The Public Engagement Unit is thrilled to announce the successful Engage and Involve Grants projects. We're investing in 10 projects from right across the University of Bath to improve the connections between our research and wider society.
Co-creating films to share research findings into Unconditional Basic Income, collaborating with healthcare professionals and pharmacists to help prioritise research questions and working with residents to co-produce a guide to retrofitting homes. These are a few of the 10 projects that have secured funding as part of the Public Engagement Unit's Engage and Involve Grants.
Engaging and Involving
As a result of research funders shifting their emphasis on engaging people with and involving people in research and with what we've heard from our academic community as part of our ParticipatoryResearch@Bath project, we decided to expand our definition of public engagement at the University of Bath and use the Engage and Involve Grants to explore this with colleagues.
For us at the University of Bath, public engagement:
- includes diverse activities that seek to improve the connections between research and society
- involves people outside academia in spaces or at times where they can choose to participate and relate to specific and active research
- can happen at any stage of the research life cycle and be activities that engage people with and/or actively involve them in research.
High-quality public engagement allows people to discover, discuss, participate in, and/or create research in meaningful ways, helping them meet their goals as individuals and communities and benefiting researchers and research.
Overwhelming response
When we launched the scheme in October 2023, we changed the call's name to reflect this change in focus; the Engage Grants became the Engage and Involve Grants. And what a response we had. The 2023/2024 edition of our call has been the most popular so far in the 11-year history of the scheme, with 30 applications submitted from right across the University.
We have been thrilled by the response to this and have seen a much wider range of projects apply for funding than in previous years when the focus of public engagement with research was much more tightly defined.
Successful projects
The total funds available for the Engage and Involve Grants was £20,000 and each successful project will each receive £2,000 to develop and deliver their project with support from us at the Public Engagement Unit. We decided to take a portfolio approach to how we would distribute funding. We wanted to fund activities from across the three Faculties and the School, across different parts of the research cycle, and include different types of activities. The following people were successful in their applications:
Faculty of Design and Engineering
Robert Grover (Architecture & Civil Engineering)
Working with neighbourhood test space, We Can Make, Robert will work with residents of Knowle West in Bristol to capture their stories to create a shared vision for retrofitting their homes.
Dinesh Mahalingam, Olawumi Sadare and Liana Zoumpouli (Chemical Engineering)
Working with families, these researchers will test out early ideas for an interactive digital game about the importance of research on membrane separation technologies they would like to create with an audio-visual artist.
Hannah Leese and Nael Berri, Bernardo Castro Dominguez, Richie Gill, Sandhya Moise and Arya Shabani (Departments of Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering)
This diverse team of engineers will work with healthcare professionals at the Royal United Hospital to share the latest advancements in 3D printing technologies and use this as a stimulus for a ‘deep dive’ into the project with several clinicians to work together to help shape the next stages of the research.
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Joy Cranham and Sarra Boukhari (Department of Education)
Responding to an identified need by a research collaborator, Bristol's Sadaqa Women's Group, a group that is made up of over 60 women of refugee/emigrate status who meet weekly and share information that to support health, education and child development. Joy and Sarra will spend time developing relationships with this group by exploring parts of Bristol together and, through this work, involve them in the design of their research project.
Neil Howard (Department of Social & Policy Studies)
Co-creating a film to share the findings of Neil's research into the experiences of participants who took part in an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) in communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Hyderabad, India.
Carly Mckay (Department for Health)
Carly will work across the UK and Europe to capture the experiences of female athletes who suffer anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury to help set research priorities.
Katrina Tavoulari (Department of Psychology)
The visually impaired young people who have been part of Katrina's study, looking at the challenges they face as they transition to adulthood, have secured funding to organise a sporting event for themselves and their sighted peers to celebrate their achievements in the research.
Faculty of Science
Matthew Jones (Department of Life Sciences)
Matthew aims to bring together pharmacists and other healthcare professionals as part of the SouthWest Pharmacy Research Network to set research priorities for the network.
Rachael Andrews (Department of Life Sciences)
Working with charities in the South West of England that support people experiencing drug addiction, Rachel will test the portable, rapid and battery-powered drug testing device.
School of Management
Pardeep Attri
Pardeep wants to work with students at UK universities who belong to the Dalit caste of Indian society to better understand their experiences of discrimination and navigation strategies within organisations such as Higher Education institutions.
Whilst we could not fund everyone who applied, we would like to thank everyone for the time it took to apply for funding. As part of our ongoing work, we've offered our support to those who are unsuccessful to help them develop their ideas and think about other funding opportunities.
Engage Grants
Since 2013, the Engage Grants aim to support researchers at the University of Bath in developing their skills and understanding of public engagement with research by funding activities where they can give public engagement a go for themselves. Over the last 11 years, the Public Engagement Unit has invested over £195,000 in 96 diverse public engagement projects from the Faculties of Science, Engineering & Design and Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Management.
Dean Veall is Deputy Head of Public Engagement at the University of Bath
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