We are delighted to be announce the first round of projects from the Social Responsibility (SR) / Cultural Engagement Awards. The project descriptions below demonstrate the extraordinary range and reach of SR related work being undertaken across the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC). We hope also they will provide helpful examples for those interested in putting a project together in the future.

We will circulate the call for the second round soon (deadline 18 February 2022). If you have any questions or ideas you would like feedback on, contact your departmental SR representative in the first instance, and/or get in touch with Simon Parry (simon.parry@manchester.ac.uk) or Steven Pierce (steven.pierce@manchester.ac.uk).

Cara Berger, Embedding Sustainable Creative Industries Practices in the Drama and Film Curriculum

This project embeds sustainable creative industries practices in the curricula for Drama and Film Studies. It will design a carbon literacy module accredited by the Carbon Literacy Trust specific to theatre and film students, creating a model widely adaptable within SALC. Students will be inquire into sustainability in current teaching and learning practices and make recommendations for the future. These will disseminated through a SALC-wide workshop on Sustainable Pedagogy, complementing existing work on research sustainability within the School.

Michelle Coghlan, Re-imagining Motherhood Now: A Collaborative Project with Manchester-based Cultural Institutions and North-west based Artists, Activists, and Mental Health Practitioner

This project brings together scholars, artists, activists and mental health practitioners for a series of immersive public events at the Whitworth and the Working Class Movement Library reflecting on the challenges of contemporary motherhood. It will also feature a series of hands-on creative arts workshops aimed at directly engaging audiences in representing and re-imagining the lived experience of motherhood now. Specifically, it will sponsor a public lecture series at the Whitworth, two hands-on creative arts workshops led by visual artist and art-therapy practitioner Sarah Harrison-Greaves, and a public roundtable on radical motherhood.

MaoHui Deng and Sophie Everest, Co-produced Filmmaking with Older People Ageing in Greater Manchester

This project develops a partnership with the Elders Company, which is a year-long programme run by the Royal Exchange Theatre. The Elders Company connects older people in Greater Manchester in order to challenge the stereotypes of ageing, and to celebrate the ways in which one can age creatively. Using a series of workshops on digital storytelling and multimedia creativity, the project will invite participants in the Elders Company to document their everyday lived experiences on film so as to create short documentaries about their lives in Greater Manchester. In turn, this project will develop an interdisciplinary collaboration between the University’s film academics and the applied theatre practitioners in Royal Exchange.

Anindita Ghosh, Our Songs: Recovering Bangladeshi Migration Narratives

This project stages a bilingual play, Telegram, to bring the history of Bangladeshi migration (1950s-80s) to younger generations of Bangladeshis in the wider region,  commemorating migration and hardship in a work that foregrounds the songs of migrant mill workers. For these migrants, folk songs connected with work, life and ritual in rural settings, helped build community bonds in foreign lands and provided vital succour for survival. Performing them collectively with improvised instruments at the end of a working day was an experience these workersoften remember with much fondness. Telegram presents these songs as central to the Bangladeshi experience. In doing so, it promotes a lost heritage that has subsequently become overlooked in contemporary diasporic culture, especially among the younger generations

John Piprani, Whose past is it, and who gets to tell it (part 2)

This project explores the largely ignored working class history of Greenheys, the location now occupied by Science Park. Building upon previous work, this project will bring together past residents and volunteer SALC students for a Community History Day. Over coffee and cake students will help past residents locate their old homes on large scale printed 1960s maps. Students will then use digital mapping technology (Digimap) to locate grid references for each home and plan a walking route. Using GPS, they will lead the past residents out into the Science Park to find the present locations of their past homes. This process will be used to elicit resident memories of life in Greenheys up until the 1970s. These stories will be recorded, and then curated within digital maps of the area  via Google Earth and Echoes.

Sundhya Walther, Gastro-Activism: The Arts and Politics of Food Justice

This project brings the artist Sujatro Ghosh to Manchester in order to offer local young people the space to think critically about the politics of food and how they can participate in arts practices that address food injustice. Ghosh has long been engaged with gastro-activism; his work The Cow Mask Project, for example, critiqued Hindu ethnonationalism and misogyny by connecting ideas about beef consumption and gendered violence. His current work connects food and desire to the histories of the Bengal Famine and Bengali diaspora. Ghosh will present a public talk based on his exhibition Museum of Desire; a workshop in which local young people will, through recipes, produce a digital archive of personal and generational histories including experiences of colonialism, conflict, and migration; and give a seminar for SALC students on the connections between arts practice and activism.

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