University of Westminster

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-08

Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) within Higher Education (HE) is a global issue that requires urgent attention. By centring the experiences of survivors and prioritising prevention and cultural change, this research aims to decolonise understandings of SGBV in HE, drawing on lessons from institutional practices and feminist struggles in the Global South. The overarching vision is to develop new, inclusive, and survivor-centred approaches for preventing and responding to SGBV in HE through a programme of research that is empirically grounded, methodologically innovative, and theoretically informed. Finally, this research bridges the gap between theory, policy, and practice by integrating insights from survivors, activists, academics, and policymakers across South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, and Argentina. The next phase of FLF funding will build on the foundation of the research conducted so far by advancing innovative and decolonial theoretical knowledge, policies and practices to address and prevent SGBV in HE. Emergent findings from the study reveal a systemic failure of due process, with inadequate reporting mechanisms, policy frameworks and support structures, alongside pervasive cultures of sexism, racism, and queerphobia. Participants in this study emphasised the urgent need for an intersectional approach to addressing and preventing SGBV in universities, recognising the role of multiple axes of power, including race, class, sexuality, and religion. They also advocated for shifting beyond individualised understandings of SGBV, instead framing it as a collective, structural issue that requires systemic and cultural transformation through collective action and accountability. The next phase will aim to address these critical gaps, using findings from four fieldwork sites to advance theory-building on SGBV in HE. Drawing on and integrating insights from gender studies, feminist geography, media studies, and public health, this ambitious and timely study will offer a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to tackling SGBV in HE through theory, policy, and practice. Findings thus far also indicate that survivors of SGBV in universities seek accountability, justice, and healing; however, existing university mechanisms fail to provide these outcomes. Few HE institutions have processes to address SGBV effectively, and where mechanisms do exist, they are often misaligned with survivor needs. Several participants indicated that they do not seek punitive action against perpetrators. However, there is very little literature and data available on how university policies and practices can meet the needs of survivors. In the next funding phase, to address this gap in knowledge identified by the study, a series of ten interviews and focus groups will be conducted to generate data on transformative justice (TJ) practices for addressing SGBV in universities, with a focus on prevention and accountability rather than criminalisation. This research will not only lead to the development of novel ways of understanding and addressing SGBV within HE but also extend the understanding of TJ practices. The final three years of the study will focus on consolidating the study’s findings into an accessible policy and practice toolkit, ensuring that the theoretical knowledge generated translates into tangible institutional change. A key gap identified by the study is the lack of policies and practices informed by theoretical interventions and centred on the narratives of those with lived experience. This toolkit directly addresses that gap. Crucially, it will provide a survivor-centred, trauma-informed foundation for developing policies and practices that foster safer and more inclusive university spaces.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-02

Event tickets are sought after commodities and demand for them often outstrips supply. The result of this is the emergence of a secondary ticket market that negatively impacts on consumers.  It inflates the price of the tickets and the contested legality of the resale places the consumer at a risk of being denied entry to the event. The secondary ticket market is an unregulated space that offers few protections to consumers. The overarching aim of this project is to provide clarity on the legal status of an event ticket so that the secondary market can be regulated effectively in a way that provides appropriate protections to consumers and a fair marketplace. The project will advance socio-legal inquiry of event tickets and contribute to the timely debate with robust empirical insights. To do this, we need to understand what an event ticket is, and what its ownership allows consumers to do with it. Recent furores around the sale and distribution of event tickets illustrate their cultural, legal, and economic significance, and highlight the potential problems associated with their distribution and the remedies available for redress. While there has been some  legislative, Parliamentary (Waterson 2016), academic (James and Osborn, 2016a & b), and consumer group activity (including Fan Fair Alliance, Face-Value European Alliance for Ticketing and Victim of Viagogo) around matters relating to tickets, there is a lack of understanding of their legal definition, as evidenced by the workings of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Ticket Abuse, before which the project team have presented evidence from their earlier work. Now is the ideal time for this research, as the transition to digital ticketing continues. Our specific objectives are to: (1) provide a clear statement of the legal properties of an event ticket; (2) analyse the justifications for regulating the secondary ticketing market; (3) explore the role and impact of ticketing technologies on the operation and regulation of the secondary ticketing market; and (4) propose solutions, including developing a new digital platform that will both educate consumers and provide a pathway to dispute resolution. This project will help define the legal status of an event ticket, the legality of the terms and conditions most used to prevent their resale, and offer consumer-focussed solutions from a legal and extra-legal perspective. Key to the project's outcomes is to ensure that consumers are better educated before they interact with the secondary market and that any future regulation of tickets' sale and resale is based on a clear understanding of what a ticket is and what can be done with it. The Digital Hub will be the fulcrum of the public outputs. It will act as both educational tool to empower consumers and provide a pathway to the resolution of ticket-related disputes. It will be made freely available to consumers via consumer advice group Consumer Friend and partner websites.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-02

This PhD will be the first to focus on the records in photographs and film held by Imperial War Museums (IWM) of Black volunteers from the Caribbean in the UK during the Second World War, when 10,000 Black men and women people served in the UK - in the armed forces, industry, forestry or the Merchant Navy. The majority of these volunteers responded to British recruitment drives in the Caribbean, while some, particularly early in the war, made their own way to Britain to join the fight. Although the Colour Bar had been officially lifted in 1939, many of them would experience discrimination during the recruitment process or in the course of their service. The experiences of these people varied across the different areas where they contributed to the war effort. Many Caribbean volunteers served in the Royal Air Force, whereas the Army proved far less receptive to Black men and women serving in its ranks. Those involved in industry and agriculture experienced racial discrimination from employers, trade unions and government officials. Although the Colonial Office was keen to encourage recruitment of Caribbean men and women, it was mostly an exercise in public relations and an attempt to quell any dissent to ensure that those who served in Britain would return home ‘convinced Ambassadors of Empire’. The PhD project will focus on the visual record – photographs and film – held in IWM’s collection commissioned largely (though not exclusively) by government departments, including the Colonial Office, the Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Supply, or by branches of the armed forces. It formed part of a wider propaganda campaign that showed Britain’s empire pulling together in a joint struggle, overlooking differences of race and ethnicity. Our understanding of this material is, however, very limited. This PhD will open up new perspectives and information on this largely unexplored collection by looking at how and why these images and footage were commissioned, the subjects chosen, and the intended audiences and messages. It will also investigate how these records have been used more recently in developing understanding and making memory, and engage in innovative field work which draws in minority communities, captures marginalised voices, and examines long-term memory processes in the context of postwar decolonisation. Specifically, in order to address this gap in the historical record, this CDP PhD aims to: 1) Unearth the lived experiences of the people in the visual records by engaging with the history of Black Caribbean service/armed forces personnel and war workers in the UK, and visual and material culture; 2) Explore how these records have been used since the war, thereby developing an understanding of post-war narratives and memory construction in Britain through memory studies and history of emotions; and 3) Retrospectively centre previously marginalised voices, in doing so bringing IWM collection into wider discussions of contemporary identity and memory, by using participatory research methods working with diaspora groups from the Caribbean and local community organisations.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-01

Civil society organizations (CSOs) are pivotal players in 15-minute city (15mC) transformations, bridging gaps between citizens and decision-makers and connecting technical mobility discourses to local needs. Despite this, CSOs face significant obstacles, including limited resources, political resistance, and restricted access to decision-making processes. CO/ALIGN investigates and leverages the transformative capacity of coalitions between CSOs, multi-level urban governments, and knowledge institutions in advancing sustainable mobility transitions, and collaboratively develops inclusive participatory strategies to scale up these coalitions from the street or neighbourhood level. The project objectives, in order of priority, are: Develop a European-wide ATLAS of CSO tactics, strategies, and coalitions – systematically mapping practices, barriers, and opportunities to strengthen CSOs’ roles in sustainable mobility transitions. Understand how transformative change is achieved – by analysing the conditions, processes, and governance arrangements that enable coalitions to exert influence at different scales. Test and evaluate strategies for inclusive upscaling – piloting and assessing participatory approaches within Living Labs to explore how coalitions can move from fragmented local actions to city- and system-wide transformation. Produce a COMPENDIUM – a practical, hands-on toolbox of actionable frameworks, methods, and lessons to support CSOs, policymakers, and practitioners in advancing community-centred 15mC transformations across Europe. CO/ALIGN tackles these objectives through comparative analysis in Antwerp, London, Turin, Cluj, and Barcelona, combining cross-case learning with grounded local experimentation.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

Across Europe, cities are seeking concrete pathways to implement the 15-minute city model – restructuring urban life around proximity, active travel, and equitable access to daily needs. School streets – temporary or permanent restrictions of motorised traffic around schools – have emerged as a powerful, low-cost intervention that can catalyse this transformation. By reclaiming streets for children, families, and communities, school streets support multiple dimensions of the 15-minute city: they create safer and more accessible environments for active travel; strengthen social interaction at the neighbourhood level; and reduce air and noise pollution. Their visibility, symbolic value, and connection to daily routines make them uniquely positioned to build public support for broader shifts in mobility culture and spatial planning. Despite their potential, two major shortcomings currently limit the systemic impact of school streets. First, most implementations remain fragmented, time-limited, and disconnected from long-term planning frameworks – tactical rather than strategic. Second, children and youth – the intended beneficiaries – are rarely meaningfully engaged in their design or evaluation, missing the opportunity to promote civic agency, intergenerational inclusion, and democratic innovation in urban planning. STREET-15 will generate new, generalisable knowledge to overcome these limitations. It repositions school streets not as isolated safety projects, but as embedded street transition experiments that can support wider mobility transitions and institutional change. The project has five core objectives: To design and test governance models that embed school streets within long-term spatial and mobility strategies. To develop participatory and arts-based tools that empower children and young people as co-creators of urban environments. To create multi-dimensional assessment frameworks that capture accessibility, autonomy, well-being, safety, and equity outcomes. To identify barriers and enablers that shape the mainstreaming of school streets across diverse institutional and spatial contexts. To provide strategies for scaling and policy integration, linking school streets to broader urban transformation agendas such as SUMPs, Vision Zero, and climate action plans. The project’s empirical foundation consists of Living Labs in three diverse urban contexts: London (UK), Naples (Italy), and Bergen (Norway). These cities represent different planning cultures, policy stages, and institutional conditions, allowing comparative analysis and transnational learning. By treating school streets as catalysts of change, STREET-15 will produce critical knowledge for cities seeking to operationalise the 15-minute city. All outputs – ranging from a School Streets Atlas and participatory planning toolkit to evaluation frameworks and policy recommendations – will be open access and actively disseminated through the DUT Knowledge Hub, ELTIS, CIVITAS, and other European networks. STREET-15 ultimately equips municipalities, researchers, and civil society with the tools to scale inclusive, youth-oriented interventions that support healthier, fairer, and more liveable cities.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Enact Practice Research Data Service: PR Voices and SPARKLE Phase 2 is a national practice research data service, building on insights from the Practice Research Voices (PR Voices AH/W007622/1) and Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Education (SPARKLE, AH/W007606/1) scoping projects carried out in 2022 and funded by AHRC's Scoping Future Data Services call. It is led by an expert team with global connections, and underpinned by their proven co-designed community approach. The Enact Practice Research Data Service will: 1. Build a core national practice research repository, to capture the process, practice, and end product 'data' created by practice researchers. This repository, and the associated website, will provide both a 'shop window' digital space for practice research and a forum for the practice research intersectional community of practice. With a focus on creative practice research, it will further enable practice research across disciplines to be captured in the future. 2. Implement the PR Voices metadata schema (developed by the scoping projects), 'as-is' metadata standards: Dublin Core and RIOXX, and persistent identifiers: DataCite DOIs and ORCID identifiers, as well as the CRediT taxonomy, within the core repository. This will enhance existing collaborations with global open standards communities to improve representation of practice research within these open standards. 3. Make practice research data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR). 4. Facilitate a programme of community advocacy and engagement, links to existing resources, regular news and blog posts, and highlighting of events. 5. Deliver targeted training sessions and compile practice research training resources. 6. Be scalable, and plan for sustainability, implementing existing open source repository technology and open technical standards. 7. Have governance underpinned by open infrastructure principles, including representatives from key stakeholders, groups and organisations, to embed trust across the communities with a stake in this work. Enact will become the first place that practice researchers capture process and narrative, as well as the end product of their creative research. Enabling recognition of expertise from a more diverse range of voices from contributors alongside their preferred formats of knowledge output (including film, exhibitions, artefacts, etc) will inform open research policy development and support changes to global research reward and recognition systems that are currently focussed primarily on traditional text-based outputs. The Enact team will bring expertise and global connections and actively contribute to the infrastructure for digital arts and humanities (iDAH) community.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

The challenge addressed by this project is the collecting of expanded clay practices and the ability of UK museums to make them accessible to future audiences; there is currently a significant gap between what is being made and exhibited by contemporary artists working with clay and what is represented in museum collections. Examples of innovative expanded clay practice can be transient or mutable; some involve performance, large-scale installation, or audience activity for their completion. Yet, museums have traditionally prioritized the acquisition of ceramic objects over the complexities of capturing live process-based clay works. Frequently remnants of such works are chosen to represent them but are acknowledged to be of secondary importance. Therefore, although museums regularly nurture expanded clay practices within temporary exhibition and education spaces, they are unable to collect them adequately and ensure the knowledge they hold will be available to future generations. Specific problems posed by the collection of such clay practices have not been directly addressed by recent research into the collection of other challenging fields, where primary concerns have been contemporary performance and digital artworks. The specialist focus proposed here will also bring significant new knowledge to the collection of wider material and hybrid art practices, and fresh perspectives to the collection of new media. The principal aim of this research by the V&A and the CRC-UK is to ensure recent and historical examples of ephemeral, live, performative, site-responsive and participatory works in clay can be identified, explored and analysed in the future. It will open up a new area of discourse in the field of museology concerning the collection and archiving of clay practices that do not result in permanent and tangible objects. Research objectives are to explore: The extent to which established collecting strategies and taxonomies of museums have succeeded or failed to capture recent process-based work in clay What challenges museums face in collecting expanded clay practices, and how identifying these challenges can help to inform the ways in which other art and craft practices are represented to today’s audiences and future generations How clay-based museum collections and archives can represent (document, collect, archive, share) contemporary clay artworks that are not permanent objects How museum curators can support clay artists with the right guidance to take more responsibility for how their works and practice are collected by museums The perspectives of stakeholders, including museum curators and collection managers, artists and educators, will inform a Collection and Archives Strategy Document. This will advance understandings of existing context- specific strategies, structures and practices and meet the objectives of empowering artists and curators to undertake bolder commission and collection negotiations across the UK and internationally. The research involves creating four new models of practice with four museums (including the V&A); as well as serving as case studies, they will provide new content for each museum’s collection. A book of essays will encapsulate the research findings as an original contribution to wider discourses in the fields of the visual arts and museum studies.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-03

This project examines John of Garland's Dictionarius to answer questions about the languages of everyday urban life, multilingualism, and educational practices in medieval England and France. An Englishman teaching in thirteenth-century Paris, Garland presents a snapshot of medieval urban life in the guise of teaching essential Latin vocabulary through the medium of French. His innovative text (the title is a term he coined for his wordbook; it is not a dictionary in the modern sense of the word) frames the lesson as a walk through the city, visiting shops and interacting with a range of goods, products and people. Garland supplemented his Latin text with a Latin and French commentary providing grammatical and etymological explanations. In the following centuries, copyists and readers made their own responses to the text, adapting its commentary to new learning communities in different cultural and temporal spaces, and adding multilingual glosses in medieval French, English, Dutch and Latin. The manuscripts of the Dictionarius thus reflect everyday life in an urban space and the changing vocabulary used to describe it, as well as the processes by which people taught and learnt foreign languages in England and France. While medieval Western Europe was a multilingual and multicultural space, comparatively little is known about how people learned languages during the period and this text offers a unique window onto teaching practice and its evolution between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Dictionarius survives in over 30 manuscripts scattered across 19 libraries in Britain and Europe, and its popularity and high level of adaptation by its readers results in a complex and variable text. This project will be the first to collate all manuscript versions of the Dictionarius using digital humanities techniques to create a searchable online database of the text, multilingual commentary and glosses. This resource will allow the team to interrogate the text in new ways, enabling us to compare the specialized lexis over time (the extant manuscripts reflect language use between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) and space (they capture the language used across northern France, England and the Low Countries). Lexicological and philological methods will underpin the linguistic analysis, centring on the vocabulary of specialized arts and crafts domains, and their changing lexis and languages as new multilingual audiences adapted the text. A further focus will be the pedagogical use of the Dictionarius, through a comparative analysis of its commentary and multilingual glosses, leading to a deeper understanding of language teaching practices and the relationships between the vernaculars and Latin. Finally, a network analysis of the scribes, owners, readers and locations of the manuscripts will allow further insights into the production of multilingual texts and their reading audiences. Results from these analyses and the completed database will be shared in a workshop hosted with the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, home to a specialized collection of medieval leatherwork and shoes. The workshop will cement cross-disciplinary relationships between academic and public audiences, fostering further avenues of research based on the database.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-02

Migration is often seen as an exceptional phenomenon, as a crisis occurring beyond the realms of ‘normal’ national development and change. It is viewed as challenging and undermining the coherence of nation-states and national bounded identities and cultures (Arendt 1951; Malkki 1992; Cresswell 2006). Such narratives have also strengthened populist and nationalistic movements that have spread divisions across Europe and have contributed to linking migration to perceptions of threat, often coupled with an increasing deal of xenophobic and anti-migrant hate speech (Wodak 2015; van Houtum & Bueno 2020; Appiah 2018; Dennison & Geddes 2018). As environmental degradation is set to double the numbers of migrants crossing to Europe over the next decade (UNHCR - Refugee Statistics 2022), the project attempts to both highlight the complex role of public narratives in shaping responses to the perceived migration ‘crisis’ and to explore novel ways to deescalate narratives of illegality and emergency. CMD will engage with the impact that discourses and policies that construct migration through the lens of crisis have on people using unauthorised routes (and are therefore illegalised (Tsagarousianou 2022; Rozakou 2019; De Genova 2017) to enter the EU and the UK. It aims to posit illegalised migrants as agents of change via impacting on the narratives of crisis and of illegality and related policy agendas by 1. examining the current construction of narratives around ‘illegal’ migration and their impact on policy-making (construction) 2. deconstructing such narratives through intercultural and participatory encounters with illegalised migrants(deconstruction) and 3. reconstructing a ‘just’ lexicon of migration that aims to challenge and shift current practices of migration management, based on the illegalization and criminalization of specific mobilities. We argue for narratives and policies which will ultimately foster solidarity with the collective migrant ‘other’.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-12

This project aims to develop place-based and context-specific civic engagement strategies in collaboration with local government officials and relevant civic stakeholders in Caxias do Sul, Brazil. The goal is to help local authorities increase awareness of climate change challenges and engage communities in building resilience against disasters. Recent floods in the area have exposed a significant lack of public awareness regarding climate vulnerability and its consequences. This lack of awareness has heightened the population's vulnerability to future extreme weather events, leaving the region less capable of adapting to extreme weather-related impacts of climate change, such as floods, heavy storms, and heatwaves and their consequences. To address these challenges, the project seeks to empower local authorities to develop better tools and methods for engagement processes that help deliver climate resilience strategies and broaden local voices in policy making. Focusing on Caxias do Sul, the project seeks to foster collaborations between researchers from Brazil and the UK to enable local authorities create innovative and effective approaches for disaster preparedness and response and co-produce climate resilience strategies. This initiative will be delivered through a series of workshops organised in partnership with researchers from the Universidade de Caxias do Sul. The primary objective is to enhance the capacity of local governments in Rio Grande do Sul to engage effectively with communities for improved climate resilience governance in disaster-prone areas. The workshops will foster dialogue between UK and Brazilian researchers and local stakeholders to develop and share best practices and methodologies for community engagement. They will address challenges such as inclusion, communication, and policy integration, emphasising practical implementation and sustainability. By providing a platform for exchanging ideas and strategies, the workshops aim to create adaptable solutions for diverse contexts. As the impacts of climate change affect us more and more, local governments face the pressing challenge of building long term resilience while effectively responding to disasters. Historically, top-down response efforts and mitigation strategies have often failed to meet local needs on the ground. Recently, the focus has been shifting towards policies that leverage local expertise and resources, emphasising the need for civic engagement. Local communities are the first responders to disasters and by involving them in producing, planning and delivering climate resilience knowledge and strategies, local governments can tap into valuable local assets, foster a sense of ownership, and ensure the long-term sustainability of their efforts. Collaborative, place-based approaches not only improve the relevance and effectiveness of climate mitigation and adaptation measures, but also strengthen civic resilience and address broader issues of sustainability. By adopting a context-sensitive and inclusive approach to climate resilience governance, local governments can better address the complexities of climate change adaptation and mitigation, deal better with disaster situations such as the recent floods in the region, and enhance the overall well-being and adaptive capacity of their communities. This project represents a critical step towards building more resilient and sustainable cities in the face of growing climate challenges.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-11

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.