Current Large Grants
The Centre for Public Engagement awarded 6 projects as part of the 2024-2025 Large Grants. You can find out more about each project below:
The 'Big Mouth' Project: Shaping oral health research priorities through community conversations
Dr Vanessa Muirhead (Institute of Dentistry), Prof Arunthathi Mahendran (Institute of Health Sciences Education), Dr Stephan Taylor (School of Geography), Ceri Durham (Social Action for Health)
Oral health encompasses more than the state of a person’s teeth but includes their ability to speak, eat, socialise, and smile without pain and embarrassment. This definition highlights the compelling need to move beyond Dentistry and disciplinary silos, which is the reason why this project is located in the new HEALS joint centre for Health, Humanities and the Arts in the FMD and HSS.
Oral health research has largely focused on disease, often highlighting Tower Hamlets (TH) as the borough with the worst oral health outcomes and the lowest number of service users. However, TH also hosts 1,300 voluntary organisations, including charities and faith groups supporting health-related activities. From this perspective, what would happen if the perception of TH residents shifted from passive recipients of health services to active participants in health research? This asset-based approach recognises community strengths and wellness rather than disease to pose the question:
“what makes people well?”
The “Big Mouth” project facilitates this shift using conversations to capture residents’ and QMUL researchers’ ideas about the oral health research that should be prioritised to help people achieve wellness. The name “Big Mouth” reflects the goal of empowering residents to voice their perspectives and influence research priorities and impacts.
The aims are to:
- Capture the views of TH residents about the oral health topics and research questions that they think will improve oral health and wellbeing.
- Facilitate a dialogue between residents and QMUL researchers to identify opportunities for interdisciplinary and participatory research.
Engaging new audiences with the art of Hamad Butt at Whitechapel Gallery, London
Dominic Johnson (School of English and Drama), Dr Ragreshri Dhairyawan (Sexual Health, HIV All East Research Group (SHARE)), Richard Martin (Whitechapel Gallery), Dr Renée West (Positive East)
Hamad Butt was a British-Pakistani artist who made pioneering sculptural installations that created novel dialogues between art and science in the time of HIV/AIDS before his AIDS-related death in 1994, aged 32. Butt’s works invoke fear and imply physical risk or endangerment. I am curating the first retrospective exhibition of Butt’s work, which opens at Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin (December 2024–May 2025) and tours to Whitechapel Gallery, London (June–September 2025). Public engagement activities will accompany the exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Funding from CPE will support an ambitious programme of public engagement in Tower Hamlets involving HIV/AIDS researchers at QMUL (Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan, SHARE) and local HIV/AIDS service-provider Positive East.
Butt was described as epitomising the new ‘hazardism’ in art of the 1990s. He was highly regarded in his lifetime yet has largely fallen from view since his death: his career was drastically curtailed, and systemic oppressions arguably hindered his institutional acceptance, as a Muslim, LGBTQ+, British South Asian artist. A challenge is that there is little shared knowledge of his work among audiences to build on. Active, dynamic and inventive public engagement is essential: to raise awareness of Butt’s work and use it as a lens through which to raise public awareness of core topics: how artists responded to HIV/AIDS in the UK; the vibrant ways British South Asian artists create intellectually and conceptually sophisticated art; stigma and health inequalities; and the complex relations between religion, ethnicity and sexuality in contemporary art.
Pedagogy in the Park: Building Capacity and Confidence for Holding Critical Conversations in the Community
Dr Jennifer Randall (Wolfson Institute of Population Health), Tess Woolfenden (Debt Justice), Shayla Schlossenberg (Release), Jane Slater (Anyone’s Child)
Students join ǪMUL to not just learn something new but to become someone different. This identity transformation also includes a desire and hope to become agents of social justice, to work not only as individuals but to be part of a collective effort to instigate change.
This work expands on Jennifer Randall’s National Teaching Fellow winning project Sowing Empowering and Engaging Discussions on Substances (SEEDS), which aimed to “seed” conversations through the students’ networks on important public health topics. Forty students developed materials that distil information in accessible formats including conversation cards that explain key concepts in English, Bengali, Somali and online videos.
This project further develops this work through a scaffolded, structured, paid, training experience for 20 of our alumni and students from global public health and medicine. Two teams of ten participants will be recruited to work alongside a range of third sector organisations to develop materials for facilitating dialogue within two themes: Harm Reduction and Debt Justice, which will culminate in three days of action. Participants will also receive training on lobbying their MP, join a parliamentary lobby and engage in a knowledge exchange event at the House of Commons.
The legacy of this project is to transform classroom concepts into engaging conversations, shared knowledge and collaborative-learning. This initiative aims to raise awareness about harm reduction and the intersecting debt and climate crises. This will support the collective efforts of Debt Justice UK and the broader Global Debt Movement and local harm reduction services.
Partnering organisations will gain dedicated teams for three months to assist in developing, facilitating and disseminating their messages. By training students on developing materials and engaging in challenging and impactful conversations, it seeks to empower them as agents of change.
Housing the Commons: Where there's Wool there's a Way
Dr Jessica Jacobs, Dr Rachele Shamouni-Naghde (School of Geography), Christine Delbove (Fil en Laine Network)
This project will carry out a series of crafting engagement workshops in sheep farming locations in France and the UK to make space to explore the changing nature of rural- urban relations through the cultural and natural heritage of commoning enacted through the seasonal traditions of hefting and transhumance.
In the Lake District many sheep are ‘hefted’ meaning they ‘hold’ to a place without the need for fences, developing a sense of belonging to land that is passed down from mother to lamb. In Europe a form of nomadic pastoralism, Transhumance (to cross ground), involves sheep travelling between summer and winter pastures. While urbanisation and private ownership have impacted the idea of the commons, hefting and transhumance are examples of temporal, sequential and cyclical practices that can adapt to changing climate, while sharing land and natural resources without causing conflict; setting out a key framework for navigating sustainable relationships between people, animals and land.
The workshops will form a temporary ‘housing for the commons’ to support new community networks between France and the UK. We will produce a space where researchers, artists and local artisan partners are able to map and document how these different ways of practising and enacting the commons can help us respond to climate change. Participants drawn from the local community and visitors to the region produce portraits and maps using traditional felting practices with wool. We will also produce short films and animations based on the outputs that can be exhibited and shared on social media.
The Wildlife Photo-ID Game: Can you do better than AI?
Kostas Papfitsoros (School of Mathematical Sciences), Frederick Wordie (Designer), Dr Lukas Adam (University of West Bohemia)
An interactive, educational, and engaging digital game focused on photo-identification (photo-ID) of wild animals will be developed—the first of its kind. Photo-ID involves identifying individual animals based on their unique external patterns, such as zebra stripes or facial scales in sea turtles. This technique serves as the foundation for many ecological studies, informing research on topics ranging from behavioral studies to extinction risk assessments.
Designed as a mobile-friendly web app, the game will feature an aesthetically appealing interface and will be freely accessible to all users. The core gameplay will involve matching photos of individual animals by carefully comparing their unique identifying patterns. Various levels of difficulty will be available, incorporating factors such as photo quality, time-based challenges, and leaderboards. A primary challenge will encourage users to achieve higher matching accuracy than a state-of-the-art AI-based photo-ID algorithm recently developed, posing the question: "Can you beat our AI model?"
Photo-ID projects worldwide will have the capability to upload their own photo databases to the system’s backend, enabling the creation of customized versions of the game tailored to specific studied species. This flexibility will allow conservation projects to integrate and promote the game within their own initiatives, making it a universally accessible tool.
The game will engage a diverse range of stakeholders, including wildlife conservationists, enthusiasts, ecotourists, and students in biology and computer science. Its use will foster awareness about biodiversity, endangered species, and local conservation efforts while showcasing the role of AI in environmental protection.
Planetary Repair & Reparations
Prof Kathryn Yusoff (School of Geography), Sevra Davis (British Council)
The project aims to supports a range of public programme initiatives alongside the British Pavilion exhibition (of which Yusoff is a co-curator). The 2025 British Pavilion exhibition will be a high-profile installation as part of a British Council focus year of collaboration between the UK and Kenya which will celebrate the connections between the two countries. The British Pavilion is part of the ‘curated core’ of the UK-Kenya Season 2025 and focuses on the themes of repair, restitution and reparations in colonial afterlives, focused on solutions or repair for decolonial and decarbonised futures. The project aims to deliver:
- Live performance and film based at the launch of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 in Venice (May 8th 2025 in the State Archives, Venice)
- Production of a short film to be disseminated on the British Council’s media and online platform and through QMUL networks
- A screening of the film accompanied by a Lecture at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in the Ondaatje Theatre (to be lived stream to Nairobi) (June 8th 2025)
- Black Geographies workshop in the RGS archive for African Diasporic audiences and stakeholders (June 8th 2025) to explore reparative memory practices in the context of environmental impacts in the present.
- Film screenings and performances related to the topics explored in the film, including an interdisciplinary workshop on Inhuman Reparations (with Archie Davies and Elsa Noterman, HSS) bringing together experts in inhuman law, environmental reparations, arts, philosophy, anthropology, architecture, and more. The workshop will lead to a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly.