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QR Policy Support Fund success

9 January 2024

The faculty has been allocated funding by RIGE to spend on policy impact projects to help accelerate and maximise future REF Impact Case Studies aiming to have policy-specific impacts from an early stage.

UCL’s QR Policy Support Fund is designed to support the development of potential policy-related Impact Case Studies for future REF assessments. It is administered by two OVP-RIGE teams – Public Policy and Impact – and the funding is allocated from the Research England Quality Related-Policy Support Fund.

After inviting applications to the fund in October 2023, the following projects in SHS were funded by the QR Policy Support Fund:

Anna Maguire (UCL History) - Making Local Voices Heard in Refugee Policy Making

An arts and crafts spread entitled ‘Colours of Greenwich’
Working with Creating Ground, a not-for-profit organisation that works with women from migrant backgrounds, the project aims to make local voices more effectively heard in local migration policy. Our team will consider Creating Ground’s priority areas for policy based on their lived experience through a series of workshops in Spring 2024. Together, we will use arts practices to share our policy recommendations for the future. 

Kate Dawson (UCL Geography) - Sand and Sustainability: Just Transitions and Participatory Policy in Sierra Leone

Kate Dawson
This programme will build on the research and network of partners established through the project, ‘Sand and Sustainability in Freetown, Sierra Leone,’ opening-up space for more participatory dialogue around just policy transitions with respect to the social and environmental management of sand resources.

Building on existing collaboration with the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre and partnering with the United Nations Development Programme in Sierra Leone, the project will hold policy focus groups across the region intending to create space for more discussion with and feedback from stakeholders (affected communities, government, civil society) on potential policy pathways to achieve a more socially and ecologically sustainable relationship with sand resources.

Francesca Lessa (UCL Americas) - Digital Technologies and Memory: Promoting Accountability for Past Atrocities in South America

Francesca Lessa
This project extends existing research activities by UK and South American-based academics and civil society activists with significant policy dimensions in deepening capacity to promote policies of memory and accountability for past atrocities. 

The project aims to: co-produce and co-develop policy-related materials, specifically a good practices toolkit on digital technologies and memory; and hold a user-led knowledge exchange workshop, to gather helpful insights to adjust plancondor.org to the requirements of our stakeholders to deepen their capacities to use digital resources as part of their human rights work.

Rodney Harrison (UCL Archaeology) - Ghosts of Solid Air

A man wearing headphones holding a smartphone up in front of a black statue of a seated rider on a horse on a white stone plinth
Ghosts of Solid Air is a site-specific Augmented Reality (AR) experience designed for smartphones which takes place in and around Trafalgar and Parliament Squares in central London. It premiered in October 2023 as part of the 67th British Film Institute (BFI) London Film Festival, coinciding with the start of Black History Month.

The QR Policy Support Funding will be used to fund qualitative evaluation of the app with users and the co-creation group to support heritage and museum practitioner workshops, leading to a policy briefing which responds to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s retain and explain guidelines on contested monuments, which were also issued in October last year.  

Image © Anagram 

Congratulations to all of the SHS recipients.

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