FOAH2001 - Projects for 2024-25
Religious approaches to mental ill-health: medicine-in, or medicine-out?
Project Lead: Tasia Scrutton, PRHS
People with pastoral roles in religious communities are often the first port of call for religious people (and sometimes non-religious people) experiencing mental health challenges and crises. The response people receive at this early stage can be critical for the trajectory of an illness. On the one hand, they may be met with ‘medicine-out’ interpretations, such as the view that mental distress is a result of personal sin or demonic possession that should be treated not with medical and psychological care but instead with prayer and religious devotion, or perhaps even with exorcism. On the other hand, they may be met with ‘medicine-in’ interpretations, which appropriately signpost medical care while also providing religious support in relation to the spiritual aspects of the person’s experience. Relatedly, religious communities can be stigmatising and alienating, or else they can be supportive and affirming of the person - factors that significantly affect not only the experience but also the prognosis of mental health conditions.
My existing research involves looking at religious interpretations, focusing especially on Christianity. In this project you will expand this knowledge base, by looking at the religious interpretations of another religious tradition, such as Islam, Buddhism or Sikhism. Research will consist in gathering data through, for example, publications (including websites and blogposts) about mental health and illness from religious leaders; testimonies (e.g. online) about religious advice people received when they experienced a mental health challenge; and published data involving interviews about that religion’s attitudes to mental health. You will not undertake interviews as part of this research; however, you are encouraged to attend some of that religion’s services and/or to speak to members of that religion in order to understand the views about mental health and illness in the context of understanding the religion as a whole.
You will gain skills in religious and cultural sensitivity, communication, data-gathering and reporting findings. The project might involve out-of-office time, for example in order to attend some religious services.
You will produce a report outlining your findings. This could be co-written in its entirety, or be a collected volume with an introduction written as a group and sections written by individual members. Research questions will include: what religious interpretations of mental health and illness did you encounter? In particular, were those interpretations medicine-in or medicine-out? How did the interpretations affect the person’s experience? Are there ways in which religious communities can better support people with mental health challenges? Are there examples of best practice?
You don't need a Religious Studies background but you do need a willingness to engage with religious traditions and communities sensitively and respectfully.
A Somali Village in Colonial Bradford
Project Leads: Fozia Bora, Stephanie Dennison, LCS
This project is a cutting-edge and highly impactful collaboration between the University of Leeds (Dr Fozia Bora and Prof Stephanie Dennison) and the Ango-Somali Society, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery , Everyday Muslim, Bradford City of Culture, University of Bradford and Bradford Literature Festival. As a student group, you will be working with community partners and academics to help uncover the buried history of 'A Somali Village in Colonial Bradford' - a brand new collaborative project.
In May-October 1904, the Great Exhibition in Lister Park, inaugurating Cartwright Hall and promoting Bradford's businesses, displayed its star attraction: the Somali Village. 60 Somali individuals lived in a walled compound – men, women and children – attracting 348,550 visitors, the most profitable of the entertainments. We will tell the stories of these ‘Villagers’ – often polyglot cosmopolitans – by centring British Somalis in the public reinterpretation of this history, and enabling the local and contemporary art/culture scene to address issues including the white ethnographic gaze and “looking back” as an act of resistance, crucially avoiding re-display of the Somali community in its internal diversity. Somali voices, often absent or deeply obscured in metropolitan and provincial colonial archives, will speak back from the past through recovery of family and oral histories of the carwo (“people of the fair”), and co-create both the research and the cultural outputs.
Together with the project leads and community partners, you will be working on some important outputs for the project. These will be decided collaboratively with the group and leads, and might include blogs, events with a UoL student society, catalogue of archival material, websites etc.
Social Lives with Books - 19th century women's friendship albums and commonplace books
Project Lead: Special Collections & Galleries, University of Leeds Libraries
Special Collections have an amazing collection of 12 19th century women's friendship albums and commonplace books, where women wrote poetry, made reading lists, copied favourite passages, pasted illustrations, copied music, sketched, painted, wrote riddles, practised handwriting. Created by women from diverse backgrounds, they give unique insight into past lives. You will be one of the first groups to work with these incredible sources, and what you discover will help us understand this exciting collection. You’ll shape the project – what can you find out about the women who made these books? What does their poetry and the books they read reveal about them? Who were they in touch with? What do these volumes have in common, and which stand alone? You’ll be working with Special Collections archivists, but the project will be your own.
You’ll develop research skills and skills around handling, reading and assessing historical sources. You will also have a chance to develop writing skills for the outputs, and to develop creative and engaging approaches to presenting the past. You’ll also gain group working and time management skills – as well as spending time with the sources, you’ll need to decide and plan the creation of your outputs. You don’t need experience of research or using historical sources – this project will be your introduction. Good reading skills would be useful, but there are artistic and visual possibilities to this project as well. This is an exciting opportunity to work with unique historical raw material that has not been available before!
There's a wide range of outputs that this could generate - a report that highlights your key findings, with illustrations and quotations from the volume, or digital visualisations of the contents and the networks the women were part of. An event, such as a presentation or even a reading would also be possible. You will definitely contribute to the Special Collections & Galleries blog, and there may be chances to contribute to our social media channels as well.
I Got Rhythm, I Got Music, I Got Pages and Pages of Script: The Development of the Musical 'Girl Crazy' (1930)
Project Lead: Ian Sapiro, Music
The 1930 musical 'Girl Crazy' has music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and a book (script) by Guy Bolton and and John McGowan. While it did well when it first opened on Broadway and its most famous songs quickly became established as standards (notably 'I Got Rhythm' and 'Embraceable You'), the show itself is now largely forgotten, a circumstance not helped by the materials currently available to hire for performance being riddled with errors and inconsistencies.
You'll be contributing to the creation of a critical performing edition of 'Girl Crazy', one volume of 'The George and Ira Gershwin Critical Performing Edition', which is part of an international project run by 'The Gershwin Initiative' to publish scholarly editions of all the Gershwins' works. You'll work with archival materials from the musical's development, primarily scans and photographs of pages from several versions of the script, to understand how this important aspect of the show developed across the middle of 1930 ahead of and even during the out-of-town Philadelphia 'try-out' performances that preceded the Broadway opening in October of that year. Work with additional materials relating to song lyrics and (depending on your interest and expertise) music may also form part of the project, though the script - and, as part of that, the narrative structure, plot and characters - will be the main focus.
You'll develop skills in working with archival sources, and learn how to make critical judgements about the relationships between such materials, and what that means for their use in research projects and outputs. You'll also develop your knowledge of the creative processes that underpin the development of musical-theatre works, and the challenges such pieces might present to editors (and, by extension, performers, directors, etc.).
The project will involve a lot of close reading and analysis of scripts (including hand-written annotations) for which a high level of attention to detail is essential. However, you do not need any particular expertise or background in musical theatre or knowledge of 'Girl Crazy'. It is not necessary to be able to read music, though if you have this skill you may be able to make use of it on the project.
The project output could take the form of a report charting the development of (aspects of) the script over time, or a presentation focused on a section of the script that might involve some small-scale (non-staged) performance. It might be possible to contribute to 'The Gershwin Initiative' blog, or to create a web page or other form of online public output, but all materials being used for the project are under copyright so this would need to be discussed with me to ensure no permissions are breached.
Ethical Dating Online
Project Leads: Natasha McKeever and Luke Brunning, PRHS
Students will be working on the Ethical Dating Online project. This project is looking at ways that usage and design of dating apps could be more ethical. Use of dating apps is widespread and growing, but many people are frustrated, and/ or have had bad experiences with them. Dating apps gamify our relationships and may encourage bad behaviour, such as 'ghosting'. They might also encourage discrimination by allowing users to 'filter' out people with certain characteristics.
You do not need to have a background in philosophy or ethics, or have been users of dating apps yourselves to work on this project. You just need to have an interest in the topic and a willingness to undertake some research and produce an output. The first stage of the project will be to conduct some research into the area and get to understand the online dating landscape and the various ethical issues around it. The group will then choose what output or outputs they want to produce in relation to the project and we will work with you to produce it.
The project may or may not involve working off campus, depending on the output decided on by the group.
Project Outputs - We are open to possibilities with regard to output, but some options could be: a podcast series; social media posts; an interview series; a survey; an educational resource for schools; a website; a public event.
Art and Literature in Ibadan, Nigeria
Project Lead: Will Rea, FAHACS
External Partners: Ndidi Nkwopara, African Heritage Project, Adam Jaffer, Leeds city Museum
The University of Leeds special collections held at the Brotherton Library contain a selection of archives that relate to the historical moment of what has become known as the 'Ibadan Renaissance'. This was a period of great literary and artistic activity in post-colonial Nigeria. This project would be to develop a survey of UoL holdings.
A second aspect relies upon working with the Leeds City Museum and the Leeds African community. This is work toward the project 'Rites of Passage' into which the above work dovetails as we work toward 2026 as a year of Africa in Leeds.
Students would gain valuable research skills - developing a systematic catalogue of Ibadan holdings in Special Collections, working to document the form of these holdings (literary, photographic, image based), but also learning to discriminate between important and different works. Potentially there is work with the African community of Leeds - giving students experience of interviewing and the conditions associated with developing qualitative research.
Archive and curatorial work at the City Museum will add to those wishing to gain experience in this field.
Intellectually the project sits absolutely within the Liberal Arts ethos of combining investigation into various modes of material and aesthetic production and questioning the interaction between the two.
Displaying death in museums: visitor responses to human remains
Project Lead: Laura King, History
External Partner: Kat Baxter, Leeds Museums and Galleries
This project will involve students working with Leeds Museums and Galleries, around the theme of human remains in museums. A group of students would talk to visitors while doing an activity, such as some object handling stations in both the Living with Death exhibition (running May 2024-Jan 2025 at Leeds City Museums) and the Ancient Worlds gallery, over the duration of their placement. Kat Baxter, curator, would provide training for the students. The group would engage visitors with questions co-designed with the students. Once enough data has been collected the students would collate it and write it up in a final report.
Hopefully they would get a lot out of working in the museum, receiving object handling training and working on the project, and LMAG are always happy to support students who have a particular interest so we could arrange, for example, some work shadowing. LMAG will benefit from the research, which will feed into both our human remains policy and the redisplay of the Ancient Worlds gallery.
Leeds Museums' Jewish objects - a hidden history
Project Lead: Eva Frojmovic, FAHACS
External Partner: Kitty Ross, Leeds City Museum
You will be researching the Jewish objects held in the Leeds City Museum but hidden in storage at their Discovery Centre. Leeds City Museum is happy to offer access but the main supervision will be done by me. Skills experience and knowledge: you will develop a historical knowledge of the material culture and memory of a provincial Jewish community (Leeds) from the Victorian era onwards. You will develop skills of working in a heritage context, creating accurate catalogue records, communicate the value and interest of material culture by means of blogs, vlogs or mini virtual exhibitions. these skills will include writing explanatory material for a non-specialist audience. you do not need expertise in cataloguing but only willingness to follow a template and maybe improve.
You do not need to travel much to the Discovery Centre (which is in South Leeds) as there is extensive photographic documentation (but you'll want to go occasionally to breathe in the smell of the originals!).
Energetic Women! Re-examining gender and electricity in post-war Britain
Project Lead: Graeme Gooday, PRHS
External Partner: Anne Locker, The Institution of Engineering and Technology, Library and Archives
In 1947 a Labour government was building a new welfare state to help Britain recover from both the harshest winter weather in living memory and also six brutal years of bombing in the Second World War. You are invited to help describe and assess the role of women in this recovery process: What especially was their role in helping less-privileged sectors of population gain access to the newly-nationalised electricity grid? And how did this relate to the wider process of decolonisation as the Labour government dismantled the British Empire? Our project will involve writing blogposts on the feminist campaigning group, the Electrical Association for Women (the EAW, set up 100 years ago in 1924) as documented through stories in its digitised magazine The 'Electrical Age', hosted by the Archives of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. You will receiving training in writing your blogposts, including how to draw effectively on the IET's digital resources. Your blogposts will be hosted here: https://ietarchivesblog.org/, alongside those of last years’ students who wrote on the EAW’s first decade. All of this will contribute to the EAW centenary festival of womenpower ‘Electric Dreams’ Your blogpost topics could include the debates over women’s post-war career opportunities, the changing face of domestic life through electrical gadgets, and the extension of the EAW's work internationally, including to Trinidad and Tobago.