Networks, consortia, budgeting and ‘impact’:learning from two AHRC-funded projects

Graham Jeffery

Graham.Jeffery@uws.ac.uk

Challenging Elites: rethinking disconnection and recovering

urban space(AHRC Connected

Communities closed call £1.5m bid, 2014 - 2015)

www.connected-communities.org

Resources of Hope: Giving Voice to underprivileged communities in India(AHRC highlight notice: Follow-on funding for impact and engagement, c. £80k, 2016 - 2017)

‘Remaking Society’[opportunistic – ‘pilot demonstrator’]

• Co-produced research – AHRC “Connected Communities” – so how?

• Enclosure of public space/quasi-public space

• Surveillance/control/exclusion• Retrenchment of welfare

state/housing crisis• Precarious urban lives/precarious

identities • What’s the point of community arts

in these contexts?• Multiple roles of artists deployed into

these contexts – ‘ruthless pragmatism’

• University-community partnerships to co-create/investigate

“…addressing the challenges of disconnection, division and exclusion”• Read the call document

• Apply for a place at sandpit/meeting

• (450 applicants, 120 selected on track record /experience)

• Multi-disciplinary, mix of academics and community organisations

• networking/development opportunity – funding on the table

• Three day residential workshop (big investment…)

• Meeting people – listening, discussing, negotiating

• Strange behaviours and complex power dynamics –‘reading the room’

• The importance of your web presence - people will be checking out your stuff…

• Cultivate relationships/networks

How to cope

• Project confidence

• Don’t underrate your experience/expertise

• “There’s a fine line between clever and stupid” (Nigel Tufnel)

• Don’t show off

• Don’t hide

• Watch out for the ‘big beasts’

• If you don’t know, find out/ask questions

• Make friends with someone more familiar with the rituals/language/approach of the funder than you

• Be open and flexible

• Observe and listen

• Trust your instincts

Working together

• BE USEFUL/HELPFUL – what can I contribute? What do I know? Who do I know? What can we do together?

• But BE GUARDED – don’t give everything away for nothing

• DON’T BE ARROGANT

• TRUST is important: building relationships, enjoying working together, delivering together, making things happen, engagement, enjoyment etc

• LISTEN, LEARN, INCLUDE, be sensitive

Working process

• Groups formed and ideas ‘pitched’

• Development funding awarded – worth doing even if final proposal not accepted

• POLITICS – inevitable

• (group dynamics, interpersonal issues)

• Communicate clearly: set out process and deadlines

• Divide up tasks

• Build relationships

• Spend time together (difficult but essential)

• Negotiate, listen, learn, share, be reliable

Development workshops

• Clarifying ideas

• Questions, theories, methods

• Who will do what?

• Have we got the right mix of expertise/experience?

• Working things through

• What do we need to do to find this out?

• What will work for the funder? How can we innovate?

• What ideas, resources, processes needed?

• Shared workspace online/social media

• Learning and exchange

• Interdisciplinary knowledge – who brings what?

• Planning/timeline

• Then allow enough time for internal process – ethical approval/peer review/costings etc

Writing the proposal

• Don’t leave it until the last weeks/ last minutes

• Build it up slowly

• Multiple drafts

• Look at other successful proposals

• Read and re-read the call document, check off everything there, look for clues in the guidance

• J-ES and Pfact

• Allow time to negotiate with other partners/universities

• Be flexible

• Be ambitious

• Be honest/open

• Go for closed calls/highlight notices –better chance of success

…always building on previous work• Austerity urbanism: economic insecurity,

inequalities & privatisation

• The entrepreneurial state/city marketing strategies

• Media (and policy) representations of ‘zones of deprivation’ – dangerous combinations of deprivation and spectacle

• Multiplicity of activist, artist, urbanist counter-narratives/tactics/strategies to challenge ‘taken for granted’ processes of financialisation, gentrification, exclusion etc, but power inequalities persist…

• Art as a form of resistance? Or art in the service of ’urban entrepreneurialism’? Or both? Cf. Hull, City of Culture, Paisley, city of culture..?. (Zukin: Whose Cultures?)

Fran Tonkiss: ‘space at the margins, and room for manoeuvre in the cracks &geographies of urban power,…minor practices, ordinary audacities and little anti-utopias that nevertheless create material spaces of hopein the city.Such spaces may matter most when urban prospects are most bleak’

Double-edged narratives of regeneration, poverty and development: Markers of disposability/obsolescence but also sites of opportunity – for whom?

Plays out spatially – embodied, situated, sited knowledges – specificities of everyday life in each place.

Spatial agency and social agency: creative methods which build active involvement and participation

Ethnographies and histories of place linked to live urban interventions

Architecture and urban design -people, places, participation

• The financial crisis leaves vacant, gap sites

• Zones where previous socio-economic logic has broken down

• Proliferation of temporary/pop up strategies

• Approaches which reconnect people to ‘stalled spaces’?

• Recuperation by developers?

• Place making, place branding

• Good for creating sense of ‘potential’ – but for who?

Actively contested places, changing rapidly: comparative histories of ‘capitalism on the waterfront’

Grimsby : East Marsh Ward & Docks

Govan , Glasgow Convoys Wharf, Deptford

Costings

• Academic time (Full economic cost)

• Community partner time

• Space

• Resources/materials

• Travel/subsistence

• Documentation/print/web

• Equipment (generally avoid)

Elements of a proposalCase for Support (4 – 6 pages)

Pathways to Impact (2 sides)

Justification for Resources (2 sides)

Ethical information

Summary for lay audience – Gateway to Research

All sections of JE-S completed

CVs and publication list in standard format

Visual material

Letters of support

Gantt chart/milestones

Technical Plan (data, ICT, web)

Panel meeting and presentation

…and we didn’t get the thing funded.• HOWEVER – the development process was valuable and enabled us to build new

relationships and new approaches, and experience of large funding bids…

• We’ve fed elements of the proposal into other work and publications

• It’s helped networking and raised the profile of the team (and UWS) with key people at the AHRC

• We were graded ‘4’ (“A very good proposal demonstrating high international standards of scholarship, originality, quality, and significance. It meets all the assessment criteria for the scheme.”) but 2 others got a five…

• “nothing is wasted”….?!

Complaints Choir

Follow on funding for engagement and impact

• Highlight notice for international development • Working with existing/trusted partners/colleagues• Building on existing work/networks• Specific criteria for the scheme – easier to get follow-on as

limited to previous recipients of AHRC funding• Not doing ‘new research’ (*hmmm*) but increasing impact

and ‘reach’• Based on Remaking Society

(http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=AH%2FJ006882%2F1) & Challenging Elites & Coventry University’s work on food/agroecology (…welding together agendas!!!) – focus on two communities in India/sustainable development goals

challenging representations

• Tenant farmers in Telangana – using theatre as a means of communicating/discussing the politics of rural development and food

• 13th Compound, Dharavi, Mumbai – ‘slum’ imaginaries and reclaiming histories – arts methods as powerful ‘engagement tools’ (or delivering export-grade research?)

Participatory interventions

• Building platforms using arts and humanities methods to directly challenge/address problems/issues

• Linking this to ethnographic and historiographic methods - / generative and improvisational relationship to site/ place/ identity

• To make visible local knowledge and reveal hidden logic of social context/situation– drawing out complexities & contradictions

• Creative tools for challenging developmental process / generate alternative future proposals / interrogation of community and participatory/public arts traditions

Impact – beyond academia

• Places to look: The Conversation, LSE Impact Blog• Social media: twitter, the blogosphere• Policy and practice impact – local, national,

international• Change in organisational/business practice• Invention and innovation• Long term impact is about relationships and

engagement• Partnerships matter – cultural/social

institutions/social enterprise/policy and funders

Developing new interdisciplinary, practice-led methods…?

• Building community/academic capacity – across sites, disciplines, communities

• Methodological innovation – practice/participation at core of methods –

interdisciplinary , rich understandings of place, space, urbanization and forms of

exclusion and division

• ‘The right to the city’ in practice – tactical and strategic urbanism: ‘bottom-up’ approaches to shaping and challenging urban change

• critical and challenging perspectives on ‘localism’ and ‘participatory urbanism’ from sharp end of urban development – “strong potential for policy and practice impact” . There is plenty of lip service to ‘participatory development’ out there but HOW this happens matters, what happens in communities matters…

• Potential to reach much broader audiences than conventional academic research –range of outputs – conducting research ‘in public’ and sharing outputs through broad range of channels.

• The claims that we make and the ethics of these claims…

• OUTPUTS, OUTPUTS, OUTPUTS – drawing all these strands into a publication/dissemination strategy

Dharavi Urban Design Lab: a pilot

Next steps/dilemmas

• Finding/channeling money to sustain collaborations – not always well understood by institutions

• Parasitical relationship with practitioners?• Opportunism versus strategy – slippery institutions, slippery

contexts, slippery funding, slippery people • Converting this web of activity into recognisable ‘outputs’• The ethics of collaboration – inviting people into a process but not

always having the resources to sustain it -- “The University of Armageddon” (Peoples Knowledge Collective 2016)

• Links to REF Impact narratives – urban development, Govan/Gdansk, participatory methods etc.

• MORE FUNDING!! MORE OUTPUTS!! MORE OPPORTUNITIES!!

• www.generalpraxis.org.uk

• www.twitter.com/grahamjeffery

• www.twitter.com/RemakingSociety

• Graham.Jeffery@uws.ac.uk