK-based SEW, will generate insights into their knowledge, attitudes and behaviours surrounding money, and the business, personal and household circumstances informing their retirement-planning, also enabling better policy and practitioner responses.
Professor Simon Underdown
SRG26\262086
Project Title: Unearthing Faya: Ancestry and Kinship in Neolithic Southeast Arabia
Oxford Brookes University
Value awarded: £9875
Funded by: BIST
This project will undertake a tightly focused pilot palaeogenomic study of human remains from the archaeological BHS18 cemetery site in Sharjah, UAE, which forms part of UNESCO Faya Palaeolandscape World Heritage Site. It addresses a major gap in Arabian prehistory by testing the feasibility and interpretive value of ancient DNA recovery from a small, carefully selected sample of Neolithic individuals. The study will examine whether BHS18 individuals show genetic affinities with local Arabian populations, incoming Neolithic-related groups, or mixed ancestries, and will explore whether close biological relationships are reflected in burial patterning. By combining targeted laboratory analysis, authentication procedures, and comparative population-genetic modelling, the project will generate new evidence for debates about kinship, mobility and adaptation in southeast Arabia. The award will deliver peer-reviewed outputs, a discrete and publishable pilot dataset, a conference paper, and a basis for future funding applications focused on larger-scale analysis.
Dr Moises Vieira
SRG26\262326
Co-applicant(s): Professor Lucy Frith
Project Title: Immigration Enforcement in the National Health Service and Clinicians’ Moral Responsibility: Bordering Practices through Healthcare and the (Im) Possibility of Being Ethical.
Independent Scholar
Value awarded: £5180.72
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates how clinicians navigate the ethical dilemmas arising from healthcare for chargeable migrants in the English NHS. On the one hand, healthcare professionals must aim to practice according to professional ethics considerations (i.e., the principles of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence and justice). On the other hand, in complying with the NHS Charging Regulations, they become implicated in harm-causing practices that subject patients to immigration enforcement. In other words, access to NHS care can result in migrants’ health enhancement, but also in the enactment of data-sharing policies with the Home Office for purposes of border control. This research interrogates the possibility of clinicians’ moral responsibility and their understandings of the ‘ethical’ when healthcare is provided to chargeable migrants, especially those with insecure immigration status in the UK. In doing so, this project will generate insights for medical ethics education and contribute to policy debates on equitable access to NHS care.
Professor Dirk vom Lehn
SRG26\260781
Co-applicant(s): Dr Rafie Cecilia
Project Title: Inclusive Interpretation and Mixed-Ability Shared Engagement in Museum Sculpture Galleries
King's College London
Value awarded: £9882.90
Funded by: BIST
Museums have made progress in accessibility, yet little is known about how inclusive interpretive resources function in practice within shared gallery experiences of mixed-abilities groups. Sculpture galleries present a particularly important context to investigate this because engagement relies on movement, touch, conversation, and shared attention among visitors with differing sensory needs.
Using video-based ethnographic research conducted at the British Museum and Manchester Museum, this project investigates how sighted, blind, and partially sighted visitors collectively engage with existing inclusive interpretive resources, including tactile materials, audio description, and haptic interfaces.
Rather than developing new technologies, the project examines how current accessibility practices shape social interaction, meaning-making, and shared cultural participation within mixed-ability visitor groups.
The research will generate empirically grounded evidence about the strengths, limitations, and unintended consequences of existing interpretive strategies, producing findings with direct relevance for museum accessibility planning, exhibition design, and future inclusive interpretation policy.
Dr Irmi Wachendorff
SRG26\261846
Project Title: Old letters, new meanings: Understanding generational and regional differences in the perception and use of Blackletter across contemporary European typographic landscapes
University of Reading
Value awarded: £9965.60
Funded by: BIST
At a moment of intensifying ideological tension across Europe, understanding how typography carries social and political meaning is a pressing research gap: blackletter – the typeface of medieval manuscripts and Nazi propaganda – might seem like a relic of the past. Yet walking through Berlin today, left-wing activists deploy it to fight the far-right; in Paris, it evokes nostalgia on bakery signs; in London, it signals streetwear and pop culture. The same letterforms carry different meanings across three cities. This study investigates why that matters. It explores the use and perception of blackletter in contemporary semiotic landscapes comparatively across the UK, France, and Germany, tracing how social actors mobilise, contest, and re-signify its associations across political and cultural contexts. Blackletter’s indexical range, from heritage to subcultural rebellion, makes it a powerful lens for a broader understanding of how typography as a semiotic resource shapes social meaning in democratic public spaces.
This research undertakes a comparative analysis of European and Chinese approaches, examining notice-and-takedown processes alongside administrative enforcement mechanisms. It proposes best practices to enhance legal certainty and streamline copyright dispute resolution using AI. A harmonised approach may contribute to a more consistent cross-border legal framework for copyright protection. It further supports the development of an effective administrative enforcement framework to manage copyright protection in platform-based environments.
Dr Annie Watson
SRG26\260941
Project Title: Teenage Girls' War Diaries: The First Digitised Archive of Second World War Teenage Girls’ Diaries from South Wales.
Nottingham Trent University
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Teenage girls’ Second World War diaries provide rare accounts of everyday wartime life, yet remain largely inaccessible to the public and overlooked in scholarship. Despite growing interest in civilian and youth war experiences, diaries written by teenage girls represent only around 1% of archived wartime diaries. This project develops a scalable framework for the first systematic study of UK teenage girls’ wartime diaries through a South Wales pilot that digitally preserves and analyses five diaries, written locally during the War. The project combines transcription, NVivo-based qualitative coding, Creative Data Analysis, and evaluative testing of AI-assisted transcription and analysis tools to assess feasibility, value and methodological risk. Outputs include accessible digital transcriptions, a regional exhibition and workshops, a journal article, evidence-based foundations and methodological guidance for a national digital archive with scholarly, public and cultural impact in the UK.
Professor Gert Westermann
SRG26\261621
Co-applicant(s): Dr Elena Altmann
Project Title: Development of the Middle Childhood Curiosity Questionnaire
Lancaster University
Value awarded: £9842.61
Funded by: BIST
Curiosity drives children to explore, ask questions, and learn, and it is linked to long-term academic and wellbeing outcomes. However, measuring curiosity and capturing differences between children is challenging. Although validated questionnaires now exist to measure trait curiosity in infants and preschoolers (the ITCQ and ECCQ), there is no comparable tool for middle childhood (6–12 years), a period of rapid expansion in where and how children explore. This project will develop and validate the Middle Childhood Curiosity Questionnaire (MCCQ) in parallel in the United Kingdom and Germany. The MCCQ will (i) build on the existing infant and early-childhood scales to ensure continuity from 5 months to 12 years of age; (ii) anchor items in observable behaviours across everyday contexts (home, school, with friends, on trips); and (iii) introduce parallel caregiver, teacher, and child self-report versions so that we can examine, and reduce, the well-documented divergence between informants in (literate) children.
Dr Amy Wilcockson
SRG26\262225
Co-applicant(s): Dr Roslyn Joy Irving
Project Title: Touring the Rhine in the British Romantic Imagination (1790-1840)
Independent Scholar
Value awarded: £6592.26
Funded by: BIST
Visited by and inspiring Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Caroline Norton, Dora Wordsworth, Thomas Campbell, William Lisle Bowles, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Rhine was an integral site for British Romantics. The works of these authors, encompassing verse, travelogues, and prose fiction, as well as published and unpublished journals, are the catalyst for this creative-critical project, Touring the Rhine in the British Romantic Imagination (1790-1840). Our research combines a critical reappraisal of works of Rhine Romanticism across a network of authors, with our own impressions of sites along the river, which we plan to visit during the research process. Supported by a BA/Leverhulme Small Grant from October 2026, we will conduct the comprehensive place-based study of Rhine Romanticism as conceived by British poets and artists, and will produce a book-length study as a result of this research.
Dr Bethany Wood
SRG26\260568
Project Title: Beyond Primary: Embedding News Literacy in KS3 and KS4 Civic Education in Derbyshire
University of Derby
Value awarded: £9760.40
Funded by: BIST
This project investigates how news literacy can be systematically embedded into Key Stage 3 (KS3) and Key Stage 4 (KS4) civic education across Derbyshire secondary schools. Moving beyond primary-level interventions, it will co-design, pilot, and evaluate a novel, curriculum-embedded framework integrating peer-led and teacher-led delivery. The study examines pedagogical strategies, teacher training needs, and student engagement, focusing on measurable outcomes including misinformation identification, trust in news, and civic participation. Through mixed-methods research and collaboration with schools and the Guardian Foundation, the project generates both theoretical insight and practical resources. It contributes an original framework for embedding news literacy in secondary education and produces scalable outputs to support wider adoption.
Dr Shi Hui Wu
SRG26\261785
Project Title: Understanding Communication Breakdown and Repair in Older Adults’ Dialogue with Conversational AI
Edge Hill University
Value awarded: £9180
Funded by: BIST
Conversational AIs are increasingly embedded in healthcare, public services, and everyday technologies, with growing potential to support independent living for older adults (OAs). Yet OAs often experience misunderstandings and conversational breakdowns when interacting with conversational AI, leading to frustration, disengagement, and marginalisation from the benefits of AI-mediated communication. As ageing populations increasingly rely on these technologies, understanding the sources of communication difficulty is both a scientific and societal priority. Successful interaction with conversational AI depends on users forming and updating assumptions about how the system communicates and what it understands. OAs may struggle to form and adapt these assumptions due to limited technology experience and age-related cognitive changes. Combining qualitative workshops with controlled psycholinguistic experiments, this project will investigate how ageing shapes these assumptions and influences communication breakdown and repair. The findings will advance theories of communication and ageing while informing more inclusive and accessible conversational AI design.
Dr Luba Zatsepina
SRG26\260969
Project Title: AI, Nuclear Escalation, and Divergent Deterrence Logics: A Wargaming Pilot Study
Liverpool John Moores University
Value awarded: £8694.47
Funded by: BIST
This pilot project examines how AI-assisted decision-making interacts with divergent deterrence logics in nuclear crises. Building on my recent argument that AI integration may intensify escalation risks when adversaries operate with different understandings of deterrence, the project explores these claims through structured wargaming (Zatsepina, 2025). AI is increasingly integrated into nuclear decision-support systems. Existing scholarship often assumes shared understandings of deterrence among nuclear-armed states. It should not. Russian strategic deterrence emphasises ambiguity, pre-emption, and cross-domain coercion more than dominant Western approaches. How might AI-assisted decision-making shape escalation behaviour where adversaries hold divergent deterrence logics? Four structured wargames at LJMU with UK academics and practitioners will generate exploratory evidence on participant behaviour and hypotheses for a larger follow-on study. Outputs include two peer-reviewed articles, a blog post, an open-access scenario library, and a tested methodological framework.
Dr Yunxiao Zhang
SRG26\261815
Co-applicant(s): Dr Yuxi Heluo
Project Title: Shadow AI in UK Public Sectors: Incentives, Risks, and Governance for Cybersecurity Resilience
University of Exeter
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: BIST
Shadow AI refers to the use of unauthorised artificial intelligence tools within organisations, a trend that has emerged as powerful generative AI services become widely and easily accessible. While these tools can significantly enhance productivity, they also expand the organisational attack surface and introduce new cybersecurity challenges. Public sector organisations are especially vulnerable due to limited budgets, outdated IT systems, and strict procurement rules. Their exposure is heightened by their broad societal responsibilities and increasing reliance on AI.
This project investigates the use of Shadow AI in UK public sector organisations and develops governance strategies to strengthen cybersecurity while preserving productivity. It has four key objectives: (1) to review current AI adoption and information governance practices, (2) to analyse behavioural and technological incentives driving unauthorised use, (3) to assess the associated cybersecurity, ethical, and regulatory risks, and (4) to propose governance frameworks that balance innovation with compliance, ethics, and security.
Dr Ping Zheng
SRG26\261287
Co-applicant(s): Mr Perry Holmes
Project Title: Local Authority Trading Companies (LATCs) as Innovation Intermediaries: Governance, Resource Dependence and Local Innovation Ecosystems in England
Canterbury Christ Church University
Value awarded: £9754.80
Funded by: BIST
Local Authority Trading Companies (LATCs) are increasingly important in supporting local economic development, delivering public services and creating social values. However, existing research remains fragmented across governance, public administration and innovation studies and inadequately explains how these hybrid organisations coordinate and balance innovation flexibility while managing governance accountability and resource dependency. This project develops a new understanding of LATCs as innovation intermediaries within local innovation ecosystems. It examines how governance arrangements and resource dependencies shape their capacity to mobilise partnerships, support innovation and improve organisational performance. A method for creating intermediaries is offered and tested in collaboration with one local council. Other councils will be informed of the approach and are invited to provide feedback on its acceptability and appropriateness for their needs. This study provides an empirically grounded and practically tested framework that can strengthen governance and innovation.
Dr Yi Zhu
SRG26\260656
Project Title: Interpreting Sustainability Across Contexts: Discourse, Ideology, and Meaning in Global Japanese Organisations
University of Sheffield
Value awarded: £9963
Funded by: BIST
The project contributes to an emerging area of scholarship examining how sustainability is interpreted and enacted in everyday organisational practice across cultural and institutional contexts. Using global Japanese firms operating in the UK as a case study, it draws on theories of discourse, ideology, and sensemaking, alongside a business anthropological approach, to explore how ESG, CSR, and sustainability are understood and operationalised. Building on prior research that developed an evaluation rubric and identified a gap between corporate sustainability discourse and workplace practice in Japan, the project examines how sustainability discourse is translated between Japanese headquarters and UK subsidiaries, and how these processes produce divergences between official narratives and everyday practice. Methodologically, it combines exploratory GenAI-assisted analysis of public materials with qualitative interviews in the UK. By integrating macro-level textual analysis with micro-level interpretive insights, the project highlights how culture and institutions shape the reinterpretation of global sustainability strategies.
Dr Arfian Zudana
SRG26\260125
Co-applicant(s): Dr Maryam Yousefi Nejad, Dr Veronica Nyatichi
Project Title: Teaching Professional Judgement in Accounting: Experimental Evidence to Identify Earnings Management.
Oxford Brookes University
Value awarded: £9980
Funded by: BIST
This project examines how different teaching approaches influence accounting students’ ability to distinguish legitimate managerial judgment from earnings management in realistic financial-reporting scenarios. Addressing a key gap in accounting education, the study compares rules-based and principles-based instructional interventions against a control group using an experimental pre-test and post-test design. Participants will be final-year undergraduate and postgraduate accounting students, who will classify earnings management case scenarios. Classification accuracy and written reasoning will be assessed to evaluate both decision outcomes and judgment processes. The study contributes to accounting education by shifting attention from ethical perceptions of earnings management to students’ judgment performance. Its findings will provide evidence on whether structured warning-sign checklists or broader principles-based reasoning better support students in navigating ambiguous reporting choices, with implications for curriculum design, graduate work-readiness, and the development of professional scepticism and judgment under uncertainty.
Leverhulme Trust
Dr Ruth Abou Rached
SRG26\261977
Project Title: Landscapes of future memory (LandMem): charting the translatory stories of literary works by Middle East North Africa creatives (1950-1999)
University of Manchester
Value awarded: £9887.30
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
LandMem investigates the pathways of translations for literary works by Middle East North Africa (MENA) creatives published 1950-1999 and shares new knowledge about interlingual literary histories of MENA, many at risk of being forgotten, for some language pairings, overwritten. Using bibliographic data science and innovative theoretical approaches that diversify concepts of translation, this project expands knowledge of MENA authors and translators while according due recognition to many other creatives, the 'unsung heroes', co-creating cross-language literary works in less digital eras, alongside translators. To visualise and preserve such pluralised MENA translatory histories, and as preliminary steps towards a separate grant, the project also conceptualises and pilots a digital cross-lingual resource/map of Arabic, French, English and German works, with examples of Hebrew, Turkish and Syriac. LandMem anticipates two articles in high-impact journals alongside the pilot 'translatory literary map’ of MENA, plus a significant grant application and a monograph in preparation following on.
Dr Nicoletta Asciuto
SRG26\260771
Co-applicant(s): Professor Katja Mihurko
Project Title: Slovenian Women’s Writing: Translating Zofka Kveder (1878-1926)
University of York
Value awarded: £9431.50
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Zofka Kveder (1878-1926) was a feminist activist and the first Slovenian woman to live by the pen. She was a prolific polyglot author at the heart of Central European transnational networks of feminist writers and thinkers. Despite her international acclaim during her lifetime, Kveder’s work has remained virtually unknown to Anglophone readers. This project will produce the first book-length translation of Kveder’s short prose in English. The edition will serve as a vehicle for rethinking feminism and feminist writings across borders and languages, stimulating comparative approaches to women’s writing of the turn of the twentieth century. The project team will establish a transnational network of scholars and translators to investigate the historical and contemporary politics of translating women’s writing from Slovenian into English. The foundational moment for this network will be a one-day workshop at the University of Nova Gorica.
Dr Maggie Awadalla
SRG26\261862
Co-applicant(s): Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia
Project Title: Narrating Migration and Trauma: Postcolonial Form in Libyan Writing across the Italian Mediterranean
University of Kent
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project reconceptualises migration and colonial trauma in Libyan narratives as a formal and visual structure. Through a tightly defined corpus centred on The Slave Yards by Najwa Bin Shatwan, it offers a close, textually grounded analysis of how trauma operates across literary, testimonial, and visual imagery. The project situates the focal novel within a wider Mediterranean visual language of trauma, showing how it reworks recurring images of movement, vulnerability, and violence. Drawing together a focused corpus of literary texts with carefully selected testimonial and visual material, the project traces a powerful network of motifs: sea, ship, body, enclosure, and threshold. Taken together, these images provide a rich account of how migration trauma is narrated, visualised, and shaped by colonial histories.
Polina Barducci
SRG26\262316
Project Title: Writing culture in premodern Japan: preservation of history and development of doctrine in Buddhist temples
University of Cambridge
Value awarded: £8270.54
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Medieval temple manuscripts in Japan are known for their genre duality: the verso side consists of reused historical letters; the recto side is usually later doctrinal writing. However, the connection between the verso and the recto texts is often overlooked. By investigating a Japanese medieval temple manuscript collection “Cambridge Kōfukuji Historical Documents” (circa 13th –14th centuries), held by Cambridge University Library, our collaborative team of specialists in history and Buddhist studies seeks to fill this gap in scholarship and shed light on how texts on Asian epistemological tradition were written, studied, and transmitted. An interdisciplinary approach to transcription, translation, and annotation of the manuscript allows us to understand the significance of space, religious rites, and monastic community as the conditions for the development of Buddhist epistemological tradition, specifically the idiosyncratic Japanese branch of Buddhist logic (inmyō).
Dr Aidan Barlow
SRG26\260462
Project Title: Second Hand Frontiers: Old Risks and New Rewards in the Political Economy of Mining Waste
University of Bath
Value awarded: £9940
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Mining waste is being transformed from environmental liability into a strategic asset. Traditionally, waste has been treated as a risk to companies, governments, and communities alike. Yet, with the rise of critical minerals, this waste is being transformed from a burden to a new resource frontier. Using interviews, documentary analysis, and ethnography, this project investigates how the shifting temporalities of mining waste are reshaping the political economy of extraction in Zambia, and what this means for the political economy of extraction and development across Africa. It will explore how rising prices, geopolitical competition, and new processing technologies are driving governments, multinational firms, and artisanal miners to re-evaluate these sites as valuable mineral deposits. Findings will inform debates on resource governance, community livelihoods, environmental justice, and US-China competition over mineral supply chains through two journal articles, a blog post for wider public dissemination, and conference presentations.
Dr Gabriele Bellucci
SRG26\261445
Project Title: Benevolence and Competence in Trust under Uncertainty
Royal Holloway, University of London
Value awarded: £9980
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Trust is fundamental to social life, yet how people decide whom to trust remains poorly understood. Most research focuses on a single dimension of trustworthiness: whether someone has good intentions. In practice, trust also depends on competence, whether someone is actually able to deliver on their commitments. A kind but unskilled partner and a capable but dishonest one both undermine trust, but for different reasons. This project investigates how people combine information about intentions and competence when deciding to trust others, and what happens when this information is uncertain or incomplete. Using online economic experiments and mathematical modelling, we will test precise predictions about how people integrate these two dimensions of trustworthiness under varying levels of uncertainty. Findings will clarify the cognitive foundations of trust, with implications for social cohesion, public institutions, and our understanding of when and why trust breaks down.
Dr Eleoma Bodammer
SRG26\260086
Co-applicant(s): Professor Essaka Joshua
Project Title: Gnome Fly! The Story of Hervio Nano
University of Edinburgh
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This research will provide a comprehensive account of the life of Harvey Leach (1801-1847), the internationally famous American actor, equestrian, and acrobat known professionally as Hervio Nano. Often marketed as a ‘dwarf’, Leach started his career performing highly skilled acrobatics at seasonal fairs, moving to circuses and hippodromes, and acting in opera houses and traditional theatres. Leach’s success in the theatre saw him take on starring roles in plays written for his unique body, the most famous of which was Gnome Fly! His genre-breaking work included climbing up auditoriums, impersonations of insects and monkeys, and led to the redesign of the Adelphi Theatre (London) to accommodate his talents. Leach toured extensively across the UK, Europe, and America, managing his own bookings and recruiting other disabled performers. Leach’s entrepreneurial career reveals a remarkable degree of agency and self-management that fundamentally challenges our perceptions of disabled performers in the early nineteenth century.
Dr Maryanne Brassil
SRG26\261558
Co-applicant(s): Dr Aglaé Navarre, Dr Alexandra Afroditi Asimakopoulou
Project Title: Persistence Beyond Belief: Can Irrelevant and Implausible Misinformation Distort Our Memories?
Queen's University Belfast
Value awarded: £4150
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
One of the most troubling aspects of misinformation is its persistence. False information can continue to impact decision-making even after it has been debunked, which is known as the ‘Continued Influence Effect’. In another phenomenon, the ‘Anchoring Effect’, we know that arbitrary numerical information can distort perceptual details in memory and subsequent judgments. A key similarity between these effects is that both involve reasoning being shaped by information that should be inconsequential. This project will investigate whether theoretical understandings from Anchoring Effect literature translate to the Continued Influence Effect; examining whether refuted misinformation functions similarly to an anchor in skewing recollections of an event. This project will test: i) whether debunked misinformation distorts perceptual details in memory; ii) whether these memory distortions subsequently influence judgments about the event; and iii) whether these effects persist even when the misinformation is irrelevant to the event or is implausible from the outset.
Dr Thomas Cheney
SRG26\260130
Project Title: Defining Harmful Contamination
Northumbria University
Value awarded: £9919
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty urges the avoidance of the ‘harmful contamination’ of outer space and celestial bodies, yet the meaning of that term remains vague. This project examines the origins of the concept through archival research, tracing its two converging sources: scientific and diplomatic concern about atmospheric contamination from high-altitude nuclear testing, and the emerging discipline of astrobiology’s anxiety about biological cross-contamination between Earth and other bodies in the solar system. Understanding these origins is essential to interpreting Article IX in the present moment, when planned lunar and Martian missions make the provision’s scope a live question for governments and space policy communities alike. By reconstructing the negotiating history of harmful contamination, this project will establish a more robust interpretive foundation for Article IX and contribute to broader debates about the capacity of existing space law to function as a framework for environmental governance in outer space.
Dr Jessica Clarke
SRG26\262355
Project Title: Decentring Rome: The politics of entertainment in Republican Italy
School of Advanced Study, University of London
Value awarded: £9610.74
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project will radically transform our understanding of cultural development in the ancient Mediterranean by establishing a new archaeological and contextual framework for the evolution of entertainment in ancient Italy. This, in turn, will contribute to wider contemporary debates about the visibility of regional identities within imperialistic historical narratives. This will be achieved through the first systematic study of forty theatres built in Italy between the late third and early first century BCE, each of which exhibited distinctive design features to previous Greek theatres, and each pre-dating the construction of Rome’s first permanent theatre. These buildings required the large-scale mobilisation of labour and capital, making them key evidence for economic investment, resource distribution, and local hierarchies in ancient Italy. Bringing historical expertise to bear on the archaeological material, the project aims to explore how entertainment created and solidified local, regional, and inter-regional Italian identities independent of the imperial capital.
Dr James Craig
SRG26\262314
Co-applicant(s): Dr Nick Morgan
Project Title: Drawing the Search: Collaborative Drawing and Enforced Disappearance at La Escombrera, Medellín
Newcastle University
Value awarded: £6180
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
What is it like to search? This project investigates how collaborative drawing can reveal new understandings on the experiences of searching for victims of enforced disappearance. Focusing on La Escombrera in Medellín, Colombia—an active exhumation site associated with the concealment of victims during Operation Orion in 2002—the project responds to the site’s recent reactivation. The discovery of human remains in 2025 has renewed public attention and given fresh hope to families and communities who have searched for the disappeared for more than two decades. Yet the embodied experience of searching has received limited visual documentation. Working with a local community organisation, the project will use collaborative drawing workshops to explore how this experience can be visually acknowledged. Unlike written testimony, photography or film, drawing offers a slow, embodied and attentional form of testimony, arguably bringing drawer and viewer closer to the physical and affective experience of searching.
Dr Kay Crosby
SRG26\261383
Project Title: Women's Jury Service and Citizenship
Newcastle University
Value awarded: £7655
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project is about women’s jury service as a function of citizenship, drawing on understandings of the jury in England and Wales and in Scotland during the first half of the twentieth century. This was the period when women first appeared on trial juries, and it was also when women’s citizenship was being institutionalised, particularly after women’s voting rights were partially secured in 1918. I argue that the lawyerly insistence on constructing womanhood narrowly informs the ways that we need to understand women’s participation on juries and women’s citizenship more generally during the first half of the twentieth century, ahead of the passage of the British Nationality Act 1948. This research offers a detailed account of the relationship between constructions of citizenship and juror selection practices; and a deeper understanding of how intersectional experiences largely around gender, class, race and nationality have informed and continue to inform constructions of citizenship.
Dr Olga Danylyuk
SRG26\262295
Project Title: Veteran Theatre in Contemporary Ukraine: Performing Lived Experience in Wartime
Independent Scholar
Value awarded: £7800
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project examines how contemporary veteran theatre in Ukraine serves as a space to articulate and mediate wartime experiences through performance. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, a theatre created by veterans has emerged as an important cultural response to conflict and social change. The research analyses a selection of productions, scripts, performance documentation, and interviews with theatre makers and participants to explore how lived experience is transformed into cultural narrative and collective memory. Drawing on performance studies, literary analysis, and cultural memory studies, the project also investigates how veteran theatre engages with Ukrainian literary and mythological traditions, including Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s Eneida. This satirical anti-imperial epic, a vernacular adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid, offers a key framework for understanding how epic and mythic structures are reactivated in contemporary wartime performance. The study contributes to scholarship on Ukrainian theatre and cultural memory, offering new insight into performance as a form of wartime cultural expression.
Dr Chris Deacon
SRG26\260731
Project Title: The temporal politics of territorial disputes
SOAS University of London
Value awarded: £9490
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project seeks to pilot a research agenda examining the temporal politics of territorial disputes through a case study of the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute in Japan-South Korea relations. International Relations (IR) scholarship has approached territorial disputes through recourse to both rationalist and ideational lenses. While both approaches have recognised the role of history (respectively, the importance of historical border precedents and of collective memory), little attention has been paid to how territorial disputes are constituted through competing constructions of time itself. Extending literature on the ideational underpinnings of territorial disputes and combining this with insights from IR’s ‘temporal turn’, this project seeks to utilise the Dokdo/Takeshima case – through discourse analysis of official, media and cultural-political texts obtained in South Korea and Japan – to capture how parties to such disputes mobilise competing temporal frameworks to legitimate their rival claims and the consequences of this for the intractability of such conflicts.
Dr Friederike Döbbe
SRG26\260268
Co-applicant(s): Dr George Ferns
Project Title: Oh Deer: Rethinking governance across multispecies contact zones in England
University of Bath
Value awarded: £9850
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Wild deer populations in England are increasing, prompting concerns about their browsing impacts on woodlands, and biodiversity and climate objectives. In response, policy actors and interest groups have intensified deer management efforts, with some calling for large-scale culls. Yet research and policy frameworks often assume a neat separation between human institutions that govern and wild animals that are governed. In practice, however, deer management unfolds in entangled systems where these boundaries collapse, and where ecological, economic, and ethical worlds intersect. This project explores these spaces as multispecies contact zones (Haraway, 2008; Pratt, 1991) — sites where humans, animals, and institutions negotiate authority, value, and power. We seek funding to collect and analyse interviews, documents from key organizations and media articles to understand how wild deer management in England is organized and how it has evolved. The study advances understanding of environmental governance in more-than-human worlds of shared vulnerability and care.
Professor Julien Dugnoille
SRG26\260715
Project Title: Managing Life on the Move: Care, Risk, and Heritage in Mediterranean Transhumance
University of Exeter
Value awarded: £3660
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project examines contemporary transhumance in southern France as a fragile mobility infrastructure through which care, labour, and governance are organised under changing ecological and political conditions. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Crau and Alpilles regions (2019–present), it explores how pastoral mobility is reshaped by transport systems, regulation, predator management, and shifting labour relations. Although transhumance is increasingly recognised as intangible cultural heritage, the project argues that its survival depends less on symbolic recognition than on the material and institutional conditions that enable pastoralists to care for animals, landscapes, and livelihoods. It also shows how heritage and policy frameworks shape how transhumance is valued and governed, with direct consequences for everyday pastoral practice. By tracing how shepherds negotiate wolf predation, climate variability, and administrative regulation, the project reconceptualises transhumance as an infrastructure of care whose future depends on broader social and political decisions.
Dr Alexander Gagatsis
SRG26\262031
Project Title: Milt Jackson: A Life In Music
University of Manchester
Value awarded: £9994
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project offers the first book-length study of the vibraphonist Milt Jackson, drawing for the first time on his autobiographical notes, which become publicly accessible at the Wisconsin Historical Society in January 2027. Raised in a working-class family in segregated Detroit and shaped by the Church of God in Christ, Jackson developed a blues-inflected style that contemporaries celebrated as a 'natural' vernacular voice. Yet his long tenure with the Modern Jazz Quartet—the longest experiment in collective Black authorship in twentieth-century American music—positioned his work uneasily against prevailing notions of ‘real black music’. This study reframes that tension not as a stylistic dispute but as a sustained negotiation of race, class, and cultural legitimacy within postwar Black musical discourse. Drawing on extensive archival research, it reappraises Jackson as a major figure in Black cultural history whilst challenging inherited narratives of Black modernism, respectability, and racial authenticity in twentieth-century American music.
Dr Malgorzata Goclowska
SRG26\261141
Co-applicant(s): Dr Kou Murayama, Dr Matthias Gruber
Project Title: Beyond the Trait-State Divide: A Multidimensional Exploration of Curiosity Profiles
University of Bath
Value awarded: £7315.07
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Curiosity drives how we learn, explore, and adapt, but researchers still struggle to define it clearly. Traditionally, curiosity has been studied either as a stable personality trait or as a momentary state triggered by a specific stimulus. Although these approaches each provide complementary insights, they are rarely integrated, leaving critical gaps in our understanding of how curiosity manifests in everyday contexts. Our international team aims to bridge this divide. Building on promising pilot data, we will use a diverse set of naturalistic stimuli – from magic tricks to news headlines – to explore how curiosity experiences vary across contexts and individuals. Using a comprehensive task battery that integrates self-report and behavioural measures, we aim to uncover distinct curiosity profiles and examine their relationships to broader personality traits. This work will provide a structured basis for understanding individual differences in curiosity.
Dr Conor Heffernan
SRG26\261169
Project Title: When Bodies Meet Stones: Revival, Risk, and Safeguarding in Irish Stone Lifting Heritage
University of Ulster
Value awarded: £9875
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Stone lifting is undergoing a contemporary revival in Ireland. Once preserved mainly in folklore, local memory, and scattered historical references, the practice is now being reassembled as living heritage through public events, digital media, and community initiatives. This project examines how participants, organisers, and heritage institutions negotiate that revival, and what happens when safeguarding a living practice depends on continued bodily interaction with specific material objects, some of which may also require archaeological protection. Combining 20 oral history interviews, fieldwork at two existing lifting events, targeted archival research, and analysis of public digital material, the study investigates how historical fragments are made usable in the present and how tensions around risk, preservation, access, community identity, and ownership are managed. Building on recent historical work, it offers the first sustained analysis of Irish stone lifting as a contemporary heritage-making process.
Dr Andrea Jaeger
SRG26\260529
Project Title: Glocal Modernism: Re-mapping the Transnational Impact of Film und Foto (1929–31)
De Montfort University
Value awarded: £8811
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
My research examines the global ripple effects of Film und Foto (FiFo), a photography exhibition that opened in Stuttgart in 1929, toured Europe, and reached Japan in 1931. Rather than revisiting the European story, I trace how FiFo was received in Japan and how it shaped local photographic practices. Using newspapers, magazines and professional association records—especially the Asahi Shimbun archive—I examine what Japanese photographers saw, discussed, and what changed in their subjects, techniques and ideas of modernity. Duirng my Tate Modern fellowship (2020–22), I mapped the European venues; the Japanese leg however remains under-documented, making Tokyo-based archival research essential. In partnership with the Keio University Art Centre, the project reconstructs routes, debates and experiments that followed, foregrounding overlooked non-Western participants. This knowledge is relevant to reforms in museums and education, supplying a historical basis for inclusive canons, equitable curatorial practice and critical literacy about how photographic ideas travel across cultures.
Professor Stephen Kelly
SRG26\261099
Project Title: ‘A better future’: John Major and the Northern Ireland peace process, 1990-1997
Liverpool Hope University
Value awarded: £7640
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This proposed two-year research project represents the third and final phase of this author's ongoing research on the Conservative Party and Northern Ireland, 1968-1998. It seeks to trace and elucidate John Major’s pivotal role in the long and often tortuous path towards peace in Northern Ireland from 1990 to 1997. Far too often, Major’s contribution to the Northern Ireland peace process has been airbrushed out of history. The research projects will address this history imbalance. As such, this will be the first study of its kind. Drawing on a treasure trove of previously classified archival governmental and personal papers and a series of interviews with retired politicians, civil servants, military officials, members of the clergy, and representatives of civil society, this project deconstructs many of the historical inaccuracies surrounding Major’s Northern Ireland policy.
Dr Linda Li
SRG26\260251
Project Title: The Networks States See: Comparing Organic and Repression-Constructed Political Networks in Late Ming China
London School of Economics and Political Science
Value awarded: £6226.96
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
To repress political groups, states must first construct their versions of them: defining who belongs, attributing connections, and imposing collective identity. Yet the network the state builds for repression need not correspond to the network that actually exists. This disjuncture is well documented across contemporary cases, but no study has systematically compared a state-constructed repression network against an organic movement network within the same case. This project does so for the first time, using social network analysis and the Donglin movement of late Ming China (c. 1604–1626), where both state-produced enemy rosters and independent prosopographic records survive. I reconstruct networks among ~300 individuals and use statistical methods to test whether co-persecution ties - who was arrested or indicted together - were driven by actual political collaboration or by institutionally legible categories. If states construct from what is legible rather than what is real, repression may systematically destroy the wrong targets.
Dr Helen McGhie
SRG26\261760
Co-applicant(s): Dr Antony Hall
Project Title: Relational Light: Photography, Power And Stakeholder Dialogues In Salford’s Contested Winter Urban Gardens
Manchester Metropolitan University
Value awarded: £9999.76
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This practice-based research investigates how photographic practice within urban gardens can foster dialogue between gardening communities and city planning stakeholders during winter, when darkness invites ecological and introspective reflection. Developed with Incredible Edible Salford (IES), research creatively responds to the constraints in urban gardening within sites under threat from redevelopment. Drawing on historical links between photography, gardening and power, the research positions the winter garden as a site of creative dialogue and resistance. Microbial/soil-powered lighting systems, co-created with community members, will transform IES into a living photography studio, illuminating portraits of Salford’s city planners, residents and gardeners with more-than-human energy, to investigate the power dynamics and shared ground in urban gardens. Two site-specific exhibitions will highlight the cultural value of temporary gardens, fostering civic dialogue, stakeholder reflection and creative access to urban nature during winter. Research contributes new knowledge to ecological arts, relational photography and community-led approaches to urban resilience.
Dr Stephen Mullen
SRG26\260445
Project Title: Repatriating Slavery's Profits from the British-Atlantic World: Scots and the Legal Recording of Colonial Wealth, 1750-1838
University of Glasgow
Value awarded: £9956
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project investigates the repatriation, distribution, and social integration of slavery-derived wealth to Great Britain, 1750-1838. Through close analysis of legal records recorded in Scottish Commissary and Sheriff Courts (wills, testaments, and confirmation inventories), this project analyses how merchants, planters, and sojourners accumulated and repatriated assets from British Atlantic slavery societies, notably colonial America and the West Indies. Enabled by distinctive mechanisms of Scots Law related to property, succession and inheritance, this project reveals how Scottish legal practices served as an institutional mechanism across jurisdictions in the British Atlantic world which acted to distribute slavery-derived wealth in Britain. By centering the Scottish legal system within Atlantic slavery studies, the project provides empirical evidence of slavery-derived fortunes and develops a new model that will enhance debates about the effects of chattel slavery and racial capitalism on British development.
Dr Sharanya Murali
SRG26\260825
Project Title: Mumbai Art Deco as Postcolonial Performance Architecture
Brunel University London
Value awarded: £8930
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
In 2025, Mumbai celebrated the Art Deco centenary with the second-largest number of Art Deco buildings in the world. However, Mumbai Deco buildings are more susceptible than ever to real-estate usurpations as well as climate change erosion. While the socio-historical contributions of Mumbai Deco as a heritage architectural form are well-researched, there exists little scholarship on Mumbai Deco as a postcolonial live art form, where its aesthetic, affective and cultural uses and dimensions are investigated as performance architecture. The project remedies this scholarly gap by using qualitive analysis, including interviews and ethnographic guided walks, to assess how Mumbai Deco buildings and its public users perform postcoloniality contemporaneously. By reframing Mumbai Deco as a vulnerable form of postcolonial performance architecture, the project will disseminate findings through a heritage walk and publications, reshaping contemporary cultural narratives and debates about Mumbai as a postcolonial city, and architecture as a form of performance.
Dr Deborah Olukan
SRG26\260283
Project Title: Versions of Me: Relational Memory and AI-Mediated Identity
King's College London
Value awarded: £8847.37
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly enabling new ways of representing individuals, from conversational agents to digital remembrance tools. Yet little is known about how these representations are recognised, trusted, or challenged by those who know the person best. This project addresses this gap by creating a memory-based AI representation of the researcher and examining how close family members interpret and respond to it. Drawing on relational memory, the study treats differences between AI outputs, personal accounts, and participants’ recollections as central to analysis. Using a small-scale qualitative design, participants will engage with the system through structured tasks and follow-up interviews. The project will generate new empirical insight into how identity is formed in AI-mediated contexts. Findings will inform debates on AI, identity, and digital remembrance, and will be shared through academic publications, a collaborative workshop and a short documentary film for public engagement.
Professor Nicola Royan
SRG26\262050
Project Title: Understanding Scottish Receptions of Humanism c. 1480- c. 1560
University of Nottingham
Value awarded: £8330.20
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project investigates the Scottish reception of humanism between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century. I am applying a generational model to trace the reception and deployment of humanist practices from the first record of printed books in Scotland to the absorption of humanist styles into vernacular writing and culture before the Scottish Reformation. While focusing on text, the project will extend to interrogate the deployment of narratives, images and symbols in material objects, including buildings, decorative art and illustrations. The direct engagement with broad material culture central to this project and to this application will be enabled by a fellowship in Edinburgh: this will allow sustained examination of manuscripts, early print and material culture held in Scottish collections, and interaction with scholars in the same and adjacent disciplines, for early peer review. The outcome will be a ground-breaking study of a broad cultural reception of a key intellectual movement.
Dr Valeria Ruiz Perez
SRG26\260347
Co-applicant(s): Professor Manuel Iturralde, Professor Alejandro Chehtman
Project Title: Laboratories of Transitional Justice: From the Argentine Juntas to the Colombian Peace Jurisdiction
University of Nottingham
Value awarded: £9976.76
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Latin America has played a foundational role in shaping transitional justice, functioning as a genuine laboratory for legal and institutional experimentation that has reversed conventional understandings of flows of knowledge between the Global North and the Global South. Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace represents the most ambitious expression of this tradition, yet its most radical innovations remain understudied: new legal categories of offending that transcend existing classifications in domestic and international law, and a Special Sanctions regime that reconceptualises the relationship between retributive and restorative justice rather than merely combining them. Building on a pilot project completed in April 2026 and an established network of institutional contacts in Colombia, this project employs doctrinal, comparative, and empirical methods to produce the first systematic analysis of the significance and reach of these innovations, at a moment when conflicts around the world make the search for new models of accountability imperative.
Dr Magda Schmukalla
SRG26\261551
Co-applicant(s): Dr Liene Ozoliņa
Project Title: Hope in Fragments. A Psychosocial Analysis of Post-communist Art and Political Hope in Times of Polycrisis
University of Essex
Value awarded: £8368.08
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Contemporary societies face an intensifying polycrisis — the convergence of climate catastrophe, democratic erosion, and economic precarity — which places practices and narratives of political hope under severe pressure. Hope in Fragments investigates how fragments of hope are preserved and radically reinvented in times when the future itself seems foreclosed. Drawing on psychosocial studies, affect theory and critical social theory, the project treats hope not as naïve optimism but as a structured orientation toward positivity, creativity and the good under conditions of uncertainty. It does so by studying art practice and artistic infrastructures in post-communist sites in Central and Eastern Europe — societies which carry an embodied, culturally sedimented knowledge of living through systemic collapse and the loss of future imaginaries. This seed-funding application supports the foundational phase of the project, developing collaborative partnerships and a shared methodology in Latvia and Poland in preparation for a larger interdisciplinary research programme.
Dr Hannah Smyth
SRG26\260089
Project Title: The ‘archival turn’ in Irish feminism? Commemoration, archiving and abortion politics in Ireland
University College London (UCL)
Value awarded: £5408.45
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
Irish feminist activists remixed historical texts and images in the recent abortion rights movement in the Republic of Ireland. This capitalised on a ‘feminist turn’ in the state-led ‘Decade of Centenaries’ (2012–2023), in which women revolutionaries were widely recognised for the first time in official commemorations. This research asks: did the commemorations facilitate an ‘archival turn’ in Irish feminism? This unexplored question will be addressed by conducting archival research and interviewing activists in Ireland and London by applying Eichhorn’s theory of the archive not only as a place of recovery or a destination for preserving the past but ‘an apparatus to legitimize new forms of knowledge and cultural production in an economically and politically precarious present’ (2013, 4). This research will offer new insights into how Irish activists deconstructed the relationship between conservative femininity and nation, and of ‘nostalgia’ as a productive force.
Dr Clare Stevens
SRG26\260352
Project Title: Invisible Technicians as Agents of Technological Change: GPO Labour and the Sociotechnical Infrastructure of British Air Defence, 1935-1945
Cardiff University
Value awarded: £9997.96
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
In 1940 a Post Office telephone network kept Britain in the air. The Dowding System, Britain's wartime air defence architecture, is widely understood as one of the twentieth century's defining technological and information handling innovations. Recent scholarship has extended this picture to the women of Bletchley Park and the wartime GPO workforce, but the labour that built and maintained these intelligence infrastructures remains absent from the historical record. This omission misunderstands how such systems work, then and now: their capabilities are upshots of workers' labour as much as of inventors' designs. This project asks how the GPO engineers, line workers and factory workers of the Dowding System were organised, trusted within a secrecy regime, and written out of its histories. Through systematic archival research at seven UK repositories, it reconstructs that labour between 1935 and 1945, with implications for how labour in contemporary intelligence and security infrastructures is understood.
Professor Jean Stubbs
SRG26\260096
Co-applicant(s): Professor Catherine Krull
Project Title: Mobility, Nation Branding, and Soft Power in Contested Geopolitical Spaces
School of Advanced Study, University of London
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project investigates how mobility, nation branding, and soft power interact within contested geopolitical contexts. It examines how states and other actors use branding—through cultural narratives, tourism, and migration policy—to shape international perceptions and assert legitimacy. Focusing on Cuba and comparative cases across the Americas and the orbit of Western and post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe, it explores how branding operates as a tool of influence and site of tension, revealing conflicts between official images and lived realities of displacement or exclusion. Through the movement of people, ideas, and global commodities, it aims to illuminate how nations negotiate identity and belonging amid shifting global power relations. The project centres around two innovative workshops, on distinct yet interrelated topics, functioning as research laboratories for jointly developing theoretical, empirical and comparative approaches to assess the impact of mobility, nation branding, and soft power on societies facing political uncertainty and international contestation.
Professor Karin Tusting
SRG26\261607
Project Title: Academic Writing in Exile: How Displaced Scholars Navigate Multilingualism and Generative AI
Lancaster University
Value awarded: £9993.10
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project examines how scholars forced to leave their countries sustain academic writing and publishing careers while working through English as an additional language. It addresses a key policy–practice gap in international research: while frameworks promote inclusion and mobility, participation in publishing remains shaped by linguistic gatekeeping, uneven institutional support, and emerging technological pressures.
Focusing on Ukrainian academics displaced by war and now working in the UK, the study analyses how writing practices are reshaped under conditions of displacement. It pays particular attention to the negotiation of scholarly voice, institutional expectations, and the growing use of generative AI as both support and constraint.
Drawing on a survey and thirty-three in-depth interviews, the project provides an original, evidence-based account of how multilingual scholars navigate language, legitimacy, and AI-mediated writing. It will inform practical strategies for more equitable participation in research publishing across higher education.
Dr Mathura Umachandran
SRG26\261047
Co-applicant(s): Dr Sarah Drews Lucas
Project Title: Against Bourgeois Coldness: Resisting Professionalism in the Academy
University of Exeter
Value awarded: £8211
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This project examines contemporary academic professionalism through a dialogue between modern critical theory and ancient Greek and Roman thought. Taking Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “bourgeois coldness” as a starting point, it analyses how affective detachment and instrumental rationality shape scholarly life in the modern university. The project places this diagnosis in conversation with classical accounts of ethical and social relations, including Aristotle’s theory of philia, Cicero’s account of officia, and Stoic approaches to moral self-formation. Combining textual analysis, qualitative interviews, and three practice-based research events modelled on ancient forms (symposium, rhetorical performance, philosophical dialogue), the project explores how classical traditions illuminate alternative modes of intellectual engagement. It contributes to classical reception studies, intellectual history, and moral philosophy by demonstrating how ancient ethical and rhetorical practices can inform contemporary debates about academic life and institutional culture and contribute to anti-professional intellectual practice.
Dr Hannah Whittaker
SRG26\260133
Project Title: The silent history of the Somali Youth League in Kenya, c. 1948-1960
Brunel University London
Value awarded: £9970
Funded by: Leverhulme Trust
This study is a groundbreaking analysis of the ‘silent’ decade (1948–1960) of the Somali Youth League in Kenya. Focusing on the Northern Frontier District, the research moves beyond conventional political narratives to excavate the subterranean social life of the movement. It interrogates how the pan-Somali ideal was not merely preserved but radically indigenized and transformed by local actors in the face of British colonial suppression.
The study will make a major intervention in the history of clandestine movements by understanding ‘proscription’ not as a period of political dormancy, but as a time for ideological innovation. It also historicises the ‘subversive’ label applied to Somali political activists in Kenya – a designation that continues to disenfranchise an entire demographic. By illuminating the origins of political marginalisation and resilience during this foundational era, the study reshapes our understanding of resistance, state-making, and the long-term impact of British colonial policy on regional (in)stability.
Wellcome
Dr Hesham Ali
SRG26\261112
Co-applicant(s): Dr Heba Aboelkheir, Dr Tarek Metwally
Project Title: Politics at Workplace: Are Employees Paying the Price?
University of Nottingham
Value awarded: £9491.48
Funded by: Wellcome
While UK firms and their directors heavily engage in the political process through lucrative donations, surprisingly, little is known about how politically active firms treat their workforce, particularly whether this engagement comes at the expense of employees’ health and workplace safety. This project examines whether firms that donate to political actors affect their labour protection outcomes through two competing hypotheses. Drawing on attention-based view, we hypothesise that political donations divert managerial attention and resources away from employee welfare, leading to poorer workplace safety outcomes. Conversely, from a visibility perspective, we hypothesise that political engagement increases public scrutiny and accountability, thereby encouraging firms to improve workplace welfare and reduce employee safety violations. We aim to create a new, comprehensive, and publicly available dataset linking UK Electoral Commission data to UK companies and their directors. The analysis will also explore whether differences in political orientation/ideology are associated with variation in workplace safety.
Dr Kylie Baldwin
SRG26\261142
Co-applicant(s): Professor Nicky Hudson,
Project Title: Between the Clinic and the Algorithm: Patient Perspectives on AI in Fertility Decision-Making
Loughborough University
Value awarded: £9984.74
Funded by: Wellcome
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used within fertility treatment, from predicting IVF success and selecting embryos to providing patients with information and emotional support through chatbots and AI-powered tools. Yet little is currently known about how fertility patients themselves experience and understand these technologies. This project explores how patients use AI throughout their fertility journeys, how they perceive AI being integrated into fertility clinics, and how AI may be reshaping trust, expertise, and decision-making in reproductive care. The study will combine focus groups and a national online survey with fertility patients, alongside a scoping exercise examining how AI technologies are increasingly a feature of marketing within the fertility sector. Taking place within a emotional, uncertain, and increasingly commercialised area of healthcare, the project will provide the first in-depth sociological investigation of patient perspectives on AI in fertility treatment and lay the groundwork for future research in this emerging field.
Dr Amy Burton
SRG26\260589
Co-applicant(s): Dr Lucy Prodgers, Dr Karen Rodham
Project Title: Advancing Qualitative Evidence Synthesis Through Co-Production: A Poetic Synthesis Approach to Understanding Complex Regional Pain Syndrome
Staffordshire University
Value awarded: £9857
Funded by: Wellcome
Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) is a debilitating chronic pain condition affecting around 26 in every 100,000 people. One of the barriers to effective care is the lack of accessible research evidence about the lived experience of CRPS. Good quality clinical decision making should be based on the synthesis of clinical experience with the best available research evidence. For this to be possible, accessible and actionable synthesis of research findings need to be developed.
With this in mind, we propose to undertake a Qualitative Evidence Synthesis (QES), which will be the first to combine QES methodology with poetic synthesis within an overarching co-production methodology. This combination will prioritise the patient voice, illuminate the social, emotional and cultural experience of CRPS, advance the application of poetic synthesis for the production and dissemination of QES findings, and provide practical guidelines for researchers wishing to conduct their own co-produced QES in the future.
Dr Heeral Chhabra
SRG26\261305
Project Title: Dissecting for Welfare : Experimented Bodies of (British) Dogs and (Indian) Monkeys in the Colonial-Global World.
Independent Researcher
Value awarded: £9952
Funded by: Wellcome
This project aims to bring together history of animal welfare through global mobilities of animals in 19th and 20th Britain and India. It specifically aims to retrace the physical and epistemic movement of animals for medical experimentation across the colonial-global networks (i.e within and across colonial metropoles and colonies) for human ‘health’ and animal ‘welfare’.
Animals such as rhesus macaque, rabbits, rats, and street dogs, were frequently used for research on diseases, vaccinations, and testing of procedures. While colonies proved to be the laboratory for medical research, the ‘useless’ animals of the metropole (ownerless dogs) and animals of the colonies (such as rhesus macaques) became the raw material. This research explores these animals and their bodies in making medicine modern through colonial-global linkages. By viewing animals as subjects of the Empire it seeks to interrogate the social, political, and legal discourses which made institutionalised use of animals a thriving reality.
Dr Kathrina Connabeer
SRG26\261943
Co-applicant(s): Ms Sarah Bicknell, Professor Paul Drew
Project Title: Assessing Suicidality and Risk of Self and Infant Harm in Perinatal Mental Health Services: A Pilot Conversation Analytic Study
Birmingham City University
Value awarded: £9999.22
Funded by: Wellcome
This pilot qualitative study investigates how suicide and harm risk are communicated between women or birthing people and clinicians in NHS Perinatal Mental Health Services. Despite suicide being the leading direct cause of maternal death in the UK, only 20% disclose suicidal thoughts. Risk assessments are essential but often complicated by stigma, cultural factors, and concerns about child removal. The study will video-record 10–15 routine consultations, with clinicians and women, with interviews offered to those who decline recording. Data will be analysed using conversation and reflexive thematic analysis, supported by post-consultation evaluations. The aim is to better understand how risk of harm is raised and navigated in clinical interactions and the outcomes associated with these interactions. Findings will inform co produced training guidelines and CPD workshops, developed with lived experience and staff advisory groups, to improve risk communication. Results will be disseminated through academic journals and conferences.
Dr Adela Desowska
SRG26\262152
Co-applicant(s): Dr Irene Faiman
Project Title: A pilot study of motor learning in children
Independent Researcher
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Wellcome
Children learn many important skills through movement, play, and practice, yet we still know relatively little about how the brain supports learning of complex coordinated skills during childhood. This project will explore how children learn a new motor skill using juggling as an engaging and accessible activity. Juggling combines coordination, timing, concentration, and visual prediction, making it a useful model for studying motor learning.
This pilot study will recruit children aged 6 years and above to complete a short two-week juggling programme designed with a professional juggler. Before and after training, children will take part in simple tasks while brain activity is measured using electroencephalography (EEG), a safe and non-invasive method.
The project aims to test whether this child-friendly approach can help researchers better understand how children acquire coordinated skills and how learning-related changes in brain activity can be studied in real-world movement activities.
Dr Oliver Gale-Grant
SRG26\260185
Project Title: Mother and Child Experience of Perinatal Mental Health Care
King's College London
Value awarded: £9958.79
Funded by: Wellcome
The perinatal period (pregnancy and one year after birth) is a time of hazard for women’s mental health. Treating perinatal mental health problems improves outcomes for mothers, and reduces their chances of experiencing a crisis. A mother experiencing mental health problems is linked with less favourable child outcomes. It is logical to expect that treating maternal mental health problems would therefore improve child development, but few studies have specifically tried to answer this question.
We already have access to a large anonymised database of NHS secondary mental health care records. We propose to link this with a dataset of baby developmental assessments from NHS health visitor services. We can assess if the babies of women with perinatal mental health problems had different patterns of development at 1 year compared to other babies, and can also see if treating mother's perinatal mental illness improved baby development or not.
Professor Jose Arturo Garza-Reyes
SRG26\260301
Co-applicant(s): Dr Arebu Bilal, Ms Eyerusalem Berhanemeskel
Project Title: Building Resilient and Equitable Cold Supply Chains in Low-Resource Settings: Evidence from Ethiopia
University of Derby
Value awarded: £9820
Funded by: Wellcome
Ensuring that vaccines and other temperature-sensitive medicines remain safe and effective requires reliable “cold supply chains,” particularly at the last mile where products reach patients. In many low- and middle-income countries, including Ethiopia, these systems face significant challenges such as unreliable electricity, limited transport, and uneven access between urban and rural areas. This study will investigate how well last-mile cold supply chains perform across different health facilities in Ethiopia. Using a combination of quantitative data and stakeholder interviews, it will assess infrastructure, medicine availability, and user experiences. The research will also examine how resilience (the ability to cope with disruptions) and equity (fair access to services) interact within these systems. By identifying key gaps and bottlenecks, the study will provide practical recommendations to improve access to essential medicines. Its findings will inform policymakers and contribute to strengthening health systems in Ethiopia and similar resource-constrained settings worldwide.
Dr Arpita Ghatak
SRG26\260500
Co-applicant(s): Dr Preetam Basu, Dr Swagato Chatterjee
Project Title: From Constraints to Capabilities: Mapping Entrepreneurial Pathways for Neurodivergent People in an AI-Transformed Economy
University of Kent
Value awarded: £9994.59
Funded by: Wellcome
Neurodivergent individuals, including people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia and related conditions, remain under-represented in conventional labour markets, despite significant entrepreneurial potential. NHS data show that 3.8 million people were in contact with mental health, learning disability and autism services in England in 2023-24, highlighting the need for more inclusive pathways into work and enterprise. The Lloyds Bank disability and entrepreneurship report shows that 25% of UK entrepreneurs are disabled or neurodiverse, yet 84% feel they do not have equal access to the same opportunities and resources as non-disabled founders. At the same time, rapid AI adoption is reshaping work, business support and entrepreneurial practice. This project examines whether AI-enabled business ecosystems expand or restrict neurodivergent entrepreneurial capability. Drawing on the Capability Approach and entrepreneurial ecosystem theory, it uses a literature review, stakeholder interviews and a co-design workshop to develop an evidence-based framework for inclusive AI-enabled entrepreneurial support.
Professor Corinna Haenschel
SRG26\262004
Co-applicant(s): Dr Anne-Kathrin Fett
Project Title: From vision to social meaning: Neural mechanisms of sensory–cognitive integration in human social perception in schizophrenia and neurotypical participants
City St George's, University of London
Value awarded: £9960.39
Funded by: Wellcome
How the brain transforms what we see into social understanding is a central question in neuroscience. Subtle differences in visual processing can alter how social information is perceived, shaping relationships and feelings of connection. This project examines how the brain’s initial processing of visual information influences social understanding and emotion, including loneliness, suspiciousness, paranoid thinking and social connectedness. We will combine behavioural tasks, recordings of brain activity, and self-report measures to trace how the brain’s early responses to visual information relate to understanding others’ emotions. People with schizophrenia, who often experience social-cognitive difficulties and isolation, will be included to understand how changes in visual and cognitive processing affect social connection. By identifying when these processes begin to break down, the study will provide new insights into the neural mechanisms linking vision and social understanding and behaviour and may guide targeted approaches to reduce loneliness and improve social wellbeing.
Dr Roxanne Hawkins
SRG26\260725
Co-applicant(s): Professor Steve Loughnan, Dr Mayke Janssens
Project Title: Moments of Connection and Calm: A Real-Time Exploration of Human–Pet Interactions in Everyday Wellbeing and Self-Care
University of Edinburgh
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Wellcome
Are pets “good for us”? While people typically believe that they are, clear scientific evidence is limited. Rather than preventing distress or serving as “treatments”, pets may play everyday roles in managing wellbeing and in self-care, promoting calm, relaxation, and positive mood, while reducing stress, anxiety, and loneliness. Past research has relied on one-off surveys ignoring dynamic day-to-day changes in mood, wellbeing, closeness to pets, and patterns of interaction. This project pioneers and tests the feasibility of applying Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) via smartphone to study human-animal interaction (HAI) in a wellbeing and self-care context. EMA will capture real-time insights into how moment-to-moment interactions, pet responsiveness, and connectedness, shape daily wellbeing and self-care. By identifying specific social behaviours and bonding experiences that enhance wellbeing, this study will strengthen the evidence base, inform practical wellbeing and self-care strategies, generate pilot data, and establish feasibility of this innovative approach in HAI research.
Dr Laura Iannuzzi
SRG26\260026
Project Title: Exploring the influence of personal Sense of Coherence when facing challenges in labour and birth. An exploratory qualitative inquiry based on Antonovsky’s salutogenic model of health.
Bournemouth University
Value awarded: £9875.74
Funded by: Wellcome
Sense of Coherence (SoC) is a concept introduced by the sociologist Antonovsky, representing a pillar of his salutogenesis theory. The latter recognises health, wellbeing and quality of life as dynamic statuses and that individuals can move any situation towards a healthier side of the spectrum through the way they understand, find meaning, identify and use their resources when dealing with life stressors. SoC comprises these dimensions, which are also shaped by ethnic, demographic and socio-cultural factors. Birth represents a major life event, and yet the role of personal SoC when dealing with it remains underinvestigated. This project aims to co-develop research methods with stakeholders and start exploring the impacts of women’s, partners’ and healthcare professionals’ SoC on dealing with events related to labour and birth, focusing on the occurrence of slower-than-expected labour progress. Outputs will advance awareness, knowledge, and understanding of the matter and offer a platform for further investigations.
Dr Laura Katus
SRG26\260627
Co-applicant(s): Dr Roger McDonald, Professor Paul McCrone
Project Title: Reading Emotions: Shared Narratives and the Development of Emotion Regulation in Early Childhood
University of Greenwich
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Wellcome
Emotion regulation is a foundational skill which enables children to engage with formal education, build relationships, and support lifelong wellbeing. These skills do not develop in isolation; children learn to understand and manage emotions through socially scaffolded interactions with caregivers. This project explores whether emotionally focused shared reading can support the development of emotion regulation in early childhood.
While shared reading interventions typically aim to improve language competencies, this project investigates such interventions as supportive relational contexts through which children learn to recognise, communicate, and regulate emotions. The project will develop and evaluate a 6-week shared reading intervention for 4-5-year-old children and their caregivers using carefully selected picture books and caregiver guidance materials designed to encourage emotional dialogue and co-regulation.
By reframing shared reading as a context for emotional development, the project aims to generate new insights into children’s emotion regulation while laying foundations for future scalable interventions.
Professor Christos Lynteris
SRG26\262399
Co-applicant(s): Professor Jacob Steere-Williams,
Project Title: Imperial Endemic Cartographies
University of St Andrews
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Wellcome
The project will examine the development of mapping endemic diseases in the British and French empires in the nineteenth century. Endemic disease maps were not simply a way of visualizing areas affected by infectious diseases in European colonies, but were technologies for developing, debating and enacting scientific approaches to “disease endemicity”. While scholars have studied disease cartography as regards epidemics/pandemics, no study exists on how maps were used to understand and tackle endemic diseases. The project’s focus on French and British colonies builds on current debates on the visualisation of diseases, which argue that images should not be approached as mere illustrations of scientific studies of infectious diseases, but rather as key agents in knowing and controlling diseases. The project will compare for the first time the epistemological and governmental impact of “endemic cartographies” developed in the two empires during the nineteenth century and across the bacteriological revolution divide.
Dr Clare Matysova
SRG26\261190
Co-applicant(s): Dr Mark Gatto, Dr Ana Lopes
Project Title: How is the unpredictability of reproductive health considered within workplace parenting leave policies? An exploration with workplace policymakers as expert informants.
Independent Researcher
Value awarded: £6775
Funded by: Wellcome
Effective parental leave policies can support employees through the transition to parenthood, yet parenthood journeys are often unpredictable. In the UK, limited statutory provision increases employee reliance on employer‑enhanced leave, making organisational policy a key site where reproductive ill‑health may be recognised (or overlooked). While scholarship documents the prevalence and workplace silencing of pregnancy loss and fertility treatment, we know little about how employers translate this evidence into parenting leave design. Using UK Higher Education as a sector case study, this project draws on HR and EDI professionals’ perspectives to analyse factors influencing institutional policymaking. It also brings together workplace, policy and lived experience expertise to deliver findings informed by multiple stakeholders. The research will produce actionable, sector‑sensitive report and a policy review checklist to support review and implementation, strengthening employers’ capacity to develop more inclusive provision and providing transferable learning for workplace policy beyond UKHE.
Dr Britta Philp
SRG26\262393
Co-applicant(s): Dr Jennifer O'Neil,
Project Title: Navigating Emotionally Difficult Conversations Online - The New World Of Hybrid And Remote Work
Edinburgh Napier University
Value awarded: £9857.62
Funded by: Wellcome
Remote and hybrid work shape the post pandemic labour landscape, with over half of organisations using flexible models. Managers and employees increasingly handle emotionally sensitive conversations online — including mental health disclosures, redundancy, and personal crises. These interactions affect wellbeing, performance, and organisational culture, yet little is known about how emotional labour is enacted, experienced or supported in digital environments.
Drawing on emerging ideas such as the Online Emotional Labour Process, this project explores how workers and managers experience emotionally complex online conversations, how these compare with in person interactions, and whether they feel adequately supported.
Using qualitative methods, the study will generate new insights into the emotional demands of remote work and skills required to navigate them, and inform evidence based training, policy, and organisational practice.
Dr Isabel Potani
SRG26\260170
Project Title: Engagement of Female Nutrition Researchers in LMICs with Artificial Intelligence for Undernutrition Research: A Formative Study to Inform AI-Enabled Evidence Synthesis
Independent Researcher
Value awarded: £8800
Funded by: Wellcome
Undernutrition contributes to nearly 50% of child deaths, yet policymakers lack timely access to high-quality, synthesized evidence due to the labor-intensive nature of reviewing thousands of studies. AI tools offer potential to accelerate evidence synthesis but often perform poorly in specialized domains like undernutrition, which require nuanced, context-specific expertise. At the same time, little is known about how nutrition researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly women, engage with AI in practice. These researchers are central to generating contextually relevant evidence because of their close engagement with affected communities and health systems but face structural barriers including limited access to funding, mentorship, and analytical tools. This formative study examines how female LMIC researchers use, interpret, and experience AI.
Dr I Gusti Ngurah Edi Putra
SRG26\261811
Co-applicant(s): Dr Sirinya Phulkerd, Professor Eric Robinson
Project Title: Guiding consumer choice to align with health: using Thailand as a policy case study to understand the science of effective front-of-pack nutrition labelling
University of Liverpool
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Wellcome
A front-of-pack nutrition label (FoPNL) system is a global recommended strategy for tackling obesity by encouraging consumers to choose healthier food products. Many countries have so far implemented different FoPNL schemes. Current evidence, mostly from Western and developed countries, is i) mixed on effective FoPNLs, and ii) limited on how and when FoPNLs guide consumer food choice to align with health, leaving developing countries uncertain about the best FoPNL to implement. In this project, we will use Thailand as a policy case study to investigate how and when FoPNLs are effective. We propose that perceived health risk and nutrition literacy are key constructs in explaining how and when FoPNLs guide consumer food choice to align with health. Research findings will directly inform current labelling policy in Thailand and test theory on when different types of labelling will be most effective, which can also guide labelling policy in other developing countries.
Dr Katharina Rowold
SRG26\260526
Co-applicant(s): Dr Ranjana Saha
Project Title: Raising Nation and Empire: Mothercraft and the De/colonial Imagination in Britain and British India
University of Essex
Value awarded: £9790
Funded by: Wellcome
In 1918, New Zealand physician and infant welfare reformer Frederick Truby King was invited to London to open the Babies of the Empire Society, later renamed the Mothercraft Training Society. The founder of the Society for the Promotion of the Health of Women and Children in New Zealand, Truby King promoted a medically supervised, clock-regulated approach to infant management, premised on the idea that mothering was a craft to be learned. In the decades that followed, his ideas gained traction in Britain and across the empire. This project traces how mothercraft ideas, materialities and ‘experts’ circulated between New Zealand, Britain and British India. Informed by decolonial, postcolonial and feminist perspectives, it examines how Truby King’s mothercraft ideas, which espoused the aim of improving the ‘white stock’ of empire, could also be repurposed, including into quests for social reform and self-government in Britain and British India.
Dr Christina Steenkamp
SRG26\260637
Co-applicant(s): Professor Mayyada Wazaify, Dr Zoe Jordan
Project Title: Drugs and Disorder: The geopolitical context of methamphetamine trafficking in Jordan
Oxford Brookes University
Value awarded: £7740
Funded by: Wellcome
This study asks how ongoing political instability in the Middle East affects the increased trafficking of methamphetamine into Jordan? It adopts an interdisciplinary approach involving Politics; International Relations and Criminology to examine patterns in the production and trade of methamphetamine (particularly 'crystal meth') in the Middle East. The study analyses the regional crime-conflict nexus and its impact on drug supply in Jordan. Data-gathering involves interviews with counternarcotics and security policymakers. Merging results from this study with a previously completed study on methamphetamine use in Jordan, the project ends with a workshop to disseminate research findings, improve policy responses to drug trafficking and consumption in Jordan, and set a research agenda for unpacking the crime-conflict-health nexus in the Middle East. This overall project will enhance understanding of the contemporary, context-specific political and health challenges posed by illegal synthetic drugs, improve responses, and show what gaps remain in existing knowledge.
Dr Hongmei Sun
SRG26\261323
Project Title: Exploring the Potential of Emerging Technologies in Precision Medicine for Rare Diseases: A Pilot Interview-Informed Analytical Study
University of Sheffield
Value awarded: £9755
Funded by: Wellcome
Precision medicine offers new opportunities for people with rare diseases by tailoring diagnosis and treatments to individual needs. However, the development and delivery of these solutions remain constrained by small patient populations, high costs, and fragmented healthcare systems. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and digital platforms may help overcome these barriers, but their practical applications in this context remain underexplored.
This pilot project will combine interviews with healthcare professionals, policymakers, and industry experts with initial analytical modelling to explore how such technologies could support the full lifecycle of precision medicines for rare diseases. By integrating stakeholder insights with early modelling, the study will identify key opportunities and risks, uncover barriers to adoption, and provide a foundation for future larger-scale research on technology-enabled solutions to improve access and outcomes for rare disease patients.
Dr Simon Toubeau
SRG26\262150
Project Title: How do federations fare in times of crisis? Assessing the responsiveness of multi-level states' public health policies during the Covid-19 pandemic
University of Nottingham
Value awarded: £9953.55
Funded by: Wellcome
States are increasingly vulnerable to external shocks like the Covid-19 pandemic. Responding to this shock was difficult for ‘multi-level’ decentralised and federal states like the UK, Germany or the USA because it was a transboundary and transversal policy challenge that presented governments with a dilemma between localised and collective decision-making. Previous work identified three distinct response modes (coordination, non-coordination, centralisation) through which multi-level states coped with this dilemma. This project studies how these response modes shaped responsiveness of central and regional governments in deploying the protective public health policies that contained the Covid-19 outbreak. It brings together theories from welfare economics, fiscal federalism, political science and public policy to assess the efficiency and optimality of their policies. The results bear implications for the study of other complex intergovernmental problems such as mass migration and climate change-related events.
Dr Stephen Uzor
SRG26\260774
Project Title: AI Therapist Support for Older Adults: A Socially-Informed Requirements Study on Ageing and Falls Rehabilitation
Anglia Ruskin University
Value awarded: £9564.32
Funded by: Wellcome
This project will investigate the design requirements for an AI-assisted digital therapist to support older adults undertaking falls rehabilitation in unsupervised scenarios, such as the home. At the intersection of digital health, the humanities and the social sciences, the study will explore how social, cultural, and behavioural factors shape engagement with AI-powered digital health tools, particularly among diverse and underserved populations. Through qualitative interviews, co-design workshops, and stakeholder engagement, the research will examine lived experiences of ageing, barriers to rehabilitation access, including telehealth, and ethical considerations surrounding AI-mediated care in the UK. Special focus will be given to health inequalities, including rural isolation, socioeconomic status, and cultural background. The project will produce an evidence base for designing inclusive, ethical, and context-sensitive AI tools that can effectively support unsupervised home rehabilitation. The findings from this initial investigation will contribute to policy-relevant recommendations for digital health innovation in ageing societies.
Dr Margreet Vogelzang
SRG26\260742
Co-applicant(s): Dr Franziska Maria Köder
Project Title: Comparing social and communicative abilities across multiple languages in autistic adults (MultiLangA)
Newcastle University
Value awarded: £9582
Funded by: Wellcome
This project investigates whether autistic traits (ATs), particularly social and communicative behaviours, vary across languages in multilingual adults with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Although social and communication difficulties are considered core facets of autism, communication is highly context- and language-dependent, and no research has directly examined whether ATs differ across first, second, and third languages. Existing evidence suggests that pragmatic abilities can vary depending on the language being used, particularly in multilingual individuals, raising the possibility that self-reported ATs may also vary by language. Building on this evidence, this project explores whether multilingual adults experience ATs differently depending on the language they are using. The findings will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between multilingualism and autism and may have important implications for culturally and linguistically sensitive diagnostic assessments and support strategies for autistic individuals in multilingual contexts.
Dr Bangdong Zhi
SRG26\262476
Co-applicant(s): Dr Jiong Sun
Project Title: From Patient Reviews to Policy: AI-Driven Insights to Improve NHS Care Quality and Efficiency
University of Bristol
Value awarded: £9625.34
Funded by: Wellcome
This project uses AI to help the NHS understand and improve care quality and operational efficiency. Despite millions of patient reviews on platforms such as NHS Choices, Care Opinion, and iWantGreatCare, this rich but unstructured data remains underutilised for systematic service improvement. Using machine learning and natural language processing, the project will analyse reviews by linking comments to key stages of the healthcare journey—appointment booking and access, admission and triage, diagnosis and treatment, inpatient care, discharge, and follow-up. At each stage, performance will be evaluated using the five dimensions of the SERVQUAL model: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. These measures will then be integrated with hospital performance indicators, including bed turnover rates, waiting times, and satisfaction scores, to examine how perceptions of care quality influence operational outcomes. The project aims to generate actionable insights to support data-driven service improvement and inform evidence-based decision-making in NHS management and policy.
Dr Yueyang Zhong
SRG26\262379
Project Title: Operational Congestion in NHS Maternity Care: National-Scale Evidence and Load-Balancing Policy Design
London Business School
Value awarded: £9999.50
Funded by: Wellcome
Maternity units must manage planned caesareans and inductions alongside spontaneous labour and emergencies using the same beds, theatres and clinical staff. Yet we know little about how this everyday operational congestion affects maternal and neonatal safety, or whether scheduling planned births differently could reduce harm. This project uses linked NHS England maternity, emergency-care and hospital records for all NHS-funded births in England from April 2021 to March 2025 to construct national measures of unit-day congestion and examine associations with emergency caesarean, postpartum complications and neonatal care admission, including differences by ethnicity and socioeconomic deprivation. It then develops clinically realistic load-balancing rules for planned births and tests them through simulation. The project will generate the first national operations-management evidence on congestion in maternity care and provide a feasible policy-design platform for a larger NIHR/ESRC-funded evaluation with NHS partners.
Society for the Advancement of Management Studies
Dr Afsaneh Bagheri
SRG26\261200
Project Title: Redefining entrepreneurial leadership mindset and capabilities in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) era
University of Lincoln
Value awarded: £9590
Funded by: Society for the Advancement of Management Studies
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping entrepreneurial ecosystems by transforming how opportunities are created and pursued. As AI becomes embedded in everyday business practices, entrepreneurial leaders increasingly require new mindsets and capabilities to navigate this evolving landscape. This project explores how entrepreneurial leaders comprehend the role of AI, assesses their readiness to integrate it into new ventures, and develops the strategic, cognitive, and ethical competencies needed to lead in AI-driven environments. It examines how entrepreneurs cultivate capabilities in opportunity recognition, decision-making, AI-driven innovation, and responsible AI adoption, and how these contribute to organisational resilience and competitiveness. Employing an inductive qualitative multiple-case design, the study draws on entrepreneurial ecosystems across the United Kingdom, including innovation hubs in London, Manchester, and Cambridge. The project produces a context-driven framework for cultivating entrepreneurial leadership in the AI era. Aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goal 8, it advances inclusive, sustainable, and responsible economic growth.
Dr Whysnianti Basuki
SRG26\260194
Co-applicant(s): Dr Monrudee Owen (Tungtakanpoung)
Project Title: Empowering Displaced Women through Entrepreneurship in South East England, United Kingdom
Southampton Solent University
Value awarded: £8425
Funded by: Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and BIST
Women displaced by war face significant challenges rebuilding their lives in host countries. They often experience trauma, disrupted education and careers, social exclusion, and limited access to employment or business opportunities. These barriers make it difficult to achieve stability, safety, and independence.
Education and entrepreneurship can support integration by building skills, confidence, and financial independence while fostering community belonging. However, appropriate support is essential for success.
This project focuses on conflict-displaced women living in South East England, aiming to understand their challenges and identify business skills and support. It involves interviews with affected women and organisations supporting refugees to explore experiences and needs.
Findings will inform charities, community groups, and policymakers in designing effective support programmes. Ultimately, it seeks to enable more secure, independent, and fulfilling lives. By addressing barriers and promoting entrepreneurship, the study contributes to long term integration, economic participation, and wellbeing for displaced women within local communities
Dr Adebukola Oyewunmi
SRG26\260388
Co-applicant(s): Dr Gbemisola Ogbolu
Project Title: Developing Leaders to Support Neurodiversity in the Workplace: A Study of Nigeria and the United Kingdom
Teesside University
Value awarded: £9941.50
Funded by: Society for the Advancement of Management Studies
Neurodiversity is an increasingly important dimension of workplace inclusion, yet organisations continue to lack clear evidence on how leaders can effectively support neurodivergent employees. This study investigates how leaders in Nigeria and the United Kingdom develop and use emotional, social, and organisational resources to foster neuroinclusive work environments. Guided by the social model of disability and informed by conservation of resources theory and servant leadership principles, the research adopts a mixed‑methods design combining a systematic literature review, semi‑structured interviews, focus groups, and a cross‑national survey. The study examines how resource availability influences inclusive practices, and how cultural contexts affect leadership responses to neurodiversity. The findings will generate a validated framework for neuroinclusive leadership, cross‑cultural insights into organisational support for neurodivergent employees, and practical toolkits for leadership development. The research advances leadership and HRM scholarship while offering evidence‑based strategies to enhance the participation and wellbeing of neurodivergent workers.
Dr Heesang Ryu
SRG26\260331
Co-applicant(s): Dr Hsing-Fen Lee
Project Title: University–industry collaborations, global grand challenges, and innovation diffusion
Queen Mary University of London
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and BIST
While the effect of publicly funded research on firm innovation and society has been widely discussed in management studies, a longitudinal analysis of such effect within university–industry (U-I) collaborations remains underdeveloped, because such collaborations involve complex stakeholders governed under multiple, often conflicting, institutional logics. The proposed research examines factors that may mitigate the conflicts by interrogating knowledge diffusion patterns of U-I research collaborations tackling global grand challenges, such as neurodegenerative disease, cancer, climate change, and AI transformation, through a novel customized longitudinal dataset and a sequence-based approach to understanding how knowledge diffuses over time. By addressing the scholarly and policy debates in the effectiveness of publicly funded research that addresses global grand challenges, and by developing a novel dataset integrating research output with industry innovation, the proposed research contributes to literature in the organization of innovation, sustainability, and an emerging field that utilises big data to address societal problems.
Sino-British Fellowship Trust
Professor Adrian Blau
SRG26\262275
Co-applicant(s): Professor Elena Ziliotti
Project Title: Between Confucianism and Liberalism: Rethinking Virtue in Politics
King's College London
Value awarded: £9985.29
Funded by: Sino-British Fellowship Trust and BIST
Although both good institutions and good virtues are needed for political stability and flourishing, most recent political theory primarily emphasises institutions, and says little or nothing about virtue. This project thus highlights the importance of virtue in political theory. We pay particular attention to problems of pluralism (i.e. social diversity) in modern societies. Importantly, we will use an innovative cross-cultural dialogue between liberalism and Confucianism, bringing together two scholars of Western liberal democracy based in London, and two scholars from the Confucian tradition based in Hong Kong. Each scholar’s project will integrate insights from these different traditions. The questions asked by the four scholars are as follows. (1) Can Confucian democracy accommodate liberal concerns about pluralism? (2) What virtues are appropriate for citizens in plural societies? (3) What virtues are appropriate for leaders in plural societies? (4) What virtues are needed for racial justice?
Dr Ting Guo
SRG26\261611
Project Title: Off‑Air Across Borders: Doctor Who and the Making of Chinese Science Fiction Culture
University of Liverpool
Value awarded: £8600.56
Funded by: Sino-British Fellowship Trust and BIST
Doctor Who, the world’s longest-running science fiction television series, has reached audiences across 13 regions and 54 languages over more than 60 years. However, its full modern catalogue was only officially introduced to China in 2017 through a BBC–Shanghai Media Group Pictures partnership, aimed at leveraging an existing fanbase alongside growing domestic interest in science fiction in China. This project asks how a sustained Chinese audience developed before formal distribution, and why this particular series was considered suitable for a tightly regulated media market like China. It reconstructs the circulation of Doctor Who texts in China by tracing early screenings in the 1970s-80s and informal dissemination through Chinese online fansubbing communities since the early 2000s. It challenges the Anglophone bias of existing Doctor Who scholarship and advances understanding of Chinese science fiction culture by foregrounding its longstanding engagement with global media industries and transnational science fiction fandom.
Dr Daniel Siaw
SRG26\262072
Co-applicant(s): Dr Linlan Huang, Professor Lukman Akanbi
Project Title: Public–Private Partnerships for Biomass Energy Innovation in Emerging Markets
Birmingham City University
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Sino-British Fellowship Trust and BIST
Biomass energy has gained renewed significance for energy security, waste valorisation, the circular economy, and decarbonisation. However, in emerging markets, its development is constrained by weak infrastructure, fragmented waste-supply systems, limited SME finance, policy uncertainty, and underdeveloped market demand. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) may help address these barriers by combining public-sector regulation, legitimacy, and infrastructure support with private-sector innovation and market capabilities. This project investigates how PPP arrangements enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to overcome institutional and market constraints and develop scalable biomass energy innovations. Adopting a qualitative multiple-case study design, the research compares China and Ghana as contrasting emerging-market contexts. Data will be collected through 35–40 semi-structured interviews with SME managers, policymakers, investors, and industry stakeholders. The study will generate new empirical insights into how PPP configurations shape SME innovation processes and provide policy-relevant recommendations for designing effective partnerships that support low-carbon transitions in resource-constrained environments.
Dr Faye Wang
SRG26\261457
Project Title: Building an Administrative Enforcement Framework for Copyright Protection in Platform-Based Digital Environments
Brunel University London
Value awarded: £7498
Funded by: Sino-British Fellowship Trust and BIST
Social media platforms have become central channels for the dissemination and monetisation of user-generated content. However, the effectiveness and legal implications of AI-driven content moderation tools remain under scrutiny. In Europe, creators facing potential copyright infringements typically rely on notice-and-takedown procedures or alternative dispute resolution. By contrast, China operates an additional copyright administrative enforcement system, which is often more efficient but lacks consistency across regions (Wang, 2022). While Europe lacks comparable mechanisms, there are ongoing discussions about developing an administrative justice framework (Anthony, 2015).
This research undertakes a comparative analysis of European and Chinese approaches, examining notice-and-takedown processes alongside administrative enforcement mechanisms. It proposes best practices to enhance legal certainty and streamline copyright dispute resolution using AI. A harmonised approach may contribute to a more consistent cross-border legal framework for copyright protection. It further supports the development of an effective administrative enforcement framework to manage copyright protection in platform-based environments.
British Accounting and Finance Association
Dr Mutalib Anifowose
SRG26\260761
Co-applicant(s): Professor M. Karim Sorour
Project Title: How Professional Virtues Shape Accountants' Sustainability Sense-Making
Northumbria University
Value awarded: £9876.49
Funded by: British Accounting and Finance Association
Accountants increasingly face complex sustainability decisions, balancing competing stakeholder demands against professional ethical codes. Yet little is known about how the professional virtues underpinning these codes shape the way accountants make sense of sustainability issues. Existing research focuses on macro level organisational systems, leaving individual-level sensemaking processes largely unexplored. This study uses virtue ethics and sensemaking theory to examine how professional virtues such as integrity, objectivity, and professional competence interact with accountants' cognitive understanding, linguistic communication, and conative action in sustainability contexts. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design will survey 300 plus UK accountants and conduct seven expert validation interviews with professional bodies, policy actors, and sustainability specialists. Outputs include evidence-based policy recommendations and CPD programme guidance, addressing a critical gap in individual sensemaking within sustainability decision-making.
Professor Eoin McLaughlin
SRG26\261691
Co-applicant(s): Professor Graeme Roy, Dr Graham Brownlow
Project Title: Ulster Loans: Devolved Borrowing, Fiscal Autonomy and the Origins of Northern Ireland Public Finance, 1921–1950
Heriot-Watt University
Value awarded: £9781.67
Funded by: British Accounting and Finance Association
Recent discussion of Scottish Government “kilt bonds” has revived questions about devolved borrowing, fiscal autonomy, and the relationship between subnational and sovereign debt. This project examines the only major historical example of devolved borrowing within the modern United Kingdom: Ulster Loans Stock, issued by the Government of Northern Ireland between the 1920s and 1950s. Drawing on Treasury records, Ministry of Finance papers, banking material, and statutory instruments held in Belfast and London archives, the project reconstructs the legal basis, institutional operation, and market understanding of these bonds. It argues that the Government of Ireland Act 1920 created a distinct fiscal constitution whose credibility depended upon assumptions regarding economic capacity, constitutional durability, and sovereign support. By placing Ulster Loans within wider debates on fiscal federalism and sub-sovereign borrowing, the project provides a historical perspective on contemporary discussions of devolved borrowing powers, constitutional risk, and fiscal autonomy within the United Kingdom.
Endowed Funds
Dr Sara Miglietti
SRG26\260709
Project Title: The Many Lives of a Book: Multilingual and Visual Transformations of Comenius’ "Orbis sensualium pictus", 1658–1758
School of Advanced Study, University of London
Value awarded: £10000
Funded by: Browning Fund and BIST
Jan Amos Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus (1658) is a pioneering multilingual illustrated children’s book which systematically combined vernacular and Latin text with images to teach language and knowledge through sensory experience. Through hundreds of editions, translations, and adaptations, the Orbis pictus quickly became a foundational text in early-modern education, influencing thinkers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Its pathways of transmission, however, remain surprisingly understudied. Focusing on the first century of its reception (1658–1758), this project examines how the Orbis pictus was reshaped through both visual and multilingual reconfiguration, and what these changes reveal about the impact and adaptation of Comenius’ pedagogical, philosophical, and theological ideas in diverse contexts. Resulting in a digital bibliography, collaborative workshops, and a co-authored publication, the project will also serve as the springboard for further research on multilingualism, visual education, and the circulation of knowledge in early-modern Europe.
Dr Emmanuel Ossai
SRG26\260147
Project Title: Local Peacebuilding Following the 2024 Summer Riots in the UK: The Case of Southport
Lancaster University
Value awarded: £4137
Funded by: Research Fund and BIST
About three years after the 2024 Summer Riots in the UK, there remains limited empirical evidence on efforts to promote positive relations between members of different ethnic and religious communities in the areas affected by the riots. This ethnographic case study will examine whether and, if so, how individuals and groups in Southport have sought to (a) promote peaceful relations between members of different ethnic and religious communities in the town, and (b) foster positive views of the ethnic and religious Other. Southport, where the Summer Riots started in July 2024, is part of the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in the Merseyside County of North West England. The project runs for 12 months, and expected outputs include a journal article and a conference paper on local peacebuilding in Britain, one public-facing project report, a workshop, a podcast, and a plan for further research and a grant application.
Dr Steve Smith
SRG26\261832
Project Title: Designing Inclusive Physical Education: Neurodivergent Young People's Experiences of Technique-Led and Ecological/Game-Based Teaching Approaches
University of Winchester
Value awarded: £2000
Funded by: Research Fund
Mainstream physical education (PE) can be a critical site of belonging, movement confidence and future physical activity, but it may also reproduce participation barriers for neurodivergent young people. This study will survey 400 neurodivergent students aged 11-16 attending mainstream secondary schools to examine how they experience PE and how they perceive contrasting pedagogical environments: technique-led, correction-focused approaches and ecological/game-based, exploratory approaches. Grounded in inclusive education and ecological dynamics, the study asks whether the organisation of PE itself may be experienced as enabling or constraining enjoyment, inclusion, anxiety and willingness to participate. Recruitment will be supported by NIHR Research Delivery Networks and participating schools. The anonymous online survey combines short Likert-scale items, teaching-approach comparisons and one optional open-text response. Findings will provide a student-centred evidence base for inclusive PE design, future intervention research and a peer-reviewed publication.
Dr Chin Eang Ong
SRG26\260002
Project Title: How UK Taught Postgraduate Students Understand Being Ready to Work with AI
Liverpool John Moores University
Value awarded: £5062.29
Funded by: Marc Fitch Fund
Universities are being asked to prepare students for workplaces where artificial intelligence is becoming routine. Yet we know little about how students themselves understand what it means to be ready to work with AI. This project will study taught postgraduate students close to graduation at three UK universities. Using 30 online interviews, supported by a review of graduate job adverts and university guidance, it will explore what students think employers expect, where they feel confident, and where they feel underprepared. The project examines perceptions, not students’ actual AI skills. It will identify where messages about AI and employability seem clear, unclear or conflicting from a student perspective. The findings will inform careers guidance, staff development and how universities explain AI and employability to students, and will also contribute to wider discussion about AI use in early-career work.
Dr Jacob Miller
SRG26\260015
Project Title: The Lived Experiences of British Retail Decline: Emotional Spaces and Hopeful Futures
Northumbria University
Value awarded: £9958.70
Funded by: Marc Fitch Fund
The lived, emotional experience of retail decline is not well documented and understood today. This proposal fills this gap and initiates a research program at the case study site – Newcastle-upon-Tyne – reimagining what can become of these unused, abandoned and sometimes derelict urban spaces. We know from decades of research that retail spaces can become important social spaces, ones that have deep emotional resonance for their users. Yet most research on retail decline has focused on economic viability. This proposal fills that gap in a way that will emphasize what is at stake in this longstanding policy challenge. Moreover, this research brings together key ideas in community-led development that will enhance public participation in the planning of what to do with vacancies, leading to possible alternatives and a revived understanding of the civic dimensions of urban space that go beyond retail and consumption.
Dr Chaoyuan She
SRG26\260109
Project Title: Forewarned is forearmed: the evolution of UK private company risk exposures
University of Essex
Value awarded: £9947.60
Funded by: Marc Fitch Fund
Over the past decade, unprecedented shocks, including Brexit, COVID-19, and geopolitical conflicts, have exposed UK companies to persistent volatility and uncertainties. Despite this, empirical evidence regarding risk exposure and its evolution within private firms remains scarce. This study provides a systematic, large-sample analysis of risks mentioned in UK private company annual reports between 2013 and 2025. Utilising Natural Language Processing and BERT classification, I examine the nature, evolution, and mitigation of risk factors faced by UK companies, alongside their economic consequences for credit suppliers. My research fills a critical gap in existing literature, which predominantly focuses on risk management by large, listed firms. Beyond the empirical findings, I develop a specialised risk factor dictionary and large-language model for future academic and practitioner use. My study provides investors and regulators with comprehensive evidence of UK private firm risk exposures and generates vital policy implications for managing risks in the private sector.