Research Projects

Disrupted Histories, Recovered Pasts is a joint UK-France research project documenting historical experiences of disruption and recovery in post-conflict and post-colonial contexts.

With funding from the AHRC, project researchers will interrogate relationships between oral histories and amateur histories with more formal written archives and historiography in a series of disrupted settings. As co-investigator, Bath Spa University's Dr Olivette Otele focuses on the recent maritime exodus of migrants from Africa. 

Co-funded by the prestigious Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, the NURSLING project is a breakthrough initiative to identify common denominators in academic sectors in Uzbekistan.

As a key member of the project team, Professor Iftikhar Malik is helping to establish the National Committee on Qualification Frameworks in Uzbekistan in order to improve national General Regulations concerning education standards on the basis of qualification framework ideas. This will contribute to the project's wider objective of bringing higher education in Uzbekistan closer towards the real needs of the economy and society, as well as increasing the number of graduates employed in the field to qualification.

Find out more about the project.

Through a cross-disciplinary synthesis of sites of memory related to the history and experiences of people of African descent, the People of African Descent in the 21st century network explores specific settings in order to show how they reluctantly tell the story of the legacies of colonial encounters between people of Africa, Asia and Europe. As principal investigator, Dr Olivette Otele brings together an international network of academic and community participants to lluminate the mechanisms of cultural production at work in these various sites of memory.

Further details of this AHRC-funded project.

The AHRC-funded Sensory Cities network creates a platform for dialogue across academic disciplines, professions and national borders to discuss how to research, curate and represent sensory urban experiences.

As a member of the project steering group, Professor Astrid Swenson helped to organise three workshops and one conference in three European cities (London, Cologne and Barcelona) comparing methodological approaches to urban experience, and connecting European scholars with urban professionals from diverse fields such as city museum curators, urban planners and urban marketing specialists. The project also developed a Sensory Cities THiNK-KiT that both professionals and the general public can access on their mobile phones as they explore the city.

Further details can be found on the Sensory Cities Network website.

Sensory Smithfield is a digital resource that experiments with different ways of communicating and visualising the various temporal flows, sensory engagements and fluctuating atmospheres that characterise the Smithfield Market area.

As part of the project, Professor Astrid Swenson and her fellow researchers gathered photographs, sound recordings, oral histories, interviews, observational notes and streetscape maps to evoke the distinctive feel of place at particular times and moments that tend to be difficult to grasp through words alone. Using these mapping techniques, the research team aim to explore how the past (both historical past and subjective memories) shapes current experiences of place.

Further details can be found on the Sensory Smithfield website.

Dr Olivette Otele is currently working on the EU-funded SLAFNET project, which aims to establish a scientific network of institutions and research groups from across Europe and Africa on the field of slavery studies.

Funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme, it brings together a multidisciplinary team of some fifty researchers in a consortium of thirteen partners from the North and South to enrich our understanding of the impact of slavery and slave trade on population histories in Europe and Africa.

Further details can be found on the SLAFNET project website.