The British Academy awards 12 International Fellowships to outstanding SHAPE researchers across the globe

The British Academy has announced over £2.8 million in funding for 12 outstanding SHAPE early career researchers from across the globe, enabling them to establish and conduct their research at a UK institution of their choice.

The two-year Fellowships provide early career researchers with the opportunity to acquire and transfer new skills and knowledge, and to encourage long-term relationships through networking opportunities and the International Fellowships alumni programme.

The 2024 International Fellowships awardees are:

Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.

Principal Investigator: Dr Danilo Barauna

UK Sponsor: Dr Giuliana Borea

IF24\100830

From queer ecology towards haunted aiesthesis: disorientation, care and futurities in the LGBTQIAPN+ artists' moving image from the Brazilian Amazon

Newcastle University

£196,350.00

This research aims to analyse the strategies used by LGBTQIAPN+ Indigenous and non-Indigenous moving image artists from the Brazilian Amazon to imagine queer ecological futures for the Amazon. In the current environmental crisis, queer ecology scholars suggest that we must learn from queer modes of conviviality to overcome contemporary ecological issues. Despite limited forays, recent literature on queer ecology also indicates the inevitability of expanding itself to the discussions on genders and sexualities from the Global South to decolonise the discipline. Nevertheless, current research provides little evidence of the aforementioned geographical context’s contribution to the existing environmental discussions on queer ecology, mainly when considering the artistic production of queer artists.

Therefore, in this project I present the hypothesis that in their work, LGBTQIAPN+ moving image artists from the Brazilian Amazon employ a haunted aiesthesis, understood as a queer ecological practice aiming to decolonise affects and imagine queer/cuir futures that challenge the binary conceptions of extractivism in the Amazon, thus promoting awareness-raising regarding the environmental challenges in the region. This project is designed as a multiple-case study and I will explore the three key concepts disorientation, care and futurities, through the analysis of the work of the following artists: 1) Disorientation: Allyster Fagundes, Rafael Matheus Moreira, and Luciana Magno, 2) Care: Danielle Fonseca, Qualquer Quoletivo, and Nay Jinknss, 3) Futurities: Keyla Sankofa, Rafael Bqueer, and Uýra Sodoma.

The methodology of this project is based on archival research, queer oral history, and textual analysis and I will implement the following three main procedures: 1) Archival research: accessing the digital archive where the artworks are located to map and organise material such as the artworks, artists’ writings, and video stills; 2) Interviews: elaborating and conducting interviews with the selected artists based on the methods and procedures of queer oral history; 3) Analysis: analysing and writing about the artworks and the previously described topics (disorientation, care, and futurities) following the stage of data collection, connecting the methods of queer oral history and textual analysis.

The outcomes of this project include five articles in peer-reviewed journals, a workshop on Latin American Art, a Moving Image Festival entitled ‘Haunted Affects | Disorientated Ecologies’, and a dedicated page on Tainaca’s website, in order to share the generated data and metadata.

Principal Investigator: Dr Maria Copot

UK Sponsor: Professor Erich Round

IF24\100591

Seeing both the forest and the trees: lexical organisation beyond lexemes and cells

University of Surrey

£239,075.52

Humanity’s greatest achievements are contingent on our capacity for language: it allows us to communicate an unbounded number of ideas to each other by changing the order and form of words we know. This is only possible because of structure in the lexical system, which we effortlessly exploit to create and understand words we’ve never heard before: upon hearing "I went zicking yesterday" you will intuitively and effortlessly parse the unknown word and reply "have you zicked before?".

Morphologists characterise systematicity in word systems by abstracting away from idiosyncratic properties of individual words in favour of finding generalisations. We employ features of various kinds to group together words based on their lexical or grammatical meaning, resulting in lexemes and paradigm cells respectively.

The abstractions of traditional theory fuelled progress by pushing idiosyncrasies into the background, thereby making the intense complexity of language tractable. However, significant advances in computational method means that this complexity can now be interrogated while also keeping the idiosyncrasies in view. I will use computational tools to build a representation of the lexicon that retains information about the idiosyncratic properties of words and look for morphological structure in this space. This will allow me to find additional structure that will shed light on morphological phenomena, in addition to providing a more nuanced characterisation of lexemes, cells and features. I will then perform experiments to test how speakers are using this complex space in language comprehension and production. Specifically, I will test the hypothesis that morphological category membership is not inherent to words, but rather that speakers 'shine a spotlight' on the portion and dimensions of lexical space that are relevant for the task they are performing.

The project will provide us with a new metalanguage to discuss morphological phenomena, and an implementation that does not abstract away from the idiosyncratic behaviour of individual words. It will contribute to a better understanding of lexical organisation, a core question in morphology and crucial for disciplines that rely on morphologists’ understanding of lexical structure to answer their own questions."

Principal Investigator: Dr Metin Koca

UK Sponsor: Dr Anna Strhan

IF24\100616

Nonversion: The Conversion of Young Turks to Non-Religion

University of York

£243,305.00

Amidst transnational cultural contestations over moral values, questions surrounding youths’ religious socialisation and education provoke heated public debate, as young people represent for adults the possible 'religious' or 'secular' futures of a nation. In Turkey, tensions emerging from the uneasy coexistence of religious and secular education entered a new phase with the recent government commitments to bring up a 'pious generation' (Lüküslü 2018). These policies have resulted in the conversion of many secular high schools into Imam-Hatip (religious) schools. Yet despite the government commitment to increasing religiosity amongst the young, quantitative research suggests that levels of piety are declining, with many young people who receive religious socialisation ending up as 'nonverts'.

With growing research attention over recent years to contemporary forms of secularity and 'non-religion' across different global contexts, there is now a burgeoning research literature exploring the growth of 'non-religious' identities, beliefs and worldviews. Yet we know little about the experiences of individuals who become 'religious nones' in predominantly Muslim societies such as Turkey. This research aims to advance understanding of how, when, where, and with whom young people self-identify as non-religious (Strhan and Shillitoe 2019). In the context of the Turkish government’s campaign to raise young people as pious Muslim subjects and its view on social media as a potential threat to their religious identity, this project will adopt a combination of digital ethnography and in-depth interviews to explore what it means to be 'non-religious' in Turkey. Given the increasingly prevalent religious educational environments which limit schooling options for the lower social strata, the project will focus on young adults from lower social-class backgrounds.

The novelty of this project lies in its capacity to: 1) address top-down religious reform and conservation projects in the Middle East, illustrated by the current Turkish government’s politics of religion, 2) advance theoretical and methodological innovation in the sociology of religion and contributing to growing research interest in religion in youth studies, 3) advance the multidisciplinary literature on non-religion, which has to date largely focused on (post)Christian contexts, and 4) enhance the knowledge base on how religiosity interacts with gender and class in shaping young people’s identities.

Principal Investigator: Dr Julieta Lobato

UK Sponsor: Professor Ruth Dukes

IF24\100982

Regulating the Labour-Capital Conflict in a Turbulent Era. Neoliberalism Reloaded or New Right-Wing Populist Wave?

University of Glasgow

£222,826.40

Once pivotal in labour law, the contract of employment no longer secures adequate protection for workers from ill and unfair treatment at the hands of employing organisations. Non-standard forms of employment define the modern world of work and insecurity prevails. Viewed in historical perspective, these trends can be linked to the election of the first wave of neoliberal governments in the late 1970s-1990s. Today, these governments are being replaced, in some countries, by right-wing populist governments. To date, labour law scholarship has portrayed neoliberal and right-wing labour governance as distinct phenomena.

This project challenges this dichotomy. By framing the neoliberal–post-neoliberal era as a historical continuum, the project demonstrates how labour governance increasingly fosters worker insecurity and the emergence of multiple varieties of work contracts, with attendant inequalities and vulnerabilities. Focusing on the UK and Argentina as case studies, the project investigates whether neoliberalism´s dominance in shaping the labour-capital conflict is really declining and what the implications are for labour law and work relations. The choice of the UK and Argentina as case studies is informed by their early adoption of neoliberal policies, the recent emergence of right-wing populist governments, and by their respective location in the Global North and South. Additionally, the research evaluates the role of violence in enforcing neoliberal–post-neoliberal labour policies. Since labour-capital relations are shaped not only by the state but also by the actors involved, the project adopts a bottom-up approach, analysing the reconfiguration of labour political subjectivity in late capitalism, especially the emergence of informal workers´ groups as new labour subjects not captured by traditional labour law.

The project investigates the resistance strategies deployed by these groups to counter the increasing insecurity of work and their development of new, alternative normativities. Methodologically, the study adopts a multidisciplinary approach, combining legal methods with insights from political and social sciences, sociology of law, and political economy. The project´s scholarly significance lies in its framing of neoliberalism and right-wing populism as interconnected elements of the same historical process – namely, the transformations of the state in shaping labour-capital conflict in late capitalism –, its challenge to prevailing approaches that overgeneralise the experiences of the Global North, and its focus on the agency of labour movements as agents of change. Ultimately, the research provides theoretical and normative support for policy responses, aiming for both academic innovation and tangible progress in labour governance.

Principal Investigator: Dr Valeria Mantilla Morales

UK Sponsor: Dr David Wilson

IF24\101179

Navigating Amphibious Lives: Women, race and environments in Colombia, c. 1750-1850

University of Strathclyde

£202,318.00

This project examines the environmental, social, and commercial lives of the Magdalena River, a fluvial network that runs along present-day Colombia from the Andean Mountain range to the Caribbean Sea. To do so, the project centres the experiences of free women of colour (a colonial category meant to classify subordinated groups like afroindigenous, afrodescendants, free Africans). Set between 1750-1850, this research threads how free women of colour exercised economic and social influence on riverine societies, thanks to their high degree of mobility grounded in their own exercise of amphibious culture, a culture equally dependent on land and water. In this way, free women of colour challenged local governmentality and spatial configurations. This project’s impact lies at the explicit connections it will draw between historical understandings of amphibious culture and its relationship to current plights for racial and environmental justice.

Placing cultural history and food studies in dialogue with environmental studies, this project has two main aims. The first is to advance a ground-breaking articulation of amphibious cultures, offsetting current scholarship that limits 'amphibiousness' to water dynamics and reduces it to an adaptive response to dramatic environmental crises and challenges. I aim to question this to show how this conception reflects a limited land-centric spatial imaginary, where 'amphibious' are those populations who dare go in water. This conception neglects amphibious cultures’ intimacies with land and their larger environment, denying complexity to amphibious world-making and the cultural consciousness of amphibious lives, traceable through food, literature, and music.

The second aim is to question how the humanities view historical periodisation across time and space. This project will do this by challenging the traditional colonial/republican periodisation of Latin American history that dictates that the region moved from coloniality to republicanism in the 1810s, when proclamations of independence were signed by the hands of men who supported the cause. Instead, guided by the life of the river as an ecological actor, and guided by its relationship to free women of colour, the proposed research focuses on changes to the life of the Magdalena, brought on by the advent of steam navigation in the 1820s. These changes are more meaningful markers of periodisation. This novel periodisation scheme exposes 'amphibious knowledges' as resistance to ongoing processes of colonial and then republican extraction and dispossession while also underscoring crucial aspects of riverine ecologies, free women of colour, and water colonialism.

Principal Investigator: Dr Lucas McMahon

UK Sponsor: Dr Levi Roach

IF24\100834

Information and Empire in New Rome, ca. 600-1200

University of Exeter

£234,378.00

Often intangible, abstract, and detectable only through its effects, information was the dark matter that held together pre-modern empires. My proposed British Academy project, Information and Empire in New Rome, is an anarchist history of information control in the medieval eastern Roman Empire that focuses on the total information regime by which the state watched its neighbours, repressed dissent, and extracted the resources necessary for its existence and reproduction. The aim is to comprehend the lived experience of empire in the distant past while also providing a template for understanding the relationship between information, power, and the state.

The project encompasses three main sections: 1) borders, 2) repression, and 3) statecraft, broadly moving from the edges of the empire towards the decision-making centre in Constantinople. The border is both a physical and imagined space and here is defined through a combination of infrastructure and encounter; it is the place where a traveller first encounters the authority of the state, and this is virtually always in some relation to state infrastructure, namely roads, ports, bridges, watchtowers, and toll-booths. This will be the first synoptic study of medieval Roman borders and border-zones.

Section two (“repression”) will look at internal efforts at information control. This turns attention to the definition of a unified set of standards, namely coinage and weights and measures, as well as the circulation between capital and the provinces of information-bearing state officials collecting tax revenues and conducting land surveys. Moreover, checkpoints on roads and stamps on bullion and ceramics attest to state efforts to control and track human activity. This will seek to answer the question of how much the state knew about the lands under its control and what this implies for the lives and activities of those under its surveillance.

Section three turns from collection and surveillance to security and statecraft and examines information security as an act of power. It will examine archives and embassies and their role in securing and making available information for the state. This part asks the big question, namely what was the grand strategy of the elites in Constantinople, and how did those in the provinces on the receiving end of such extensive efforts at information control experience it?

By looking at state efforts to dominate all informational media, Information and Empire will develop a fresh and accessible template for comparative studies across the breadth and scope of human history.

Principal Investigator: Dr Similo Ngwenya

UK Sponsor: Professor James Wilsdon

IF24\100908

Shaping the Future: Social Science Research for Progress in Southern Africa

University College London

£269,631.96

The distribution of funding resources and priorities in the current global research and innovation landscape is uneven. It is widely acknowledged that social science disciplines are often given less priority in comparison to STEM fields, despite their crucial role in addressing global health, economic, and socio-political challenges. To reposition the discipline in the research and innovation landscape, many studies have been conducted. Some demonstrate the contributions of social science disciplines to society, while others propose methodologies and frameworks for measuring social sciences. Additionally, some examine the interdisciplinary nature of social science subjects and their overlap with other disciplines. However, it is worth noting that most of these studies were carried out by scholars and focused on regions outside of Africa. There has been limited exploration of African social scientists in the literature, with a few notable exceptions.

This study aims to contribute to the discourse on social science research in the global south. It has two objectives: firstly, to map social science research produced by countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region and align these outputs with the Community's priority areas; and secondly, to investigate the level of inclusion and assimilation of social science disciplines into broader STEM fields, and the epistemic effects of such inclusions. To achieve these objectives, a scientometric and document analysis will be conducted. Scientometrics is the quantitative study of science, science communication, and science policy. The study will develop scientometric indicators to map the publications and citations of research produced in social science disciplines. The indicators will be categorised into three broad types: structural, process, and output measures. Scopus will be used as the main data source. The database was chosen for the study because it reportedly contains more research from Africa than other mainstream databases. The data will be analysed at both macro (country) and meso (disciplinary) levels using quantitative techniques, including statistical packages such as SQL and R. Visualization tools, such as VosViewer, will also be utilized.

The study's results will contribute a Southern African perspective to the ongoing efforts in the UK and Europe to comprehend the impact of social sciences and humanities research. By focusing on social science in Southern Africa, the study will enable comparisons of the discipline across diverse geographical contexts, which are crucial for regional and global research policy. The results will inform investment priorities and future system needs.

Principal Investigator: Dr Babatunde Obamamoye

UK Sponsor: Professor Jonathan Vincent William Fisher

IF24\100706

Unravelling Variations in Local Reception of International Peace Missions

University of Birmingham

£224,114.00

An increasing problem with international peace missions has been local opposition and resistance. For instance, in July 2022, citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) attacked the UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO), and more than 36 UN peacekeepers and personnel were reportedly killed. Yet, there has been little research into why this happens in some contexts and not in others. This fellowship seeks to inquire into variations in the local reception of international peace missions. More specifically, it aims to investigate why mass local resistance against international peace missions occurs in one context but not the other and how international peace practitioners can better improve their relationships with local communities and align peace missions with local concerns and experiences.

The study will adopt a comparative research design while focusing on the cases of the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). This case selection is appropriate to unravel variations in the local reception of peace missions and to look in depth at the local perspectives about community enthusiasm and hostility for peace missions. The study will rely on purposive and snowballing samplings to collect data through fieldwork visits, official documents and in-depth interviews with UN officials, government officials, leaders of civil society organisations, and local protesters.

The focus of my fellowship is innovative, and its outcomes will have a significant impact on peace intervention research and policy. Within the scholarly community, the outcomes of this project will bring to the fore the crucial subject of mass antagonism in the discourse of local resistance to international peacebuilding and peacekeeping. It will offer conceptual clarification for a better understanding of the underpinnings of mass resistance during peace interventions and present a comparative analysis of why it occurs in some contexts but not in others. From a policy point of view, its outcomes will generate an evidence-based framework that helps policymakers design and undertake peace missions that better align with the aspirations, concerns, and experiences of the people in the host communities. Thus, it will contribute to the broad aspirations for sustainable stability and peace in war-torn societies.

Principal Investigator: Dr Jerónimo Rilla

UK Sponsor: Professor Peter Schroeder

IF24\100496

The State Needs to be Seen: An Intellectual History, from Leviathan to the Caudillo Order

University College London

£271,024.16

This research project aims to construct an intellectual history of political personifications spanning from the 17th to the mid-19th centuries, with a focus on European and South American cases. A personification is the graphic or textual representation of an abstract idea as a person, giving visible forms to concepts such as liberty, power, virtues, and vices. Specifically, this study delves into two of Europe’s preeminent models of state personifications: 1) Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, symbolising an almighty absolutist state, and 2) Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘public person,’ later embodied in the Republican figure of Marianne.

Furthermore, the project argues that these personifications, which express a particular idea of order and civilisation, required a conceptual counterpart: savage America. Early modern depictions of native America conveyed an idea of disorder and lack of political agency, serving as a foil to European ideals. In the 19th century, Latin American intellectuals, notably Domingo Sarmiento, reworked this opposition. In his masterpiece Facundo (1845), Sarmiento elucidates why the advancement of European reason and civilization was outwitted in the Pampas, succumbing to an efficient system of organised barbarism. This new political entity that emerged in Argentina is ‘personified’ by the caudillo (political leader) Facundo Quiroga.

In sum, this project reconstructs how European political thought represented a newly formed concept, the state, through personification. It also argues that this development operated in tandem with a counter concept: America as the personification of barbarism. In addition, it shows that these premises were problematised by the nascent South American intelligentsia.

In terms of methodology, this research falls within the subdiscipline of intellectual history. I will interpret texts, symbols, and concepts related to these personifications within their intellectual and historical contexts. The project also draws on approaches from literary studies and art theory to elaborate a formal definition of the concept of personification, and to explore how works of art articulate ideas. In addition, it incorporates insights from postcolonial studies.

The main contributions of this project will be: a) an original historicisation of state personifications, hitherto mostly studied in its European formats, but overlooked in its Latin American reception; b) an interdisciplinary approach that involves combining history of political thought, postcolonial studies, literary studies, and art theory; c) a critical reflection on how state power was justified through personification and the questioning of a pervasive conceptual framework that has associated America with political disorder.

Principal Investigator: Dr Noah Stemeroff

UK Sponsor: Dr Karim Thébault

IF24\101045

The Mystical Physicists: Quantum Mechanics, Speculative Philosophy, and the Limits of Science

University of Bristol

£256,227.89

The Mystical Physicists (MysPhyts) project is devoted to a study of the central significance of the history of philosophy in the creative process of theoretical physics, and its speculative extensions. It is based on an examination of the widespread appeal to Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy (including later mysticism and esotericism) in the philosophical thought of two prominent theoretical physicists: Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli. By the 1930s, these early architects of quantum mechanics had settled on a basic formulation of quantum theory, but one which they considered to be incomplete, as vast domains of physics and human existence remained unexplained. In the search for new ideas, they turned to the history of speculative philosophy in the hopes of finding new modes of thought which could offer the key to a possible extension of physical theory into a broader domain of enquiry. The goal of the MysPhyts project is to explore how these studies in the history of philosophy served as an inspiration for creative extensions of quantum theory and helped promote a new understanding of the role of both intuitive insight and rational knowledge within scientific thought.

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which has centred on its early history. This attention has focused on the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation and contrasting phenomenological approaches. This later approach has been championed as a counterbalance to the predominantly ‘analytic’ tradition in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. However, this renewed interest in ‘continental’ philosophy in the history of quantum mechanics, though important, is based on a somewhat misleading characterisation of the broader philosophical context of the Copenhagen interpretation itself. This context contained threads of ‘analytic’ philosophy, but also that of speculative idealism, not to mention forms of mystical thought. This broader philosophical background has been largely neglected, and this has led to a widespread misunderstanding of the history of the interpretation of quantum theory.

By drawing attention to the misunderstood and 'misfit' philosophical thought of Heisenberg and Pauli, two of the greatest minds in the history of 20th century physics, the MysPhyts project will serve to not only fill in an important gap in the literature but paint a more nuanced picture of scientific practice. By focusing philosophical attention on the forms of thought that lay outside the main currents of physical enquiry, the MysPhyts project will promote a much-needed reappraisal of the history of theoretical physics.

Principal Investigator: Dr Roxanne Tsang

UK Sponsor: Dr Dylan Gaffney

IF24\101036

The Magic of Rock Art: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Art across Media in Papua New Guinea

University of Oxford

£243,090.99

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is host to the highest biological and cultural diversity on the planet with over 800 distinctive languages, societies and art traditions in a territory only twice the size of Britain. Despite this exceptional diversity, we have no idea how these diverse art forms emerged in deep time, what they signified for people in the past, and what it meant to transpose designs across a wide range of media. One way to explore these topics is to examine rock art.

This project focuses on the East Sepik Province of PNG, and employs a multi-disciplinary approach using cutting-edge methodologies drawn from cognitive archaeology, ethnography, and archaeological science to better understand the deep history of PNG’s rock art, the materiality of rock art production, and the spatial and temporal dynamics of transposing similar designs from one medium to another. This will be the first deep historical analysis of PNG’s art traditions, a topic of profound importance especially because of rapid loss of these traditions in the modern era. The results will have important implications for how we conceptualise the scale and rate of changes in art traditions, and how the materiality of design systems entangled across media shapes the nature of these transformations.

Principal Investigator: Dr Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori

UK Sponsor: Dr Iza Kavedzija

IF24\101053

Growing Old in Peru: Living and Dying Precariously

University of Cambridge

£237,662.71

By 2050, The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 80 per cent of the world’s older adults will be living in low and middle-income parts of the world, yet the majority of ethnographic research on ageing has focused on high income countries in the Global North (Akerkar and Danely 2023). My research explores, precisely, how Peruvian older adults in the Global South struggle to remain worthy individuals under political economic arrangements that consider them as unproductive, poor, and, above all, as human waste and invisible selves. I argue that, at the different facilities of long-term care where they live and die, Peruvian older adults strive to survive amid the unfathomable uncertainty in which their lives unravel. As an ethnographer of old age in Peru, I have explored how these spaces present an opportunity to consider how citizenship and rights for many older adults are at risk today. Furthermore, those who live in long-term care facilities are frequently abandoned by their families and neglected by the institution. The vast majority of these institutions in Lima, Peru, are precarious places where assistance is provided in complex and contingent ways, thus structuring care as tremendously messy, rudimentary, unreliable, fragile, imperfect, and even violent.

My work also challenges the idea of these older women and men as merely 'ex-humans' (Biehl 2005) and moves beyond it, as it seeks to understand how different modes of existence – of those who are dying, suffering dementia, or have seen their capacity to be self-sufficient at risk – can also be apprehended as 'grievable' (Butler 2009). My project, thus, explores the significance of growing old being socially and politically recognised when everything has been lost: families, health, and rights. What are the limitations and possibilities of remaining intelligible actors at the end of life in an environment of destitution? I answer this question by centring my analysis on the ways relations of care, processes of social and family abandonment, residents’ deaths, and day-to-day intimacy at these institutions are often fraught, but, sometimes unexpectedly, are also being recreated in ways that provide people in the margins with routes to belonging and recognition.

As Peruvian society and many others in the Global South grapple with how to care for their elderly, my project raises critical questions about the varying dimensions of late-life subjectivities and the emergent care-scapes in which older adults and their carers must navigate everyday bodily, medical, and social dilemmas.

The awards listed are those for the 2024 International Fellowships. Previous award announcements can be found on the International Fellowships past awards page.