University of Roehampton

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-09

The primary research theme of CRICA is the intersection of disability and the creative economy, specifically the performing and participatory arts (PPA) sectors. Existing research on disability and arts tend to be short-term and evaluation based. This can occlude research on how disability experience can benefit the creative economy. The scale of CRICA will permit researchers to address systemic obstacles to the academic, creative, economic and social benefits of this knowledge, such as ableist informed timelines, environments, labour value and aesthetics. It will increase access for researchers, artists, arts professionals and community arts participants through structures that address the constructive contributions their knowledge makes.   CRICA will train researchers to create a new body of scholarship and practice that will speak to these issues and challenges, promoting new perspectives and creative ventures within the disability arts sector and wider creative economy. The programme seeks to explore how inclusive cultural practices and spaces are created and experienced, and how these can inform broader societal and economic changes. By positioning disabled ways of being as sources of knowledge and creativity, CRICA aims to shift the paradigm from an assimilationist view of inclusion to one that values and integrates diverse experiences.   The aims of CRICA are to: Challenge existing hierarchies of knowledge and ableism within PPA; Influence the dismantling of barriers to participation and employment in the creative economy; Produce a body of research that points to new ways of working within PPA; Enable students to become both researchers and change-makers.   The objectives of CRICA are to: Fund research that investigates how inclusive arts practices and cultures are produced and experienced; Generate new knowledge on the relationships between disability, creativity, structures and systems within the PPA; Expand discourses and practices of disabled ways of being-in-the-world through strong partnerships and collaborations with disability arts organisations; and Equip students with an innovative training programme using inclusive methods of engagement, connection and learning.    CRICA will develop dedicated doctoral partnerships and cross-methodological, embodied, experiential training. We will promote an innovative approach to researching this field.   The doctoral training programme includes: Mentorship, supervision and support from leading scholars and highly respected industry professionals in conducting impactful research on disability and the creative economy; Professional Development and Training through workshops and innovative experiential labs that address leadership and employability, co-producing new knowledges, change facilitation and impact; Embedded placements within the sector; and Access to a network of PPA organisations for collaboration and knowledge exchange.   Our proposed programme is nurtured by a group of world-renowned experts in dance, sociology, and theatre at the University of Roehampton and LSE, in partnership with PPA organisations who are at the forefront of innovation within the arts, by/with/for disabled and non-disabled people, including Entelechy, Oily Cart, Amici, People Dancing and CandoCo.   By foregrounding non-normative embodiments as sources of expertise, CRICA will foster new aesthetic and cultural paradigms. Our ambition is to contribute to a thriving disability arts economy, bringing together key organisations and fostering a networked community. The programme aims to challenge existing hierarchies of knowledge and ableism within the PPA sector and higher education. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the creative economy benefits from the unique perspectives and contributions of CRICA’s researchers and research, leading to transformations within PPA that will promote both social and economic advancements.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

This PhD project combines unique expertise at The National Archives, Kew ('TNA') and the University of Roehampton to address the lack of diversity in AI-generated cultural narratives - particularly within 19th-century Black history - and the challenges for the discovery, cataloguing, and representation of diverse histories in an AI world. It will develop advice for effective and ethical AI use when researching, cataloguing, and presenting diverse histories, through an interdisciplinary methodology, and respond to key TNA strategic goals of access, impact and inclusive research practice. The focus will be on critically prompting mainstream commercial Generative AI tools and analysing how they answer questions on diverse histories and on how those histories are represented in answers more generally. It will draw on TNA collections, or materials that have cited/used them. Focussing on the ADM records and in particular evidence of Black British sailors, it will explore the extent of racial and geographical diversity within the 19th-century lower-decks, and consider new ways of approaching, accessing and highlighting global and diverse histories at TNA.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

This project combines unique expertise at The National Archives, Kew ('TNA') and the University of Roehampton to investigate unexplored intersections of two types of archival holdings. One accounts for the multiracial composition of the British empire’s military forces; the other records British diplomatic participation in the making of legal rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war ('PoWs'). Tracing the presence of British colonial troops in negotiations on PoWs treatment, the project maps the complex, multidirectional operation of the race category in the laws of war across two centuries, recovers the legal agency of Britain’s colonial troops, and reveals how intra-imperial dynamics shaped the modern laws of war.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Armies all over the world carry out investigations into alleged wrongdoing of their forces. The reliability of such investigations is often questioned, evoking questions on law, justice and human rights. These questions are powerfully raised around the world by different social actors, such as in the course of Black Lives Matter movements and in television productions such a Line of Duty and Homeland. Critics of these investigations point to the conditions which make this violence possible; the structural factors which often grant impunity to wrongdoers; and the disputed distinction between those who are seen and treated by official authorities as wrongdoers and those who are not. There are international guidelines for military internal investigations in times of war or occupation (ICC 2013; ICRC 2019), yet investigations' reliability is often criticised. Such critique has been made, for instance, on investigations by UK and US forces in Iraq (Baldwin 2014; Shackle 2018; Stork & Abrahams 2004). From their own perspective, legal military officials of different countries find commonalities in their understanding of the duty to investigate, and attest to similar challenges (Cole, 2012). Israel's Military Police is a unit charged with investigating unlawful conduct of soldiers, including violence towards Palestinians. Its investigations result in very few indictments, and have been labelled a sham by human rights organisations (Al-Haq et al. 2020; B'Tselem 2016, 2019). The Israeli Military Police has largely evaded academic study thus far, and research on military investigations elsewhere is scarce (Buehler et al, 2019). A key obstacle is the opaque nature of these institutions, which restricts the access of outsiders. Yet, studies into investigations are urgently needed, as they can have a crucial impact on justice for communities as well as on the operation of international justice systems. Considering their crucial functions, military investigations can shed light on accountability and on the mechanisms that produce impunity. This socio-legal research project, informed by consultations conducted with leading human rights organisations, will interrogate and clarify the processes, structures and mechanisms enabling and reproducing investigations' systemic failings. The proposed study breaks new ground through interviews of invisible actors (e.g. investigators, military and other state legal officials) who are rarely called upon to explain and account for their actions, decision making and understanding of law as well as archival work and critical analysis of materials which have not yet been studied. The study takes the Israeli Military Police both as a unique case study, and as an entry point into the study of current problems of accountability and impunity globally. To achieve this, the research will a. explore Israeli military investigation processes; institutional and practitioners' truth claims, justifications and practices of sense-making (i.e. narratives, institutional culture). b. examine the role of investigations in the broader national context, i.e. how they feed into and are impacted by the country's legal and political structures and mechanisms. c. interrogate the relationship between military investigations, national legal and political bodies, on one hand, and international systems and mechanisms (the ICC, relevant UN bodies, ICRC, etc.) on the other, thereby offering a unique and much-needed perspective on state-provided impunity in an international legal and political context, informing fresh avenues for analysis, policy and practice on an international level. The project will begin with the Israeli case study and continue to facilitate an international academic comparative exchange on investigation systems and questions of impunity and accountability in a range of national contexts as well as international institutions, and their mutual influence.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-09

The experience of justice-involvement or school exclusion or both comprise 'crucial events' in a young person's life that can critically shape their life trajectory. Youth offenders' educational histories often include experiences of school exclusion and related 'disruptions' in their school journey (DfE, 2023). In turn, school exclusion often results in youth offenders' receiving their education in Alternative Provision (AP) settings. Research demonstrates links between school engagement and educational attainment, and exclusionary school discipline practices and youth crime (Arnez and Condry, 2021; Hirschfield, 2018). Higher engagement in school is associated with reducing the likelihood of youth offending, whilst being excluded from school is an associated risk factor for offending (Gerlinger et al., 2021; Mowen et al., 2020; Novak and Fagan, 2022). As schooling and educational settings may provide protective factors for youth involved in the justice system (Christle et al., 2015), and may reduce the likelihood of re-offending, this research aims to investigate the effect(s) of AP on youth offenders' outcomes. Despite multi-level modelling (DfE, 2023) demonstrating increased likelihood of youth offenders' to have experienced school exclusion and attended AP, it is unclear what influence AP has on youth offenders' offending behaviours or the relationships, if any, between being in AP and subsequent offending and educational trajectories of this population. The MoJ-DfE linked dataset provides a significant opportunity to address this knowledge gap by employing analyses to better identify the causal effect of AP 'intensity' across AP types on youth offending patterns including severity, number of offences and time-to-offense using a matched comparison group. The research objectives are to investigate whether exposure to AP 'type' and AP 'intensity' is associated with differences in offending patterns compared to a matched group of youth offenders without AP 'treatment'. Additionally, the research aims to identify factors associated with the likelihood of offending/re-offending for multiple treatment groups based on AP 'intensity' and 'type'. Lastly, the study will investigate if any relationships exist with regards to when youth are placed in AP and when or if they commit offenses and the severity of offenses. The study will employ a quasi-experimental design and matching approaches to identify 'treatment' groups consisting of youth offenders with different AP 'intensity' across AP types matched to 'control' groups of youth offenders without AP with similar demographic, educational and social characteristics. The modelling will test whether exposure to AP is associated with offending by comparing offending rates with derived comparison groups. I will also model the prognostics related to AP offending to determine risk and protective factors. The findings will provide key information to leverage aspects of AP that reduce offending and re-design provision components that are associated with increases in offending. The identification of AP characteristics that are protective can be incorporated in mainstream settings to pre-empt 'disruptions' of education trajectories for this population. This research is timely as the DfE recently published their plans to improve AP (2023) and this work may inform policy development and practice change in these settings to better support youth offenders and change their life trajectories. Moreover, implementing appropriate supports at critical time periods for youth offenders is associated with reductions in re-offending therefore the findings from this study have the potential to enhance policy and practice that translates into reducing youth re-offending and the societal and economic costs associated with youth justice-involvement.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

Across the globe, a legal and environmental revolution is occurring. In places such as Ecuador, New Zealand, Columbia, Uganda, Spain, and Canada, communities and indigenous groups are protecting their local ecosystems from human exploitation by granting them rights. The "Rights of Nature" (RoN) movement marks a radical shift away from a view in which nature is seen as a resource for human use, and to a model in which nature is recognised as part of our moral and legal community. As such, the RoN movement has been presented as exactly the paradigm shift needed to address the environmental crises we currently face. This movement is steadily growing, with at least 27 countries passing RoN legislation, and many others currently developing it. Though the method of recognising these rights is different in each context, RoN legislation generally has two features: a recognition that we have responsibilities to nature which goes beyond human use of it, and a recognition that indigenous and local communities are best placed to represent the interests of nature in a legal context. Recognising this, RoN legislation often involves the creation of new representative roles which give previously disenfranchised communities the ability to manage their local environment through representing its rights and interests. As such, RoN connects environmental and social sustainability, and embodies the idea the health and empowerment of local communities is intimately connected with the health and empowerment of ecosystems. The RoN movement in the UK is slowly growing. In the last three years, community charters, motions in local councils, and community declarations across the UK have recognised nature's rights, with some attempting to pass RoN policy. But these fledgling RoN initiatives face at least two serious obstacles. Firstly, these groups are for the most part isolated from each other and from the global RoN movement. Secondly, there currently exists little academic research into the possibility and plausibility of recognising RoN in the UK which these groups might draw on. This project will address both issues. This project aims to bring existing RoN initiatives in the UK together to form a new network, to facilitate communication, the exchange of information, and possible collaboration on RoN action in the future. Through a series of workshops, this network will explore ways of understanding nature's rights; how RoN can or should be represented; the legal frameworks in the UK which might enable or prevent RoN; and how local communities can collect ecological data to support their nature advocacy. An interdisciplinary team of academics will guide these workshops and, in conjunction with the network of practitioners, undertake a definitive exploration into the possibility and plausibility of RoN in the UK context. Comprised of a philosopher, a legal theorist, and an ecologist, this interdisciplinary team will produce a definitive report into the conceptual grounding, legal pathways, and ecological measurement which could underpin any future RoN legislation. As such, the project will be of lasting benefit to local communities, policymakers, and legal practitioners interested in RoN within the UK and elsewhere.