AHRC grant learning

1. Networks, consortia, budgeting and ‘impact’:
learning from two AHRC-funded projects
Graham Jeffery
Graham.Jeffery@uws.ac.uk

2. 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)

3. ‘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

4. “…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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. …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?)

11. 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 hope
in 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

12. 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?

13. Actively contested places, changing rapidly: comparative
histories of ‘capitalism on the waterfront’
Grimsby : East Marsh Ward & Docks
Govan , GlasgowConvoys Wharf, Deptford

14. Costings
• Academic time (Full
economic cost)
• Community partner time
• Space
• Resources/materials
• Travel/subsistence
• Documentation/print/web
• Equipment (generally avoid)

15. Elements of a proposal
Case 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)

16. Panel meeting and presentation

17. …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

18. 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

19. 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?)

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. Dharavi Urban Design Lab: a pilot

24. 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!!

25. • www.generalpraxis.org.uk
• www.twitter.com/grahamjeffery
• www.twitter.com/RemakingSociety
• Graham.Jeffery@uws.ac.uk