British Academy announces the successful applicants under Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects 2017

The British Academy is delighted to announce the successful applicants under Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects 2017. 

This programme will support nine interdisciplinary research projects geared towards producing policy-relevant findings and improving the welfare of people in developing countries. The projects aim to engage with questions concerning the relationship between expertise, public understanding and policy delivery, and highlight the importance of collaborative engagement between communities of practice, disciplines, capacities and borders.

Professor Ash Amin, Foreign Secretary and Vice-President of the British Academy, welcomed this new cohort of award holders and emphasised the pressing need for projects of interdisciplinary nature that "examine encounters between academic, professional and lay knowledge, and how valid knowledge, knowledge associations and evidence are built and developed, communicated and disseminated, and the factors which can serve as barriers to this in different political or cultural settings.”

The 2017 awardees are:

• Dr Sarah Hartley, Senior Lecturer in Management, University of Exeter                  
  Co-producing Knowledge Co-production Across Disciplines and Borders: The Case of Gene Drive Mosquitoes in the UK and Mali

• Professor Simon Marvin, Professor of Urban Studies, University of Sheffield
  Drones/Robotics and Development Priorities in Africa: Transformative Infrastructure or Digital Colonisation?

• Professor Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds
  Engendering Equality: Working Holistically in a Ugandan Slum Neighbourhood to Challenge Gendered Inequalities, Sexual Ignorance and Abusive Sexual Behaviours

• Dr Eleanor Joanne Brown, Lecturer, University of York    
  STRIPES: Social Transformative Research Informing Processes of Environmental Science Co-production of Knowledge in the Case of the Granbio Advanced Bio-refinery in Alagoas, Northeast Brazil

• Dr Felice Wyndham, Research Fellow, University of Oxford          
  Articulating Biocultural Values in Bird Conservation Networks from Local to Global:  A Paraguayan Case

• Dr Minna Sunikka-Blank, Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge            
  Gender and Household Energy: Female Participation in Designing Domestic Energy in India's Slum Rehabilitation Housing

• Dr Michael Buser, Senior Research Fellow, University of the West of England, Bristol        
  Community Resilience in Locales of Coastal Erosion: Local Knowledge, Culture and Practice in the Upper Gulf of Thailand

• Dr Gavin Sullivan, Reader in Social and Political Psychology, Coventry University                 
  Extending the Seismic Cities Intervention from Santiago, Chile to Bandung, Indonesia: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Improve Community and City Resilience to Seismic Risk

• Dr Anna Rabinovich, Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter             
  Averting a “Tragedy of the Commons” in Maasai Land: Exploring Predictors of Communal Land Degradation and Developing Pathways to Change in Northern Tanzania

For more information about this programme, visit https://www.britac.ac.uk/funding-call-knowledge-frontiers-international-interdisciplinary-research-projects.