Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects

The Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects (CHIRP) was established in September 2012 to provide a hub for interdisciplinary research activities based within Arts & Humanities and Social & Historical Sciences, and to amplify the reputation of these distinguished areas of UCL research activity as widely as possible, both across UCL and among outside institutions. CHIRP funded a variety of interdisciplinary research projects. As of 1st August 2015, management of CHIRP initiatives and funding were transferred to the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.

During its existence CHIRP funded the following research projects:

100 Hours

100 Hours was an interdisciplinary project which, over a 15-month period, used innovative and collaborative methods to realise new research directions for the study of material things in contemporary and historical society. The project Early Career Researchers (ECRs) Leonie Hannan (Museums & Public Engagement) and Kate Smith (History) focussed closely and individually on a selection of objects – chosen from UCL Museum collections - and through discussion sessions with senior academic specialists created a series of innovative research ‘responses’. The findings of the project were made publicly available as the project unfolded through a website and blog, featuring short video streams. The project ended with a forum event in which participants reflected upon their research and the collaborative process, offering opportunities for a wider community of scholars to respond, extending the discussion still further. In this way, 100 Hours produced a tranche of novel research on material culture, but also proposes an original methodology – one that capitalises on the collaborative and interdisciplinary composition of its newly formed, early career research team.

https://ucl100hours.wordpress.com/

Co-operatives in the Development of Sustainable Food Systems

How can large complex cities such as London develop sustainable food systems? The UN’s designation of 2012 as International Year of Co-operatives stimulated interest in co-operatives as a way of responding to this major challenge of the 21st century. However, while they are often cited as a means of bridging the divide between consumers and producers to feed cities, research on co-operatives has itself been divided across different disciplines. Agricultural, consumer and worker co-operatives have generated quite distinct bodies of research. Seeking novel ways to integrate these disparate traditions, this project brought together researchers from history, GIS, education and food studies to explore the role of co-operatives in feeding the twenty-first century city.

Filming Antiquity

Filming Antiquity proposes to digitise and contextualise excavation footage currently held in the Institute of Archaeology. Dating to the early-mid 20th century, the footage features excavations and local context in British Mandate Palestine. The footage featured will be examined as material evidence of past practice in both archaeology and film, situating their creation within a wider social, cultural and technological context. The archaeological focus of the films will be married with larger questions about British culture and identity and the myriad relationships between archaeologists and local communities.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/directory/filming-antiquity-thornton

Human Right to Health and Priority Setting in Health Care

This project investigates a growing conflict, arising independently in a number of countries, between a legal recognition of the right of each citizen to health and the need to prioritise certain patient groups over others in the allocation of scarce healthcare resources. The ‘right to health’ is a feature of several international instruments (including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) and the constitution of a number of countries. However, it has been claimed that legislation along these lines has led to a distortion in the distribution of healthcare resources across populations, primarily by skewing the allocation of resources towards those who can afford to press their claim for specific treatments in constitutional courts.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/research/human-right-to-health-and-priority-setting

Mapping London's Filmland

Taking a micro-historical approach, the project sets out to discover what cinema meant to local audiences across different parts of the city during this period, and how the social experience of filmgoing changed over time. Of special interest is the cinema culture that emerged in the West End, the city’s centre of commercial entertainment. How did London’s pleasure-seekers incorporate cinema into their days and nights out? And what was life like among the cluster of film production and distribution businesses that settled in and around the streets of nearby Soho – an area that contemporary commentators came to know as London’s ‘Filmland’? By answering these and related questions, this project seeks to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on local cinema cultures worldwide. It will also add to our understanding of metropolitan history, suggesting ways of re-examining London through what Eric Smoodin has called ‘the everyday routes of film culture’.

https://londonfilmland.wordpress.com/

Pain: Speaking the Threshold

This is an interdisciplinary project to further research the value of visual images in the diagnosis and management of chronic pain. This project brings together art and medicine in the tradition of the founding professors of the Slade who were also surgeons, addressing the public understanding of pain through both science and the humanities. Pain: Speaking the Threshold builds on the doctoral research of Deborah Padfield co-supervised by Dr. Sharon Morris (Slade School proposed PI) and Prof. Joanna Zakrzewska (UCLH proposed joint PI).

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/research/projects/pain-speaking-the-threshold

Passionate Politics

Passions play a fundamental role in shaping political movements and ideologies, providing the emotional basis of individual and social identities. Our historical understanding of key moments of social change remains impoverished if we fail to take into account the importance of grief, for example, as a response to social upheaval, the role of love and empathy in the creation of political and social solidarities, or the roots of political dissent in anger. The tradition of thinking about politics, stretching from the Stoics to Kant and Rawls, has tended to view the passionate nature of human beings with suspicion if not outright hostility. The passions sit uncomfortably with the idea of a social contract, for example, that is meant to be the product of reason. Until recently, the passions drew the attention of political theorists and philosophers above all because of their capacity to wreak havoc in the social order. Interdisciplinary approaches to conceptualizing affects have recently opened up a new way of understanding the human. Our project will draw on the unique opportunity that this ‘affective turn’ has brought to other fields by returning the passions to the study of politics.

Past and Present of Amateur Media

From Home Movies to Homs: The Past & Present of Amateur Media is a 3-part series of events that will bring together anthropologists, artists, film and media scholars, and researchers to trace the historical trajectory of the amateur film, and to explore its current status.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/filmstudies/film-studies-events-publication/home-movies-to-homs

Pigment Timeline Project

This project will establish connections between all UCL departments that involve pigment and colour in their research with the ultimate ambition to create a Pigment Timeline that will function as a physical pathway through UCL. By identifying these areas and examining existing maps of UCL and plans of each department, a 3D computer model of single images and a simple animation will be created to reveal their association through colour, space and time. This will be a unique visual display of quantitative information and an innovative manifestation of the multidisciplinary ad imaginative thinking that is part of UCL tradition.

http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/methods-room/the-materials-research-project/pigment-timeline/

Torture Prevention in Latin America

This research project engages with the question of what factors contribute to reducing the risk of torture and other ill-treatment across weakly institutionalised democratic and autocratic settings in Latin America. The study of torture has gained prominence in recent years in the social science turn in human rights scholarship, in particular the study of the (disputed) influence of human rights agreements such as the UN Convention Against Torture (Hathaway 2002; Hafner-Burton 2013; Simmons 2009). However, the study of torture as a philosophical, ethical and consequential object of study has a long pedigree in other academic disciplines especially law and psychology (Zimbardo 2007; Levinson 2004; Rodley 2009).

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/americas/research/current-research-projects

#UCLFACESRACE: Past, Present, Future

This project was to determine the feasibility of establishing an inter-disciplinary and inter-faculty MSc and / or MA, in programmes within the remit of ‘Black Studies’, and developing The Equiano Centre, following the model of UCL’s Urban Lab and its successful Urban Studies MSc, administered from UCL Geography.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/equianocentre

Word of Mouth

This interdisciplinary research project between SSEES and Information Studies is aimed at building the first multimedia online resource focused on informality that explores informal practices and informal structures from a global perspective.

https://www.in-formality.com/wiki/index.php?title=Global_Informality_Project