SHAPE Involve and Engage 2026-27 awards
Funded by
The 2026-27 SHAPE Involve and Engage awardees are:
Applicant:
Dr Helen Underhill
University:
University of Manchester
Project title:
'Engaging communities of young people with museums as spaces of hope and imagination'
Project Summary:
This project reimagines museums as spaces where young people and communities actively engage with collections to co-create a hopeful vision of the future. Workshops within Manchester Museum and an inflatable museum in community spaces will empower young people to critically engage with narratives attached to historical objects and artefacts before imagining how the museum of 2060 would tell the story of arriving at a socially-just and sustainable world. A collective and co-produced manifesto-zine, an activity pack and guide for professionals will engage a wide audience with One World Together and Manchester Museum’s shared vision that centres young people as changemakers.
Applicant:
Dr Cora Lingling Xu
University:
Durham University
Project Title:
'Time Inheritance: Mapping Inequalities, Co-Creating Futures'
Project summary:
What if the time we inherit shapes our destiny? This project uncovers how unequal “time inheritance” influences young people’s journeys through education, work, and life. Time is not shared equally: some inherit resources that save time, while others face debts that waste it. Through creative workshops, pop‑up exhibitions, and the immersive Time Debt Game, communities will explore how time can be saved, lost, or reclaimed. Students, families, educators, and policymakers will co‑create strategies to navigate inequalities, while artists transform insights into powerful public experiences. The project sparks reflection, dialogue, and action, inspiring fairer futures for all.
Applicant:
Dr Will Tullet
University:
University of York
Project Title:
'Sniffers in Residence: Using Smell to Engage Intergenerational Audiences with Industrial Heritage'
Project summary:
An increasing number of museums use purpose-made smells, but few draw visitor attention to pre-existing odours from their spaces and objects. Scottish industrial heritage, represented by the members of Industrial Museums Scotland, is rich in odours from chemicals and whisky to gunpowder and mining. This project will develop a new public engagement practitioner, ‘the sniffer in residence’. The sniffer will help volunteers and curators at IMS to develop sustainable, meaningful, and cost-effective ways of engaging audiences through the odours that already percolate through their buildings and emerge from their objects, using oral histories, smell-walks, perfume-design workshops, and ‘smell monuments’.
Applicant:
Professor Claire Warden
University:
Loughborough University
Project Title:
'Strength and Combat at the Royal Albert Hall'
Project Summary:
The Royal Albert Hall opened in 1871 famously hosts iconic artists, political speeches, and the Proms. But also boasts a less well-known history in strength and combat sports, from bodybuilding’s first major contest in 1901, to the UK's first sumo tournament and Nicola Adams’ WBO title defence. Confident that tracking and celebrating this under-researched story will shift our understanding of this most iconic of cultural buildings, this project works with the Hall's newly rescued archive and reimagines this history through film, exhibition and contemporary performance.
Applicant:
Claire Hynes
University:
University of East Anglia
Project Title:
Norfolk Voices
Project Summary:
The project creates new partnership between refugees and asylum seekers and UEA student volunteers. Local people from refugees and asylum seeker backgrounds will be invited to participate in creative writing/ storytelling workshops and then to co-curate with student volunteers live events, a mini-podcast series and a book featuring their contributions. The project will be organised collaboratively with Norfolk Libraries and supported in addition by Creative UEA, the National Centre for Writing, UEA University of Sanctuary, Norwich City of Sanctuary Network and UEA Publishing Project.
Applicant:
Liz Hingley
University:
University of Southampton
Project Title:
'Mobile Miniatures: Intimate Archives, Migration, and Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery'
Project Summary:
This project investigates the role of miniature portraits as mobile expressions of identity and relationships across temporal, social, and political borders. It will enable underrepresented audiences to engage intimately with the National Portrait Gallery’s historic collections of painted and photographic miniatures while exploring connections to contemporary smartphone photography. Project activities include a co-designed workshop with young people who have experienced displacement, which will generate materials for an exhibition, an interactive digital map, a soundscape, and public workshops. The process will expand The SIM Project's participatory research methodology, share learning, and foster partnerships across academia, the arts, and the third sector: www.thesimproject.com
Applicant:
Dr Ruth Flanagan
University:
Queen’s University Belfast
Project Title:
'The Feel Good Forest: Growing Creative Evaluation Together'
Project Summary:
The Feel Good Forests is a collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast, Vault Artist Studios, Vault Artist Elaine Taylor and Sound Artist Pearse Donnelly to explore how creative practices can be used both as engagement activities and as meaningful evaluation tools. Drawing on sensory, playful and arts-based methods, the project supports participants to reflect on wellbeing, connection, creativity and personal change in ways that feel accessible and low-pressure. By embedding evaluation directly into the immersive Feel Good Forest experience, the project generates rich, contextual evidence of impact while modelling an ethical, participant-centred approach to creative engagement that can be adapted across community and arts settings.
Applicant:
Professor Dennis Olsen
University:
University of West London
Project Title:
'Designing Justice: Reimagining the Library of the Future'
Project Summary:
Designing Justice: Reimagining the Library of the Future explores how public libraries can become age-inclusive civic spaces by engaging older adults from marginalised communities in Ealing, London. Using design justice principles and speculative methods, the project unfolds in three phases: mapping current experiences through sensory ethnography, co-creating future visions via storytelling workshops, and sharing outputs through a public exhibition and a Library Futures Toolkit. Delivered with Ealing Libraries, this 18-month initiative addresses challenges of inclusivity and civic purpose, foregrounding older adults’ voices in shaping cultural infrastructure for ageing well.
Applicant:
Dr Wayne Wong
University:
University of Sheffield
Project Title:
Streets on Screen: Re-imagining Hong Kong and Sheffield Through Cinema
Project Summary:
This project explores how cinema and street life intertwine across cities by inviting participants to re-enact Hong Kong film stills on Sheffield streets with the same names. By playing with parallel locations, bilingual subtitles, and diasporic interpretation, the project highlights how urban histories, migration, and cinema intersect. Working with C&G Artpartment (primary GLAM partner) and with advisory and curatorial input from Bloc Projects, the project will culminate in an exhibition, community screenings, and an interactive digital map linking Hong Kong and Sheffield through cinematic memory.
Applicant:
Victoria Hayward
University:
Lancaster University
Project Title:
Fair Realms: Equitable Adventures in Fantasy
Project Summary:
Fair Realms is a co-created project between researchers, libraries, authors and gaming clubs to establish innovative methods for facilitating social cohesion via fantasy fiction. It combines creative writing praxis with mediated contact theory to understand how representations of women via fantasy fiction and gaming may be written to reduce real-life prejudice.
Applicant:
Dr Phil Jones
University:
Aberystwyth University
Project Title:
Expressions of Care: Opening Library Doors for Unpaid Carer
Project Summary:
How can cultural infrastructure meaningfully include and support unpaid carers?
'Expressions of Care: Opening Library Doors for Unpaid Carers' seeks to answer this question and improve access to library services for unpaid carers. The project is a partnership between Aberystwyth University’s Centre for Creativity and Wellbeing and the National Library of Wales. Together, we will explore inclusive, non-hierarchical approaches that empower unpaid carers to engage with cultural infrastructure. We hope this will lead to welcoming library spaces that cater to the needs of unpaid carers and offer suitable services and resources.
Applicant:
Dr Mhairi-Jean Ross
University:
King’s College London
Project title:
''This is our story, These are our Songs': Documenting the 100 Year History and Community Land buyout of the Carbeth Hutters'
Project Summary:
The project will use participatory and traditional musical and storytelling methods to engage local and global audiences with the 100-year history of working-class land occupation at Carbeth Huts and the community land buyout. Our GLAM partner, 100Years Archive: 100 Years of Community Ownership, is a national initiative dedicated to creating a living archive of community ownership in Scotland. The community-based participatory oral history project will engage three generations of hutters in reflecting on the historical and contemporary challenges of community land ownership and community development. The research will document and present the remarkable history of Carbeth Hutters through a downloadable audio walk and video, drawing on oral history data and previous data collected by Dr Ross in 2016.
Applicant:
Dr Jo Walton
University:
University of Sussex
Project Title:
'Global Imaginaries: Farming Futures'
Project Summary:
Approximately 70% of the UK’s land is used for agriculture; pressure on land is intensifying, yet debates on the future of farming remain polarised. This project empowers young people to imagine a range of futures for farming through storytelling and games grounded in scientific expertise and ethnographic research with farmers and food systems stakeholders, focused on the UK and enriched with perspectives from Kenya and Uganda. Farming Futures creates space for young people to explore diverse perspectives spanning locations and generations, learning about controversies while imagining hopeful futures. They decide whether to honour, adapt, or challenge farming practices before watching their choices ripple through ecological, economic, and social systems to engage with farming as a site of creativity, care, and activism.
Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.
For further information on the projects, please contact [email protected]