The British Academy announces funding for 13 interdisciplinary research projects exploring global order and disorder

The British Academy has announced 13 new interdisciplinary research projects as part of the Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research programme.

Funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the successful projects will bring together insights and perspectives from the SHAPE disciplines on the theme of ‘Global Dis(Order)’.

The programme aims to support UK-based researchers at any career stage to develop and lead interdisciplinary research projects in collaboration with colleagues overseas.

From illicit labour and resource exploitation in the Brazilian Amazon, to environmental education practices in the Congo Basin, the research projects seek to strengthen understanding of global order and disorder through cross-disciplinary and multilingual partnerships.

The 2023 Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects awardees are:

Dr David Archibald

Co-applicant: Dr Núria Araüna Baró, University Rovira i Virgili (URV)

KF7100277

Filmmaking and the Academy in Times of (Dis)Order: Deep Listening, Dialogue, Diffraction

University of Glasgow

£75,800.96

As the planet faces increased levels of global disorder, this project analyses how methodologies inspired by feminist and non-Western artists and scholars might be utilised to improve communications between the Global South and the Global North.

Drawing on composer Pauline Oliveros’s concept of ‘Deep Listening’, the research has three aims: firstly, to evaluate how Global North academics working in the Global South might benefit from employing diffractive, dialogical and deep listening methodologies to develop forms of filmmaking which reverse historical and colonial flows of power; secondly, to deepen and develop a pilot project which utilises audio-visual technology to foster translocal cinematic dialogues between feminist activists in four historically-connected cities in Cuba and Europe, and, finally, to bring Western understandings of Artistic and Academic Research into dialogue with Black and Caribbean scholarship and art to help develop a more positive ecology of epistemologies across the Global North and South.

Dr Emile Chabal

Co-applicants: Dr Timothy Peace, University of Glasgow; Dr Rochelle Rowe, University of Edinburgh; Ms Camilla Schofield, University of East Anglia; Dr Angéline Escafré-Dublet, Université Lumière Lyon 2; Dr Rachida Brahim, Immigration Resource Center; Dr Alexander Hensby, University of Kent

KF7100258

A New Democratic (Dis)Order: Race, Identity, and Political Mobilisation in France and the UK, c.1970-Present

University of Edinburgh

£195,058.71

Identity has become one of the most powerful mobilising forces in contemporary democratic politics.

Since the 1970s, social movements based around race, gender, religion, language or sexuality have challenged traditional political structures and undermined the legitimacy of broad-based political parties. While some have argued that identity politics offers unique opportunities for citizens to participate in the democratic process, others have maintained that it damages the fabric of democratic politics by setting different groups against each other.

By stepping back from the polemic and seeking to historicise identity politics, this project provides the basis for a better understanding of the power of identity in contemporary European politics. It does so by looking at various forms of claims-making by racialised communities in France and the UK, including race-based mobilisation and the opposition to it. The ultimate aim is to explore how identity politics has reshaped democracy in two diverse European societies.

Professor Leigh Payne

Co-applicants: Dr Sandra Botero Cabrera, Universidad del Rosario; Dr Gabriel Pereira, University of Tucumán; Dr Simón Escoffier, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Professor Janaína de Almeida Teles, Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais

KF7100371

The Rise of the Right-Against-Rights and Global (Dis)Order in Latin America and Beyond

University of Oxford

£188,704.62

A new global social order emerged with the millennium: an expansion of rights to those excluded historically, culturally, socially, economically, and politically.

Women, BIPOC groups, LGBT+ communities, immigrants, the economically-disadvantaged, environmentally vulnerable populations, and victim-survivors of human rights violations won rights on the books, if not always in practice. Yet this veritable rights revolution unleashed a right-wing backlash to roll back rights, undermining the new social order, and replacing it with polarized and often violent conflict around the world. To explore who is behind the disorder provoked by the right-against-rights, where and why, and with what impact, this project crosses disciplinary (social sciences-humanities) and geographic (global north-global south) knowledge frontiers. It overcomes narrow political-institutional and global north approaches.

By combining history, law, sociology, gender, and area studies, it broadens knowledge of, and develops strategies to reduce, the right-against-rights’ threat of disorder on fragile democracies in Latin America and beyond. This project is conducted in collaboration with Dr Sandra Botero (Universidad del Rosario), Dr Simón Escoffier (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), and Dr Gabriel Pereira (Universidad Nacional de Tucumán/CONICET).

Dr Nicola Thomas

Co-applicants: Dr Blake Ewing, University of Oxford; Dr Katie Ritson, LMU Munich; Dr Kenneth Toah Nsah; Professor Gordon Walker, Lancaster University

KF7100138

Wetland Times

Lancaster University

£181,626.57

Time is central to conversations about climate change and conservation practice in the Anthropocene, which unsettles human narratives of progress, development, and freedom. But the accompanying prescription for ‘deep time’ and planetary thinking to solve ecological problems often threatens to dominate and overwrite the messy, locally-specific and culturally sensitive times that underpin the human relationship with nature.

This project, a collaboration with Dr Blake Ewing (University of Oxford), uses the 'temporal ecosystems' of three global wetland sites (Morecambe Bay, UK; the northern European Wadden Sea; and the Congo Basin peatlands) to investigate the different ways in which time is conceptualised, experienced, and described in these vulnerable and complex landscapes, and show how productive use of (dis)ordered, multiple temporalities can be made.

Findings will inform conservation and environmental education practices across these three sites by enriching understanding of time in the Anthropocene, empowering communities to reconsider prevailing temporal narratives, and facilitating knowledge exchange between wetland research and visitor centres.

Dr Birte Vogel

Co-applicants: Dr Nimesh Dhungana, University of Manchester; Professor Larissa Fast, University of Manchester; Professor Nemanja Dzuverovic, University of Belgrade; Dr Maria Lucia Zapata, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana; Dr Neeti Aryal Khanal, Tribhuvan University

KF7100221

Re-ordering ethics and knowledge production in conflict and disaster affected contexts

University of Manchester

£167,570.00

Data underpins global order and shapes knowledge and action. In conflict and disaster settings, data collection is repeated and invasive, with ethics procedures deployed to mitigate harm. Yet, little is understood about how ethics and knowledge production work in practice or how to more effectively ground research practices in their cultural and historic contexts. This project examines ethics in practice in three intensively-researched conflict- and disaster-affected regions. Co-designed by Global Southern and Northern researchers, it will hold exploratory workshops with local research actors with the aim of understanding the data they collect, relevant ethics procedures, and the extent to which local scholars are involved in, or written out of, knowledge production about conflict and disaster. The project will enhance understanding of how knowledge and ethics are ordered in ‘the field’. It will produce policy, academic, and educational resources to support ethical decision-making by those engaged in conflict and disaster-related research.

Dr Donna McCormack

Co-applicants: Dr Ingrid Young, University of Edinburgh; Dr Ingvil Hellstrand, University of Stavanger; Professor Lisa Käll, Stockholm University

KF7100272

Doing Disability Futures

University of Strathclyde

£196,016.22

Doing Disability Futures puts disability justice into practice by having disabled people lead this programme and collaborate with disabled artists and marginalized communities.

This project will use arts-based and speculative methods to engage with global and local histories of colonial violence and ongoing injustices, as well as to tell stories of alternative futures that disrupt existing knowledge and power hierarchies about marginalized communities. Working with community organisation The Love Tank, a digital exhibition of disability stories from marginalized LGTBQ communities in the UK will be produced. The project team will also work with disabled artists from the Caribbean, North America, Europe and North Africa to develop understandings of how speculative arts may disrupt and challenge disability injustice.

These collaborations will transform how the project team works together as producers and facilitators of knowledge. Ultimately, the research will explore what disability futures are possible as a way of doing disability justice.

Dr Brian Garvey

Co-applicants: Professor Mauricio Torres, Federal University of Para; Professor Jose Gilberto De Souza, UNESP-Rio Claro; Dr Monique Medeiros, Federal University of Para; Dr Yamila Goldfarb, UNESP-Rio Claro

KF7100280

The unauthorised biographies of globalised commodity chains

University of Strathclyde

£159,255.20

The research contends that institutional optimism for development, growth and poverty alleviation through finance and globalised value chains (WTO, 2020) routinely omits how illicit forms of labour and natural resource exploitation are integral to contemporary commodity trades. The study focuses on two sites of land invasion, occupation and resource extraction in Brazil's Amazon, and the mineral and timber trades that link these sites to ports and markets in UK, European Union and Switzerland. It does so to explore: 1) the 'disorderly' relationships in new extractive zones that transform illegally grabbed value into regulated and 'ordered' market relations across borders; 2) how new authoritarian modes of governance and market oriented regulatory norms validate the often violent means by which new areas are brought into production, by which labour is rendered vulnerable, and indigenous dispossession is accelerated; 3) pathways towards new local, state and transnational mechanisms for territorial and value chain governance.

Professor Ayse Zarakol

Co-applicants: Professor Glenda Sluga, European University Institute; Professor George Lawson, Australian National University; Dr Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia

KF7100344

Pathways from disorder to order: where history meets theory

University of Cambridge

£179,396.00

This project brings together leading International Relations (IR) scholars and Global Historians who have been responsible for cutting-edge work on order-making and order-contestation in order to develop an interdisciplinary conversation about global (dis)order. This interdisciplinary conversation will be organised around two overarching questions. First, if global disorder does not just mean the absence of order, but is better characterised as the degree of difference from an existing order, at what point do practices of order-contestation become usefully seen as structural disorder? In other words: are there crisis thresholds or magnitudes that can usefully be characterised as ‘global disorder’? Second, how does disorder end? More specifically, under what conditions does a new global order emerge from a condition of structural disorder?

Dr Melanie Lombard

Co-applicants: Dr Fiona Anciano, University of the Western Cape; Dr Carlos Andrés Tobar Tovar, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali; Professor Charlotte Lemanski, University of Cambridge

KF7100354

Interrogating urban crisis representation and response in ‘disorderly’ Southern cities

University of Sheffield

£199,946.40

What is the relationship between representations of crisis and crisis response in ‘disorderly’ urban contexts? We are apparently living in an era of global crisis. Urban dwellers are unevenly impacted by financial, climate, health and political disruption, yet top-down responses are often flawed, lacking contextual sensitivity. Crisis response as ‘urgent and corrective action’ (Weaver 2017) may compound exclusionary or repressive interventions (e.g. curfews, militarisation), particularly affecting low-income populations in ‘disorderly’ urban areas with predominantly informal housing, services and economies. Yet crises are socially constructed, as power relations determine how crises are framed, and whose framings dominate. The link between how crises are represented and ensuing responses therefore requires critical problematisation (Roitman 2022). This research explores local experiences of crisis representation and response in ‘disorderly’ Southern cities via a multilingual comparative storytelling methodology, interrogating the relationship between crisis framings and responses, alongside the notion of crisis itself, to support improving outcomes.

Professor Emma Tomalin

Co-applicants: Dr Kathryn Kraft, University of East London; Dr Jayeel Cornelio, Ateneo de Manila University; Dr Jennifer Philippa Eggert, University of Leeds

KF7100303

Building community resilience, peace and reconciliation as a response to Global (Dis)Order: the ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ aspects of local faith actors’ contributions

University of Leeds

£199,928.03

The contributions of ‘local faith actors’ (LFAs) to building community resilience, peace and reconciliation have been marginalised by international peace/development/humanitarian actors. Neither has the role of LFAs in these areas been a strong focus of academic studies, particularly with respect to the ‘intangible’ or ‘spiritual’ dimensions of their engagement. Through ‘participatory action research’ with LFAs in Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Burundi the aims of our project are:

1. To better understand the ‘tangible’ (or ‘material’) and ‘intangible’ (or ‘spiritual’) aspects of the contribution of LFAs to building resilience, peace and reconciliation as a response to Global (Dis)Order at the local level.
2. To promote broader recognition amongst international peace/development/humanitarian actors of the ‘intangible’ or ‘spiritual’ aspects of the contribution of LFAs to building resilience, peace and reconciliation through co-producing (with LFAs) a conceptual framework that can inform engagement and partnership between LFAs and other stakeholders.

Professor Jonathan Havercroft

Co-applicants: Professor Anna Feigenbaum, Bournemouth University; Dr Susan Kang, City University of New York; Professor Kai Michael Kenkel, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro; Ms Veronica Fenocchio Azzi, Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) Brazil

KF7100438

Protest Project: An Analysis of Public Assembly Rights and Anti-Riot Technology in the U.K., U.S.A., and Brazil

University of Southampton

£158,231.45

The past three years has seen a global upswell in the number of protests. These disruptive protests have raised important questions about the nature of global order. While the existing literature tends to focus on actors, motivations, resources and tactics of dissent, scholars need a better understanding of the tensions between authorities maintaining public order and protecting the human right of public assembly. To address this gap, the Policing Protest Project will develop an interdisciplinary and international research team in Brazil, the U.S., and the U.K., to study political protest and state responses to protest as a global phenomenon. The project will generate three peer reviewed articles, one monograph, a dataset of protests in Brazil, the U.K., and the U.S., a podcast series, and training workshops for activists.

Professor Katherine Baxter

Co-applicants: Professor Deborah Sutton, Lancaster University; Professor Farhana Ibrahim, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

KF7100360

Desert Disorders: Comparative Approaches to Asian and East African Desert Regions

Northumbria University

£180,021.00

Deserts offer unique insights into modern regimes of mobilities, ecologies, and bordering practices. This interdisciplinary project will explore deserts as spaces that have been overlooked and marginalised by presumptions of their unproductiveness, inhospitality and homogeneity. It will introduce a comparative, global perspective on deserts as spaces of perceived ‘disorder’. Led from the Humanities in collaboration with the Social Sciences, the project will use literary, historical and ethnographic methodologies to explore and explain the imperial and postcolonial anxieties that deserts, and their inhabitants, provoked. Our project re-orientates deserts from the margins, placing them at the centre of our interrogation of modern/colonial and postcolonial authority and placemaking. This re-centring will allow us to recover alternative, possibly resistive, forms of sovereignty that were established among desert populations, and through desert environments and cultures, which existed beyond the conditions of normative state and citizenship regimes.

The awards listed are those for the 2023 Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects. Previous award announcements can be found on the Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects past awards page.