AHRC Grant Success
10 December 2012
Dr Carl Lavery has been successful in three recent applications to the AHRC.
In the first award, Dr Lavery will collaborate, as co-investigator, with Professor Karen Henwood in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, on an AHRC Network Grant (£40,000) researching sustainable place-making in Wales. The grant is called ‘Homing in : sense, sense-making and sustainable making’ and aims to set up a cross-disciplinary network combining the arts and humanities with the social sciences for exploring how we ‘become at home’.
The second award is an AHRC Follow Up Grant (£15,000), and is called ‘Creative Resilience Through Community Imaginings’. It provides seed-funding to develop a large research grant bid with a cross-disciplinary team of scholars in design, sustainable development, sociology, environmental studies, and politics. The aim of the project is to produce a fundable proposal which will research resilience in the face of environmental challenges and opportunities.
In the third award Dr Carl Lavery (PI) has been awarded a £40,000 exploratory grant from the AHRC's Care for the Future Scheme. The project is entitled 'The Future of Ruins: Reclaming Abandonment and Toxicity on Hashima Island', and is a cross-disciplinary collaboration that seeks to combine the complementary but as yet un-actualised expertises of geography, East Asian cultural studies, and performance studies, to explore the 'dark ecological' past of one of the world's strangest and most traumatised sites - Hashima Island, an abandoned mining town which is situated in the East China Sea, roughly 15 or so kilometres from Nagasaki City. Most people know the island from the recent James Bond film Skyfall, the place where the villain Silva (Javier Bardem) tortures Bond, and shoots the beautiful Severine (Berenice Marlohe). Our project is a little different, however. For us, Hashima Island is not simply a backdrop for filmic spectacle, but a ruin that peers into the future of the planet, a site that bears witness, in blasted concrete, to a history of industrial pollution and to the atom bomb that was dropped on Nagaski in August 1945.
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