NCACE held its first policy workshop on 17th June, bringing together around 135 practitioners, academics and policy makers to discuss collaborations between Higher Education and the arts and cultural sector.
This blog entry will provide a vignette of a key moment within a project entitled ‘Hear Me Out’, a response to urgency to connect families and patients in hospital who tested positive for COVID-19 in moments of grief.
NCACE has just launched its new Collaborations Champions Network to bring together people with experience, understanding…
In 2020, The University of Plymouth became one of twenty institutions to be awarded funding from the Office for Students and Research England funding competition, designed to explore the impact of student involvement in knowledge exchange.
Evaluation has been an integral part of the NCACE project from its early planning stages. The key purpose is to ensure ongoing dialogue and connectivity across the NCACE Areas of Work to enable us to have a clear understanding of what is working, or indeed not, and how we need to respond to that across each strand.
The cityscape of Sunderland is changing. It’s been variously captured on film as a warm and welcoming city by the sea (Sunderland Til I Die on Netflix) to post-industrial backwater (news channels like France 24 in the aftermath of Brexit). Of course, I could drive you to areas that would illustrate both perspectives. But the truth is more interesting.
In November 2020, we began working on an AHRC/UKRI funded, COVID-19 Rapid Response research project: ‘Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life: Performative strategies and practices for response and recovery in and beyond lockdown’. We are both academics from performance studies: an area of research that focuses on artistic and everyday performances.
In my recent keynote speech for the NCACE launch event, I argued that collaborative research requires a common language to facilitate cultural exchange and understanding between all parties. In this blog post, I propose that storytelling could be that lingua franca and I consider the implications of this for the professional development of future researchers.
Knowledge exchange (KE) between universities and the arts and cultural sectors is recognised as an area of significant potential and the benefits of this activity could be felt by a wide range of people. While there are some great examples of good practice, more can be done in support of practitioners to fully develop the benefits and opportunities for all.
We are living through a period of mass crisis. The issues we face predate the pandemic, but have only been brought into sharper focus by Covid-19. In the light of these issues, at the recent launch for the National Centre for Cultural and Academic Exchange, I posed the question: ‘are our current models for research and knowledge exchange up to the job?’