Beacon Bursaries awarded to 12 projects across UCL

The Beacon Bursary projects represent different methods of engagement, from using art-based practices to co-create knowledge, to participatory workshops and place-based intervention.

Their outcomes will include:

• Workshops with people living with dementia and their carers from diverse ethnic backgrounds in Waltham Forest, to raise awareness and explore how the senses can be utilised to improve emotional wellbeing
• Co-creating a children’s book with care-experienced children, young people, and foster carers
• How to actively include people experiencing socioeconomic deprivation in research
• Co-creating balance exercises with people who live with Charcot Marie Tooth Disease
• A series of consultative workshops in beauty salons in London where salon workers as well as customers are first-generation migrant women from Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Pakistan
• Mobilising art engagement as a research methodology
• Co-producing a digital resource to facilitate ‘harm-awareness’ with service providers, to work towards reducing the re-traumatisation of survivors
• Co-creating a ‘guide’ to HIV and relationships that will challenge public attitudes and support people in mixed-HIV status relationships
• A participatory workshop introducing Christine de Pizan to women attached to the Feminist Library, an autonomous community space based in south London
• Creative workshops to gather accounts of young people’s school experiences in East Brighton, connecting these to sociological research, and presenting the outcomes in accessible multi-media forms to wider audiences including local parents, schools and policy makers
• Using modular housing blocks from the recent projects Block West (Bristol, 2020) and House Block (Hackney, 2021) to seed a community-led initiative that redistributes the blocks for meanwhile use.
• Co-producing an event and resulting video to exchange knowledge with LGBTQI+ young people in the UK about the mental health self-management strategies they and others have found useful.

The aim of UCL Beacon Bursaries is to bring people together to exchange knowledge, skills and perspectives, build relationships and capture learnings to inform teaching, learning and research in the future.

This year saw many postgraduate students both applying for and being awarded a Beacon Bursary. This enthusiasm from those starting out on their research careers helps make a reality of UCL Engagement's ambitions to enable brighter ideas through deeper connections.

To find out more about the successful projects, click here.

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• UCL: Humans Make Plastic Workshop with artist Camilla Brendon