Final Report Summary - HERAJRP (HERA Joint Research Programme)
Executive Summary:
TRANSNATIONAL COOPERATION IN HUMANITIES
A joint open call for transnational projects in two humanities research areas: 'Cultural Dynamics: inheritance and identity' and 'Creativity and Innovation' was opened in January 2009. Nineteen collaborative research programme proposals involving consortia of at least three partners from three or more HERA JRP countries were awarded in December 2009. More information about those projects can be found on the HERA website: www.heranet.info.
The total amount of funding available for the two themes, which fit within the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Work Programme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), is worth EUR 16.4 million. All available funds have been pooled into a real common pot. With the coordination of substantial research support mobilised by national funding agencies, the HERA JRP complements the existing FP7 research funding instruments to offer more flexible funding opportunities for transnational collaborative research.
Beyond funding, the HERA JRP will closely monitor the progress of transnational collaborative research projects. It will also monitor the financial management of the projects, ensuring maximum efficiency of allocated funds. The national partners have allocated additional funding to the HERA JRP to realise knowledge transfer activities ensuring that the knowledge resulting from the research projects will become widely available and used. The ESF has been contracted as handling agency.
Although it is a central aspect in the field of arts and humanities, the nature of creativity is more assumed than understood critically. Creativity influences European value systems and critical thinking, contributes to our sense of culture and inspires progress and development. In recent years, creativity has been linked to innovation, particularly in the Lisbon Declaration, with the aim for Europe to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based community in the world. Humanities research will help develop a better understanding of what it means to link creativity to innovation.
Under the HERA JRP, creativity in all its aspects will be addressed. This includes the study of our perceptions, understandings and views about creativity; how they have been formed; and how they are being re-formed. New research into the processes and conditions of human creativity will add new understandings of the value systems of the humanities and the practices and conditions of the creative, visual and performing arts, and a much better understanding of how these values and processes might contribute to cultural, social and economic innovation. The HERA JRP specifically also allows for examining creativity and innovation in a practical and empirical way in various environments. This may include cooperation of academia with cultural institutes, as well as with the (creative) industry.
Particular emphasis might be placed on national comparisons with a view to offering models of successful practice generating new knowledge and developing new perspectives on creativity and innovation. Bringing an European transnational dimension to research in this theme will provide added value to national research efforts which will strengthen European competitiveness.
An equally important theme for Europe is cultural dynamics and the role of culture in the formation of identities. It examines culture as a process rather than a product, addressing the cultural process as an interplay of complex dynamic systems. The focus is more on the way in which cultural exchanges and dynamics cross between countries, social strata and media. Culture will not be studied as the output of a society or time period, but rather as a form of traffic between communities and generations.
In practical terms, research is planned into how globalisation and global mobility are creating multicultural societies worldwide, where religious loyalties are competing with national loyalties, and where the Internet is creating a 'network society' that results in increased individualisation. This paradigm is superseding state culture, even if the state maintains cultural identity through education, cultural traditions and academia.
Subjects that may be funded under the HERA JRP may pertain to the collective identities of European states, the basis for the rise of national culture canonization within a globalizing world , and the difference between collective memory and the insights of academic historians. another possible research topic is the study of exchanges between 'low' and 'high' culture, as exemplified by the influence folk music has exercised on classical music. The resulting analyses of all these topics will help identify how culture is evolving, how it is canonised, and how it should be financed. Should it depend on the invisible hand of the market place or should a European dimension be maintained against commercial pressures? The insights of history are also important for evolving cultural practices, as is citizens’ need for identity and cultural continuity.
The results of the HERA JRP are translated into social, economic and cultural benefits through implementing a knowledge transfer and networking strategy to disseminate the observations and knowledge resulting from the transnational research projects funded under the two HERA JRP themes. Dissemination will also be specifically aimed at non-academic audiences. This may include interactions with policy makers, politicians, the media sector, museums, galleries, exhibitions, as well as with the (creative) industry. Thus the HERA JRP aims to improve the quality of the ongoing European debates on basic human values, cultural identity, ethics and gender issues and have a positive impact on the competitiveness of the European Union.
In summary, the HERA JRP knowledge transfer strategy stimulates stronger public awareness about the important contributions of humanities research and trends. With new insight into research that addresses major social, cultural and political challenges facing Europe, this is expected to effect a significant change in the way European humanities research is viewed, conducted and funded.
Project Context and Objectives:
In order to strengthen the European Research Area, thirteen national research councils decided in 2008 to pool a substantial amount of their resources and set up a joint research programmes. On 9 January 2009, the HERA Joint Research Programme (HERA JRP) partners launched a joint call for transnational projects in two humanities research areas: “Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity” and “Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation”.
The Call was open to scholars located in Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and United Kingdom, irrespective of their nationality. Successful proposals required the building of consortia of three or more partners based in three or more different HERA JRP countries. The total amount of funding made available for both the transnational research programmes funded under the HERA JRP themes is 16,5 M€, 4 M€ of which is the ERANET PLUS grant. For managing the selection process, the HERA JRP Board contracted the European Science Foundation (ESF) as HERA JRP Handling Agency. Upon suggestions from the HERA JRP Board members, the Handling Agency composed two joint international Review Panels consisting of independent international experts both from HERA JRP and other countries. The selection process involved two stages – Outline and Full Proposals, where Full Proposals, in addition to the Review Panel, were each evaluated by at least three external expert referees.
The HERA JRP call had an excellent take-up: 234 proposals were submitted in the Outline Proposals stage and 55 in the Full Proposals stage. The total budget requested by the 55 submitted Full Proposals amounted up to € 49.6M. The two HERA JRP Review Panels have recommended 19 Full Proposals for funding. On 13 December 2009, the HERA JRP Board met in Berlin and decided to accept the Review Panels’ recommendation. The contract negotiations between the HERA JRP Handling Agency and the 19 projects recommended for funding were completed in September 2010. The total budget awarded to the 19 successful proposals amounts to € 16,3M. The HERA JRP grants were centrally managed by the Handling Agency. Just like in the Framework programme projects – and unlike virtual pot ERANET joint calls or EUROCORES programmes – grants are transferred in full to the Project Leader thus enabling each project leader to properly lead and coordinate the transnational projects.
The monitoring of projects involved the evaluation and approval of annual progress and financial project reports. The Handling Agency collected the first year progress reports in April 2011 and managed the evaluation process. All research progress reports were evaluated by the two HERA JRP Review Panels, where each report was evaluated by two Panel members. These evaluations and comments were subsequently approved by the HERA JRP Board. In 2012, the Handling Agency collected project reports for the second year of research, which were evaluated by the HERA JRP Board members. In January 2014, the final project reports had been submitted and subsequently evaluated by the Review Panel members and validated by the HERA JRP Board. The financial reports of all annual and final reports were checked, commented and validated by the Handling Agency.
In addition to supporting excellent humanities research, HERA aims to increase awareness of the impact of funded humanities research beyond academia and promotes knowledge exchange. A subset of the HERA JRP Board has opted to function as the HERA JRP Knowledge Transfer Advisory Committee (KTAC), chaired by the AHRC. At the beginning of the programme, the KTAC formulated a Knowledge Transfer Strategy outlining examples of actions HERA and the HERA JRP projects could do to promote knowledge exchange. The implementation of the strategy has been the task of the Handling Agency, whose work involved organising the HERA JRP launch and final conferences as well as a series of Knowledge Transfer and Networking activities bringing together academic and non-academic partners from the HERA JRP projects. The HERA JRP funding organisations have provided additional funding of 1.5 M€ for these accompanying measures.
The two theme-specific Launch Conferences “Humanities as a Source of Creativity” and “Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity” took place in Vienna on 23 and 25 June 2010. The conference provided an opportunity for the transnational projects to discuss the HERA JRP Knowledge Transfer Strategy together with the KTAC members. KTAC has convened two more times in 2010 (in Dublin on 20 October and in Lisbon on 3 December) in order to refine the Strategy and the implementation plan. As a follow-up from the Launch conferences, three HERA JRP KT workshops have been organised: the workshop “Data curation and web presence for the HERA JRP workshop” in Dublin on 20-21 October 2010, the “HERA workshop on Impact” initiated and organised by AHRC in April 2011 and the workshop “Humanities with Impact” in Zagreb on 30 June - 1 July 2011. Finally a call for proposals was organised, as a result of which three knowledge transfer events proposed by teams involving several HERA JRP projects were provided with additional funding. The Final Conference of the HERA Joint Research Programme was held in the British Library, London on 30 May 2013. It was followed by the Humanities Festival “The Time and The Place” on 31 May – 1 June.
As regards the HERA JRP communications, in addition to the publication of the HERA JRP overview brochure at the beginning of the programme and media announcements of the HERA JRP launch, the Handling Agency refined the structure of the website with the newly contracted IT provider, the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin. More vibrant and interactive, the website allowed all the HERA JRP transnational projects to have their own web pages on the HERA website and to publish information about their results, the upcoming events and news as well as to upload documents via secured individual access.
The 19 HERA JRP transnational projects produced an enormous number of academic publications. Only some seminal publications per project have been included in this report. However also a listing of project websites is included via which all publications can be found.
The final programme brochure was prepared in 2014 to provide the overview of the main achievements of the HERA JRP projects as well as a description of the programme and the governing and implementing bodies. The brochure also included a number of case-studies that highlight knowledge transfer and exchange activities within a number of the HERA JRP projects and demonstrate the wider value of HERA funding beyond academia.
Project Results:
SHORT DESCRIPTION PROJECT RESULTS AND IMPACTS
HERA JRP Theme I Cultural Dynamics : Inheritance and Identity
CULTURAL MEMORY AND THE RESOURCES OF THE PAST, 400-1000 AD (CMRP)
This collaborative project set out to explore the value of the Early Middle Ages for understanding national and cultural identities in modern Europe. Every age exploits the past as a resource, and early medieval Europe exploited both classical antiquity and the Bible. This collaborative research project was jointly carried out by between the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Utrecht, Cambridge and Leeds.
The project as a whole explored the diverse ways in which the post-Roman successor states of Western Europe in the early middle ages digested and made use of the cultural resources of their immediate past. This revolved around two principal aims. Firstly the project set out to determine the role played by the resources of that immediate past in forming the identities and communities of early medieval Western Europe. This work has highlighted the importance of Rome, Roman history, and the integration of Christian and imperial Rome into the cultural memory of early medieval Europe.
Secondly there was the hope of identifying elements of the complex process by which the new discourses, ethnic identities and social models of early medieval Europe have come to form an essential part of modern European national and transnational identities. The extant manuscript material from the early Middle Ages constitutes a major resource to shed new light on the process of codification and modification of the cultural heritage, and for the study of cultural dynamics in general.
These aims were pursued via four separate but closely interrelated projects, ‘Learning Empire – Creating Cultural Resources for Carolingian Rulership’ (Vienna), ‘Biblical Past as an Imagined Community’ (Utrecht), ‘Otherness in the Frankish and Ottonian Worlds’ (Leeds), and ‘Migration of Roman and Byzantine Cultural Traditions to the Carolingian World’ (Cambridge).
The presentation of CRP achievements has culminated in the final collaborative volume ‘Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past in Early Medieval Europe’. The volume is finished in manuscript form and is currently being prepared for publication by Cambridge University Press.
The CRP has produced project website (http://cmrp.oeaw.ac.at) a Facebook page and two project folders, one presenting the outline of the project, the other containing short abstracts of most important output of each sub-project as presented in the Final Volume (see link above).
Project Leader:
Professor Walter Pohl, Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
Principal Investigators:
Professor Mayke De Jong, History Department, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Professor Rosamond McKitterick, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Professor Ian Wood, School of History, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
8 PhD students: Vienna (2), Utrecht (2), Leeds (2), Cambridge (2)
9 Associated PhD students: Vienna (3), Utrecht (3), Leeds (2), Cambridge (1)
Website: http://cmrp.oeaw.ac.at/index.htm
Contact: Walter Pohl (Project Leader); Email: Walter.pohl@oeaw.ac.at
INVESTIGATING DISCOURSES OF INHERITANCE AND IDENTITY IN FOUR MULTILINGUAL EUROPEAN SETTINGS (IDII4MES)
This project investigated the range of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people in cities in four countries, Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in order to explore their cultural and social significance and to investigate how they are used in the context of inheritance and cultural identities. At the same time the project focused on development of innovative research methods to fulfil these aims, with the ultimate objective of making relevant and valuable contributions to policies and practices relating to support for minority languages in Europe.
In this study a research team across four universities investigated how cultural heritage and identity are dealt with in and beyond educational settings, and how multilingual young people relate to inheritance and belonging. The aim was to extend current understanding of cultural heritage in the context of local, national, and global identities.
The project pursued five related objectives leading towards its central question. Firstly the range of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people in the four European settings was investigated. Secondly the cultural and social significance of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people was explored in these four European countries. Thirdly, researchers investigated how the language and literacy practices of multilingual young people in the four European settings are used to shape and define their inheritance and identities. Fourthly innovative multi-site, new methodologies based on interlocking case studies across national, social, cultural, and linguistic contexts were developed for the project as a whole, taking account of ethnographic differences.
Then finally the project’s findings are being applied to help formulate educational policy and practice over inclusion of non-national minority languages in the wider European educational agenda.
Project Leader:
Professor Adrian Blackledge, School of Education, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Professor Jens Normann Jørgensen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Professor Jarmo Lainio, Department of Baltic Languages, Finnish and German, Stockholm University, Sweden
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
5 PhD students were linked to the project
Website: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/education/mosaic/index.aspx
Contact: Adrian Blackledge, Email: a.j.blackledge@bham.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MEMORY AT WAR: CULTURAL DYNAMICS IN POLAND, RUSSIA AND UKRAINE (MAW)
The Memory at War project set out to expand the boundaries of Memory Studies by shifting the focus to post-socialist Eastern Europe. The ‘memory boom’ that has overtaken Western Europe and North America at both a popular and scholarly level since the last decades of the 20th century, has centred overwhelmingly on West European memories of the Holocaust and Nazism. Meanwhile, East European memories of the 20th century, which differ sharply in both form and content, often contradicting and clashing with their West European counterparts, have been relatively under-studied. Memory at War aimed at addressing this emerging dichotomy between West and East European memory. With a focus on three main target countries, Poland, Russia and Ukraine, an international team of scholars mapped and analysed the dynamics of cultural memory in the region, and developed new tools and concepts for approaching and understanding memory in Eastern Europe. The team focused on the interplay between memory, identity and political developments more broadly in this region that has gone through dramatic and incomplete transformations in recent decades. At the same time, through the context of Eastern Europe, the project also set out to investigate and refine the field of Memory Studies itself.
The project approached the subject from six different innovative directions, a transnational perspective; transdisciplinary approach; from post-socialist digital memories; through collaborations within the humanities; by mapping, interpreting and debating events as they unfolded in real time; and finally by challenging and refining the whole concept of Memory Studies in the East European context.
Project Leader:
Dr Alexander Etkind, Department of Slavonic Studies, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Dr Sander Brouwer, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Dr Markku Kangaspuro, Finnish Centre for Russian and East Finland European Studies (Aleksanteri Institute), University of Helsinki, Finland
Dr Maria Mälksoo, Institute of Government and Politics, University of Tartu, Estonia
Dr Ellen Rutten, Department of Comparative Literatures, Bergen, Norway
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
There were five PhD students attached to the MAW project at Cambridge, and four students in other participating universities
Website: http://www.memoryatwar.org/
Contact: Alexander Etkind (Project Leader) , Email: ae264@cam.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHOTOGRAPHS, COLONIAL LEGACY AND MUSEUMS IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN CULTURE (PHOTOCLEC)
PhotoCLEC was an international research project studying the role the photographic legacy of colonialism has played in helping determine the multi-cultural identities of modern Europe. Partners from the UK, the Netherlands and Norway explored this through museums, as these are major sources of historical narratives.
Europe’s current multi-cultural societies have roots in their colonial history for most of the larger countries and this project analysed some of these connections through the photographic record in museums. This prompted various questions concerning the way in which varied but linked experiences from the colonial past have been translated into the postcolonial present and in turn shaped the photographic archive and current engagements with it. One key question was in what ways changing conceptual approaches to collections have been determined by social developments in European communities and their relations with their former colonies that have since become independent nations. A fundamental question was to determine what kind of historical narratives are being constructed with photographs and for which groups of people. The exact part these photographs have played in perceptions of the past, present and future of Europe and in its global relations, especially with the colonies, were all key questions. In turn it was asked whether this legacy has the potential to enhance or hinder cultural understanding. This led to another fundamental question, concerning the ways in which photographs, with their particular intimacy and directness, are themselves sources of tension and controversy between social groups and institutions in relation to shared and contested inheritance, identity, memory practice or even amnesia.
Networking with museums and museum professionals played a pivotal role in PhotoCLEC’s activities. Working with museums involved a significant amount of ‘intangible’ Knowledge Exchange in the course of the research. These discussions are encapsulated in PhotoCLEC’s major public outlet, its website http://photoclec.dmu.ac.uk.
The perspectives, methods and practical results of PhotoCLEC also addressed questions that are central to the HERA programme Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity. With its emphasis on process and complexity as they relate to histories and identities in a dynamic European dimension, PhotoCLEC addressed collective identities before and after the nation state and has helped with HERA’s remit to explore questions concerning the making of European and global heritage.
A major result of PhotoCLEC relevant to the HERA JRP is the insight that photographs in museums enable us to rethink how mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in society, European as well as colonial, connect with feelings of belonging and estrangement within the contemporary postcolonial societies in Europe.
Project Leader:
Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Susan Legêne, History Department, Faculty of Arts, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands
Professor Sigrid Lien, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies (LLE), Kunsthistorie, University of Bergen, Norway
Website: http://photoclec.dmu.ac.uk
Contact: Elizabeth Edwards (Project Leader), Email: eedwards@dmu.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POPULAR MUSIC HERITAGE, CULTURAL MEMORY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
LOCALISED POPULAR MUSIC HISTORIES AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE FOR MUSIC AUDIENCES AND MUSIC INDUSTRIES IN EUROPE (POPID)
The POPID project examined the strengthening role and significance of popular music in shaping cultural identity and heritage at both a local and national level. The project took a comparative approach by focusing on different countries and various localities within them to build as complete a picture as possible of popular music’s contribution to cultural memory across Europe. To tackle this, the project assembled a team of internationally established academics in the fields of popular music studies, sociology of the arts, media research, and cultural studies.
The breadth and scale of the POPID project, embracing the work of music archivists, historians, journalists, curators, exhibitors, broadcasters, music producers, event organisers, policy agencies and tourism bodies, as well as the thoughts and perceptions of a diverse range of music listeners across the four countries, provided an unprecedented overall view of the music heritage sector in Austria, England, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. The POPID project recognised and exploited the wide range of meanings that the term “heritage” has and explored the different ways in which it is used and interpreted. The project was able to examine how heritage is practised by individuals, groups and organisations in different European countries, as well as how groups and organisations across different sectors and countries use the associated language and discourse for certain ends (especially marketing) and for constructing a sense of shared musical identity and history.
In examining heritage issues as seen by individual audience members’ and practitioners’ through their understanding and appreciation of popular music, the project demonstrated that heritage, in addition to its connection with space and place, may also have a pan-European dimension that is preserved and expressed across generations. This is bound together through shared understanding of generic styles such as rock and punk, along with locally produced popular music that is seen as socially and culturally significant. The POPID project provided a wealth of information and insight for organisations and practitioners in the music industry, as well as the fields of heritage, tourism, and public cultural policy, in showing how cultural memories and identities centring around local popular music may be used to re-connect and engage with audiences that at first sight appear to have been dispersed and disengaged in contemporary societies as a result of ongoing processes of globalisation/internationalisation, individualisation, and rapid technological change.
Project Leader:
Professor Susanne Janssen, Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Principal Investigators:
Professor Sara Cohen, School of Music, Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
Dr Andreas Gebesmair, Business Department, St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences, Austria
Dr Peter Stanković, Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Professor Alfred Smudits, Institute for Musicology, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Austria
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
6 PhD students linked to the POPID project
Website: http://www.eshcc.eur.nl/hera_popid/
Contact: Susanne Janssen (Project Leader), Email: s.janssen@eshcc.eur.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RHYTHM CHANGES: JAZZ CULTURES AND EUROPEAN IDENTITIES (RHYTHM CHANGES)
The project Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities examined the inherited traditions and practices of European jazz cultures in Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK. The project developed new insights into cultural exchanges and dynamics between different countries, groups and related media. It was broken down into five work packages that linked directly into the theme of Cultural Dynamics, aiming to develop a broader understanding of the relationship between counterpoint, tradition and myth, community and identity. Over a three year period, Rhythm Changes achieved a significant impact on the field of jazz studies, offering a model for cross-disciplinary working, networking and Knowledge Exchange.
The project began with background research, literature reviews and establishment of the communications and knowledge exchange framework, including a website, initial data gathering, networking, media dissemination and partner liaison, training, performances and workshops. There were also conference presentations and Knowledge Transfer events. Then during the second year, the first Rhythm Changes conference took place in Amsterdam and the project team continued to work on reports about jazz scenes in partner countries. Research was presented at leading international conferences and high profile Knowledge Exchange projects, while performance events were staged with a range of European partner organisations. There was also a commissioned photography exhibition from National Portrait Photography Prizewinner, Paul Floyd Blake, in preparation for the 2013 Rethinking Jazz Cultures Conference, which took place at the University of Salford's Media City UK campus. The exhibition, entitled 'Rethinking Jazz', featured 30 photographs taken at three leading European Jazz Festivals (Copenhagen, North Sea and London) and provided a fitting opening to the showcase event, which featured over 100 speakers from 22 countries.
Rhythm Changes was the first collaborative humanities project to explore the complexities of jazz as a transnational practice and in particular its relationship with changing European identities. The project generated a body of work that has challenged the way in which jazz cultures are represented and understood. Issues of collectiveness, transnationalism, cultural identity and place have played out in complex ways within each work package. A large number of academic publications were produced and an enormous amount of knowledge exchange activities were carried out.
Project Leader:
Professor Tony Whyton, School of Arts & Media, Salford Music Research Centre, The University of Salford, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Dr Anne Dvinge,Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Dr Petter Frost Fadnes,Department of Music and Dance, University of Stavanger, Norway
Professor Franz Kerschbaumer,Institute for Jazz Research, University of Music and Performing Arts of Graz, Austria
Professor Walter Van De Leur ,Institute of Culture and History, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
3 PhD students linked to the Rhythm Changes project
Website: www.rhythmchanges.net
Contact: Tony Whyton (Project Leader)
Email: t.whyton@salford.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SHARING ANCIENT WISDOMS: EXPLORING THE TRADITION OF GREEK AND ARABIC WISDOM LITERATURES (SAWS)
SAWS developed modern digital methods to explore the large collections of ancient sayings that provided a crucial mechanism for exchange of ideas in medieval Mediterranean and European societies over many centuries. This material has often been neglected since it is difficult to handle in printed form, but is now ripe for analysis, to demonstrate what concepts were considered worth preserving and transmitting. The metaphor of picking flowers was regularly used to describe this selection process, giving us the terms anthology (from Greek), or florilegium (from Latin). Selections of this kind are always useful, but they were of particular value in a world before printing, when large texts were costly to produce.
Working in a pioneering field the project had to cope with rapid changes in methods available during its course and made a significant contribution to these itself. Many things that were difficult at the beginning of the project were much simpler by the end, yet some resources or tools were still not available. For example the new catalogue of ancient authors at Perseus only became public during the final month of the project. The development of the Alpheios project at Harvard persuaded the team to alter its approach to Arabic sources, since there was no point in doing the same thing twice, but it was impossible to link to them in their current state of development. It would have been very helpful to be able to link the materials to the new Diktyon website of Greek manuscripts, which will provide permanent identifiers for the information currently held in Pinakes.
This means that in some ways the team’s accomplishments will date quite quickly, as new possibilities emerge, but this will be driven in large part by what the SAWS project itself has accomplished. One reason why the material has been made freely available in XML is that, in a few years’ time, a new transformation and enrichment of all the texts will be quite feasible. The team is very grateful to have been part of this process, and to have been able to demonstrate the key role of European collaborative research in the humanities.
Project Leader:
Professor Charlotte Roueché, Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Stephan Procházka, Institut für Orientalistik, University of Vienna, Austria
Professor Denis Searby, Department of French, Italian and Classical Languages, University of Stockholm, Sweden
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
The SAWS project included no fully-funded PhD students. But several students working for associated PhDs were trained and employed. Of these six were co-authors of the final outputs: London (1), Uppsala (2), Vienna (3). Many more contributed to the project in a variety of ways, and from a variety of places: Bologna (1), Georgetown (1), Halle (3), Ioannina (2), Liège (1), London (5).
Website: http://www.heranet.info/saws/index
Contact: Charlotte Roueché (Project Leader), Email: charlotte.roueche@kcl.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ASSEMBLY PROJECT – MEETING PLACES IN NORTHERN EUROPE AD 400-1500 (TAP)
Assembly places and practices are fundamental to our understanding of how medieval society in Northern Europe was transformed from a network of small scale local power-structures to a competing system of large kingdoms with royally driven administrative infra-structures. The assembly or thing was an institution that emerged in a variety of shapes and forms in different parts of the North Sea zone, and provided an arena within which authority and power could be negotiated, consolidated and territorial control extended.
This project was set up to establish a critical understanding of the role of the assembly in the consolidation and maintenance of collective identities and emergent kingdoms in medieval Northern Europe.
TAP showed that over time assembly exerted a powerful influence on political consciousness at local to supra-regional levels. In particular it revealed how assembly exerted a phenomenal hold over local consciousness and identity for generations and how even major structural shifts in ruling systems failed to dismantle such local networks. A far-reaching discovery is that far from attempting to overwrite systems and places, elites and colonisers engaged strategically in a more reconciliatory approach, attempting to absorb and reshape existing places and systems.
The sites themselves often have remarkable trajectories, sometimes active for over a thousand years, which is a considerable achievement for places lacking major devotional or regal standing structures such as churches or palaces. These places, often through their monuments or role as landmarks, have acted as powerful curators of local memory and identity across generations. Yet assembly places are frequently overlooked in modern scholarship and in museum exhibitions, interpretation and educational dissemination. TAP redressed this omission through extensive public communication, through a major exhibition in Norway, work with museums in the North East and its social networking presence, as well as new academic networks. The aim was to re-engage museums, heritage and the public with the idea of assembly as something powerful for local and regional identity.
Project Leader:
Dr Frode Iversen, Department of Archaeology, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway
Principal Investigators:
Dr Natasha Mehler, Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte, Universität Wien, Austria
Dr Alexandra Sanmark, Centre for Nordic Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands, United Kingdom
Dr Sarah Semple, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
3 PhD students linked to The Assembly Project
Website: http://www.heranet.info/tap/index
Contact: Frode Iversen (Project Leader), Email: frode.iversen@khm.uio.no
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DYNAMICS OF THE MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT: TEXT COLLECTIONS FROM A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE (DYNAMICSOFTHEMEDIEVALMANUSCRIPT)
Modern editions of medieval literary texts tend to give the false impression they have come down to us in single-text manuscripts or well-ordered anthologies, with only minor revisions along the way. The truth is very different, since in reality most medieval texts, though perhaps originally composed individually, evolved and were read in multi-text manuscripts, organised in a variety of ways. Throughout the Middle Ages, these texts were copied and recopied by scribes to yield different manuscripts in a variety of contexts. With each new copy and changing of context, both the works and their meanings evolved, often significantly. This project was set up to investigate the textual dynamics of this revision and rewriting process and the implications both for contemporary readers of the manuscripts and the concept of authorship in pre-modern and pre-print cultures. The project also sought to understand how these dynamic processes shaped readers’ identities in the later Middle Ages, one of the most important formative periods for the cultural and social fabric of modern Europe.
This was the first large-scale study to investigate multi-text codices from a wider European perspective. The project sought to answer nine specific research questions, with three more added during its course to make up 12.
Project Leader:
Dr Bart Besamusca
Department of Dutch, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Principal Investigators:
Professor Matthias Meyer, Institut f. Germanistik, Philologisch-kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Universität Wien, Austria
Professor Karen Pratt, Department of French, King's College London, United Kingdom
Professor Ad Putter, English Department, School of Humanities, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project: 4
Websites: http://dynamicsofthemedievalmanuscript.eu/
www.everycodextellsastory.eu
Contact: Bart Besamusca (Project Leader), Email: A.A.M.Besamusca@uu.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN THE TRANSNATIONAL FORMATION OF ROMANI IDENTITY (ROMIDENT)
The Romident project was overdue given the rapid ascent of the Romani language over the last two decades following the collapse of communism in former Eastern Bloc states. Romani is now by far the biggest first language in the European Union that is not spoken by a majority of people in any region or country, with at least 3.5 million speakers living in dispersed communities. Traditionally an oral language whose use was largely limited to informal interaction in the family domain, over the past few decades Romani has gradually expanded in function to embrace formal usage including various functions in public discourse. Having started in the 1960s, this development gained momentum after the early 1990s following the democratisation process in Central and Eastern Europe, where the majority of the Romani-speaking population resides. Romident set out to investigate the ongoing role of language in forging the modern Romani identity and in turn shed light on our theoretical understanding of trans-national and diasporic identity formation in the age of globalisation.
The project set out to investigate what roles language has played in forging the modern Romani identity. These roles include as a key cultural asset providing a foundation for identity, as an emblem of identity, and as a medium through which identity is presented and communicated. It assessed what social conditions and attitudes support pluralism or diversity in the formation of identity, and at the time the forces that encourage convergence or uniformity. The project explored the role new technologies play in the innovative use and shaping of language and the extent to which European-led initiatives and processes have helped raise the profile of Romani in individual countries. It tried to address the more specific question of how local initiatives, emanating from Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), local authorities and individual activists, are reacting to a recent Council of Europe initiative on Romani. Another key question was how members of Romani communities are inspired to engage in ‘language activism’ through trans-national encounters. In a broader sense the project was taking the Romani model in its pluralist and trans-national context as a case study for enhancing theoretical understanding of trans-national and diasporic identity formation in the age of globalisation.
Altogether, the project has heralded the emergence of a language policy that may be characterised as non-territorial in its outreach, transnational in its strategic approach, and pluralistic in its practical implementation. The project’s resources as presented in its Romani Virtual Library will help understand and implement teaching and learning strategies that follow this pluralistic process, i.e. cater for the language needs of a trans-national audience and make use of the opportunities of digital technology for both language promotion and analysis.
Project Leader:
Professor Yaron Matras, Department of Linguistics, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Peter Bakker, Linguistik, Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, Aarhus Universiteit, Denmark
Professor Dieter Halwachs, Institute for Language, Plurilingualism and Didactics, University of Graz, Austria
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
1 PhD student linked to the ROMIDENT project
Website: http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/atmanchester/projects/RomIdent.shtml
Contact: Yaron Matras (Project Leader), Email: yaron.matras@manchester.ac.uk
SHORT DESCRIPTION PROJECT RESULTS AND IMPACTS
Theme II: Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation
COPYRIGHTING CREATIVITY: CREATIVE VALUES, CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS AND SYSTEMS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (CULTIVATE)
The digitisation of cultural archives makes them more accessible to the public but also creates difficult challenges relating to copyright and intellectual property that were previously either irrelevant or had been thought to have been settled. CULTIVATE was set up to address these challenges through a three-year research collaboration between the Universities of Copenhagen, Uppsala, London, Utrecht and Iceland, as part of the HERA Joint Research Programme for the theme ‘Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation’.
With its interdisciplinary combining of legal studies and cultural heritage research, this project has overall potential to revise the understanding of the importance of intellectual property for the humanities as well as of the role of creativity in the arts, giving credit to adaptation as well as originality. It has already had a tangible impact in one instance, with The Performing Rights Society of Iceland (STEF) making a radical change in policy with regard to traditional music.
The project has furthermore highlighted the position of cultural heritage institutions as both ‘consumers’ of copyright protected works and as ‘producers’, and therefore rights holders, to copyright protected works. It has shown how modern science emerges in the intersection of celebrity culture, through the power of print culture, and under the influence of intellectual property. It has offered proposals for resolving the impasse created by the failure of the law, internationally and nationally, to recognise the conflicts that arise when private property rights and community/public rights co-exist in relation to the same intangible cultural subject matter.
Finally, the work on Festivals looks set to make a conceptual breakthrough that will benefit scholarship in the humanities (and economics) and policy-formation in the cultural sector.
New funding opportunities are actively being pursued; collaborations and partnerships are set to continue.
Project Leader:
Professor Helle Porsdam, The SAXO Institute, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Principal Investigators:
Professor Madeleine De Cock Buning, Centre for Intellectual Property Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Professor Valdimar Hafstein, Department of Folkloristics/Ethnology, University of Iceland, Iceland
Professor Fiona Macmillan, School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom
Professor Eva Hemmungs-Wirtén, Department of ALM (Archival Science, Library & information Science and Museology), Uppsala University, Sweden
Website: http://cultivateproject.dk/
Contact: Helle Porsdam (Project Leader), Email: porsdam@hum.ku.dk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATIVITY AND CRAFT PRODUCTION IN MIDDLE AND LATE BRONZE AGE EUROPE (CINBA)
Studies of creativity frequently focus on the modern era, yet creativity has played an important role throughout human history. Creativity can therefore only be properly understood by complementing present-day studies with investigations of the past. This collaborative research project aimed to fill that gap by exploring creativity during Middle and Late Bronze Age Europe (1800-800/500BC), looking at developments in decorative motifs, techniques and skills for three different materials:
This project investigated Bronze Age objects as a means of gaining insights into the development of creativity before the written word. This is a fertile period for such study because changes in material culture were driven largely by developments related to creativity rather than technology, which saw only modest changes. Types of loom remained basically the same, while methods for casting objects were being established and potting techniques were not substantially altered. The main shifts were the result of developments not in technology itself but in the skills needed to apply it and the creativity to exploit the potential of materials, in particular their surfaces and different degrees of plasticity.
The research comprised comparative studies of these materials in three regions on a north-south axis: Scandinavia, Central Europe and South East Europe. It focused on the development of craft-skills and stylistic characteristics, comparing their similarities and differences. Examination of contemporary engagements with Bronze Age objects helped elucidate the relationship between ancient and modern creativity.
The number and range of outputs has enabled CinBA to maximise impact while also directing these at particular stakeholders, including academics and students, contemporary craftspeople, cultural heritage institutions, tourism and craft centres, and the wider public. The research led to a policy document on the potential of creative expression for heritage institutions. Major European museums (National Museum of Denmark; Natural History Museum, Vienna; Archaeological Museum in Zagreb) have engaged with the project through exhibitions and visitor activities, using CinBA research to enhance content and delivery of outreach programmes. At the same time the CinBA Live Project involving contemporary crafts students and Maker Engagement Project have been successful. The public access part of the CinBA website has proved very popular. It offered two collaborative art projects designed by CinBA, ‘Chinese Whispers’ and ‘Motifs Tracking’, which presented opportunities for the public to participate by producing and transforming images originating in Bronze Age motifs.
Project Leader:
Dr Joanna Sofaer, Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Lise Bender-Jørgensen, Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Dr Flemming Kaul , Danish Prehistory, National Museum of Denmark, Denmark
Dr Anton Kern, Prähistorische Abteilung, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria
Dr Ivan Mirnik, Department of Numismatics, Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, Croatia
Dr Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
3 PhD students paid directly by the project, 3 affiliated to CinBA, 1 Masters student
Website: http://cinba.net/
Contact: Joanna Sofaer (Project Leader) , Email: jrsd@soton.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN A WORLD OF MOVEMENT (CIM)
CIM explored the dynamics of cultural production and creativity in an era of intensifying globalisation and transnational connectivity. Instead of assessing the relative novelty of end products, the project took a processual approach by analysing practices of appropriation, consumption and (re)contextualisation in the spheres of (popular) art, religion and museums. Acknowledging the significance of individual or group-specific understandings of ‘creativity’, the project explored critically how different notions of cultural value and processes of authentication, authorisation and commoditisation affected people’s engagements with objects and images. A broad perspective was obtained by investigating concrete, partially interlinked processes across five continents.
The overall aim was to investigate concrete discourses, practices and embodied experiences of creative production, and identify the distinctions and potential conflicts that arise between local, national and global trends or influences.
Research in various locations in the different continents found that artists and gallery owners worked within multi-layered and changing local, national and transnational art markets. They responded to market demands that valued practices of copying and innovation in different ways. Artists had often limited control over the contextualisation of their works. Despite the rhetoric of equal exchange and interaction, artists and curators at an exhibition of Surinamese art in the Netherlands, for example, were not equal partners in a single ’global contemporary art’ community. Dutch funding bodies and curators who were embedded in local processes of place-making strongly influenced the framing of their works at the exhibition.
The concept of ‘artification’ identified processes of value transformation in the Indian fashion industry, a strategy used by a number of Indian fashion designers to increase the price and status of their products, presenting them as unique masterpieces. Linking the products to the magical aura of high art and alluding to ideas about the authenticity of pre-colonial Indian traditions, the designers claimed creative agency, downplaying the creative input by the embroiderers who manufactured the items. As with some of the other cases explored by the CIM, the commoditisation process clearly reproduced economic inequalities.
Project Leader:
Dr Maruška Svašek, Department of Anthropological Studies, School of History and Anthropology, Queens University Belfast, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Øivind Fuglerud, Department of Ethnography, University of Oslo, Museum of Cultural History, Norway
Professor Birgit Meyer, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dr Leon Wainwright, Department of Art History, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
3 PhD students were paid by CIM to do part of their PhD research; 10 PhD students participated in ROIE, the interdisciplinary Postgraduate Forum, entitled 'Researching Objects-Images-Emotions' (ROIE), established by CIM as part of their HERA project. 12 PhD students presented papers at the Postgraduate conference ‘‘Material Lives: Objects, Images and Emotions in a World of Movement’, organised by CIM/ROIE
Website: http://www.qub.ac.uk/CIM
Contact: Maruška Svašek (Project Leader) , Email: m.svasek@qub.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS A MODEL OF CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN PRACTICE (ELMCIP)
This three-year collaborative research project was set up to investigate how creative communities form and engage on a multi-cultural and transnational basis in the modern world of globalised and distributed communications. The project focused on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, studying its formation and interactions. It also aimed to advance electronic literature research and practice in Europe.
ELMCIP achieved several important results with lasting impact and providing scope for further research. These are:
• A cohesive but interdisciplinary European research community in the field of electronic literature. Before the ELMCIP project, there were many researchers and creative artists working in the field of electronic literature, but lacking the common enterprise or network already existing within the field in the Americas. After the conclusion of the ELMCIP project, Europe is squarely in the centre of the international field. In 2013, the two most significant international conferences in the field, the Electronic Literature Organization conference, and the E-Poetry Festival, were both held in Europe, in Paris and London, respectively.
• A robust digital humanities research infrastructure. After three years of continuous development, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base is currently the most extensive open access research platform in the international field, including thousands of records and used daily by researchers and in classrooms across Europe and internationally.
• A strong foundation for research, education, and policy. The ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature, the Remediating the Social book, the European Publishing Venues Report and the many other publications of the ELMCIP project not only address specific research questions but also provide a basis for further research, for classroom teaching, and for policy makers considering how best to integrate digital culture and its study into future policy and culture programmes.
One of the project’s major and most lasting successes was the basis for knowledge exchange it has created. By reaching across disciplines, traditional boundaries between academia and the arts, different sectors of the public, means of distribution, and platforms, the project has achieved an extended reach that will far outlast it.
Project Leader:
Professor Scott Rettberg, Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies, Faculty of Humanities, The University of Bergen, Norway
Principal Investigators:
Professor Simon Biggs, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Dr Maria Engberg, Department of Culture and Communication, School of Planning and Media Design, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Mr Jerome Fletcher, Department of Performance, School of Media and Performance, University College Falmouth, United Kingdom
Dr Raine Koskimaa, Digital Culture, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Dr Janez Strechovec, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Dr Yra Van Dijk, Moderne Nederlandse Letterkunde, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
1 PhD student was formally attached to the project, at the University of Edinburgh. 3 PhD students at the University of Bergen, funded by UiB, have also participated in various aspects of the project.
Website: http://elmcip.net
Contact: Scott Rettberg (Project Leader) , Email: scott.rettberg@uib.no
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FASHIONING THE EARLY MODERN: INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY IN EUROPE, 1500-1800 (FASHIONING THE EARLY MODERN)
This interdisciplinary project sought to understand the role of early modern fashion in creativity and innovation and the way it operated within society in setting trends and distributing textile products. It also aimed to generate wider public understanding of European creativity and innovation, both past and present. This included collaborations with museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A, UK), the Royal Armouries and the National Museum of Denmark. Results of the research have helped with ongoing work to create the new European Galleries, 1600-1800 at the V&A, which opens in 2014, as well as ideas that had fed into our understanding of museum collections in Denmark and Sweden. The results have also supported broader engagement with key questions of European copyright and design, exploring how a better understanding of creativity and innovation in the past can inform actions for the future.
The project has achieved its ambition of leaving a legacy for ongoing collaboration and knowledge exchange. It adopted an impact and knowledge exchange strategy focused on working with three communities:, museum curators, design professionals, and copyright and intellectual property lawyers who were interested in how contemporary rights to fashion innovations are protected. The project was established from the start as a collaboration involving museum professionals including curators from National Museums as either Principal Investigators (PIs) or Associate Partners.
Above all, the project was highly successful in extending its network and creating new international connections. It was able to bring together curators from across Europe to discuss the challenges and opportunities of new ways of displaying fashion and textiles to the public, also working closely with Danish designers and artists to explore their responses to early modern fashion. At the close the project had produced almost 60 publications including two major edited collections of essays. In addition to the publications, the project focused on supporting the next generation of researchers. Over the three years, 42 early career scholars joined the project, which was then able to support the development of Marie Curie fellowships gaining an additional 450,000 Euros for early career development.
Project Leader:
Professor Evelyn Welch, Department of History, School of Arts and Humanities, King's College, London, United Kingdom
Principal Investigateurs:
Professor Marie-Louise Nosch, The SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen, The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research, Denmark
Dr Paula Hohti, University of Helsinki, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland
Professor Peter McNeil, Stockholm University, Sweden
Dr Lesley Ellis Miller, Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department, Victoria & albert Museum, United Kingdom
Dr Maj Ringgaard, Nationalmuseet / National Museum of Denmark, Denmark
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
42 PhD students were trained as part of one of the workshops.
Website: www.fashioningtheearlymodern.ac.uk
Contact: Evelyn Welch (Project Leader) , Email: evelyn.welch@kcl.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MEASURING THE SOCIETAL IMPACTS OF UNIVERSITIES’ RESEARCH INTO ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES (HERAVALUE)
The ultimate aim of the project HERAVALUE was to develop better ways of evaluating Arts and Humanities Research (AHR) that are more consistent across projects and disciplines and yet take account of the implicit or societal value and not just the measurable economic impact.
The project made a significant contribution in three academic areas that together will help policy makers improve the way they measure and assess the public value of AHR. These three areas are:
1. It was found there can never be an agreed way of measuring public value of AHR so a need was identified for new hybrid concepts that bridge the different stakeholders’ interests. The project adopted the term multi-scalar slipperiness to explain this phenomenon.
2. By exploring the three national research policy systems and developing the concept of ‘public signalling behaviours’, the project attempted to resolve this debate about evaluating culture in society.
3. The project derived a multi-scalar theory of the public value of research. This reframes the public value of all research and not just AHR in terms of its contribution to societal capacities.
The thesis here was that AHR has often been undervalued compared with STEM because it is not seen as a driver of innovation or wider societal change. The project has remedied this deficiency by developing a model based on the understanding of public signalling behaviours, showing how individual transactions (i.e. research projects) generate activities that in turn create new innovative capacities for societal action not previously present. These include individual transactions between scholars and ‘aggregation actors’ (e.g. the media), who embed the ideas in artefacts and services. They also embrace the intermingling of the public with those actors through mass transactions, such as watching TV. Furthermore these ideas then circulate in society by influencing and shaping public discourses, behaviours, and institutions, enhanced in recent years by social media.
This approach puts AHR on the same level as STEM research, whose benefits are already measured in multi-scalar terms, extending to how knowledge transfer leads to new firms and products, creating jobs and stimulating spending, in turn fuelling economic growth. Now there is a similar theoretical basis for measuring the wider AHR impact.
Project Leader:
Dr Paul Benneworth, Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, Netherlands
Principal Investigators:
Dr Magnus Gulbrandsen, NIFU STEP, Olso, Norway
Professor Ellen Hazelkorn, Directorate of Research and Enterprise, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
1 PhD participated in the project and graduated on research partly related to HERAVALUE
Website: http://www.utwente.nl/mb/cheps/research/current_projects/heravalue/
Contact: Paul Benneworth (Project Leader) , Email: p.benneworth@utwente.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OF AUTHORSHIP AND ORIGINALITY: RECLAIMING COPYRIGHT IN SUPPORT OF CREATIVE COLLABORATION IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT (OOR)
The project 'Of Authorship and Originality' (OOR) queried how insights from various humanities disciplines can inform concepts in copyright law, to collective creative practices in the digital environment for producers of artworks in different media and genres. To do this, OOR obtained insights from literary theory, music studies, film/visual studies and other Humanities' disciplines, focusing on the two key and inextricably linked concepts in copyright law of the author and the work.
OOR was divided into three individual projects, two dealing with authorship and one on the work. These were Authorship in Collective Arts, Multiplicity of Authors, and The Work as Creative Expression.
The practical value of the OOR research lies in its joint focus on the work and on authorship, two areas where copyright norms have received little critical assessment in recent years, the scope and enforcement of copyright being center stage. The research was also timely in that it coincided with significant revisions that are taking place in international copyright law, particularly within the EU (European Union).
In the construction and analysis of copyright norms, economic and technological concerns have long dominated the debate. The HERA OOR project has helped to bring insights from the arts and humanities research to the fore in this area that traditionally has been driven by technology and commercial market requirements. As harnessing ’creativity’ is an increasingly important topic on both national and international research agendas (e.g. in the EU Horizon 2020, in the programmes of the Dutch national research council and of UK research councils), the work commenced with HERA is being continued and built on. At a time when Arts and Humanities research is under pressure to show its value for society, but also finds itself moving into the promising new avenues of digital humanities, arguably the regulation of cultural production is an area where it will have much to contribute. The OOR projects and its sister projects in the HERA programme are an important first step.
Project Leader:
Dr Mireille van Eechoud, Institute for Information Law, Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Principal Investigators:
Professor Lionel Bently, Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, Faculty of Law, Cambridge University, United Kingdom
Professor Jostein Gripsrud, Department of Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway
Website: http://www.ivir.nl/HERA.html
Contact: Mireille van Eechoud (Project Leader), Email: M.M.M.vanEechoud@uva.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCARCITY AND CREATIVITY IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT (SCIBE)
SCIBE was set up to investigate the relationship between scarcity and creativity for the built environment at different scales from neighbourhoods to whole cities. The research had two complementary strands, firstly development of a theory of scarcity relevant to the production of the built environment and secondly an analysis of case studies in four European cities, London, Oslo, Reykjavik, and Vienna. These two strands fed and reinforced each other, resulting in a productive understanding of scarcity relevant for practitioners and policy makers.
The research showed that far from being a threat, scarcity provides the context for new forms of creativity. Rather than being directed towards production of the new, creativity should be exercised on what already exists. From this comes a range of creative strategies around redistribution, adaptation, optimisation, and restarting. These strategies challenge standard conceptions of design creativity, particularly in architecture, which has been so closely associated with ‘innovative’ objects. The project’s research has opened up new debates within the design and planning community along these lines.
A key part of the project lay in ensuring that its findings and outputs were accessible and useful to a wide audience of academics, professionals and policy makers, and wherever possible directed towards future practice. With this in mind, the team engaged with a broad range of policy makers, designers and the general public in order to test and develop the research findings. This involvement ranged from high level policy forums (e.g. World Bank, Salzburg Congress on Urban Planning and Development) to very public outlets (e.g. London’s Evening Standard, Vienna Public Radio, Icelandic newspapers, BBC Festival of Ideas), with a focus on professional and practice-based activity in the middle. The project was extensively engaged in education and training, running studios, workshops and summer schools in a wide range of locations.
Project Leader:
Professor Jeremy Till, Central St Martins, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Christian Hermansen, Institute of Architecture, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway
Dr. Andreas Rumpfhuber, Technische Universität Wien, Austria
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project
3 PhD, one in each team
Website: www.scibe.eu
Contact: Jeremy Till (Project Leader), Email: j.till@arts.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TECHNOLOGY, EXCHANGE AND FLOW: ARTISTIC MEDIA PRACTICES AND COMMERCIAL APPLICATION (TEF)
The TEF project explored the relationship between creativity and innovation within the contemporary European media sector. It questioned how interaction between cultural categories in Europe, such as industrial/advertising film and new media arts on the one hand, and commercial exploitation of audio-visual media on the other, have been radically transformed at key times. As such it was intended to prepare the way for thinking about new media environments when the distinctions between the consumer and the producer are no longer valid or viable. The project was based around three distinct European examples of artistic practices and their commercial applications: (1) early advertising and experimental film at the times when the technologies of production became more widely available, (2) post-war industrial films and early television commercials, and finally (3) the emerging category of prosumers in contemporary media distribution around games.
The project was innovative in its scope, breadth, and research focus. Its originality was not just in the topics addressed or in the unique combination of research into practitioners and producers who have hitherto been regarded as distinct, but also in its forms of public engagement and dissemination. The findings have uncovered interconnections and acknowledged key factors for future policy and research. The project highlighted in particular the impact and potential of the participatory qualities of advertising in their interconnections with experimental film form and games cultures as they build on user participation, perceptual properties and aesthetics that stimulate new viewing practices in these related disciplines. In this way it countered the common view that technological innovation drives creative qualities and subsequently the creative industries.
The project contributed to the research outputs and dissemination in the form of a final exhibition, conferences and symposia, publications and knowledge exchange events. A unique exhibition at the Kunsthalle Vienna in March 2013 highlighted user-led interpretation and shared knowledge production with the engagement of audience participation through interactive gaming platforms. Substantial knowledge exchange activities drawing on related insights from aspects of the HERA TEF and CIM projects were delivered at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum and EYE Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam in April 2013. In these events audiences were invited to engage with advertising materials in various contexts and forms of presentation and to inform experts how they evaluated these experiences. In a follow-up evaluation event stakeholders were invited to consider how this modification of the interactive dynamic might impact on their theory, practice and policy in relation to decision making about archiving, heritage and research priorities.
Project Leader:
Professor Michael Punt, School of Computing, Communications and Electronics, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Bert Hogenkamp, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands
Professor Margarete Jahrmann, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
1 PhD linked and trained as part of the Framework
Website: www.trans-techresearch.net/tef
Contact: Michael Punt (Project Leader) , Email: michael.punt@plymouth.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Potential Impact:
HERA JRP IMPACT
As a final result from the HERA Joint Research Programme a special edition was produced summarizing all the results and impacts from the 19 transnational projects that were funded. In addition it included an analysis of the results and impact by three humanities scholars who played an important role in the set up and the implementation of this first HERA Joint Research Programme.
These three are:
* Professor Joep Leerssen, University of Amsterdam: Chair of the Working Group for the HERA JRP theme ‘Cultural Dynamics – Inheritance and Identity’
* Professor John Caughie, University of Glasgow: Chair of the working group for the HERA JRP theme ‘Creativity and Innovation’
* Professor Sean Ryder, National University of Ireland, Galway: Chair HERA Network Board
Their conclusions are presented below.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROFESSOR JOEP LEERSSEN, UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM, CHAIR OF THE WORKING GROUP FOR THE HERA JRP THEME ‘CULTURAL DYNAMICS – INHERITANCE AND IDENTITY’
When “Cultural Dynamics” was conceptualised as a HERA theme, the intention was to highlight how a specifically Humanities-oriented perspective could address the topic of culture. There was at the time an ingrained scholarly habit to associate the notions of “culture and society” in such a way that culture was either reduced to a passive, static ambience, a mere container for habitual social behaviour, or else seen just as a “mirror” or reflection of social developments. In that traditional frame, to understand “culture” meant to analyse its underlying socio-economic causes. Culture was, in this model, the mere by-product or context of social agencies or social actors, never an agency in its own right.
One way to break out of this reductionist view was to stress that culture is not just a product but a process. The picture we hang on a wall (which wall? whose wall?), the books on our shelves (which? whose?), or the repertoire of music on our airwaves, are all just ephemeral instances in complex processes of gestation, creation, transmission, adoption, adaptation, appropriation, contestation, reconfiguration and recycling. Humanities crucially inquire not just into the nature or essence of things, but into their meaning. Then the production of meaning (which, by the way, would be a good definition of the term “culture” in the first place) is a dynamic, transgenerational process – and a process, moreover, of such complexity that to reduce it to a mere manifestation of societal-infrastructural parameters would be like explaining War and Peace by analysing the book’s paper and ink.
There was more then to the notion of “cultural dynamics” than just a glib phrase. Culture was to be addressed as something taking place over time in a process of communication and transmission involving multiple trajectories of exchange. The exchanges/trajectories that were foregrounded in the HERA proposal were fourfold.
To begin with, there was the transgenerational perpetuation of cultural presences across different successive audiences (hence the subtitle of “inheritance and identity”). The diachronic study of historical changes, continuities and transmissions has always been the core business of the humanities. The project “Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past, 400-1000AD” is a fine case in point.
Secondly, there was the exchange between “high” (prestigious, canonised, and formalised, elite), culture and “popular” (informal, spontaneous, mass-audience, mass-participation, demotic) culture. This is an exchange that works backwards and forwards in multiple ways, each of them crucial to our understanding of “canonicity” or conforming to established norms, and the position of culture in society at large.
Thirdly, there is the cultural exchange between different societies, countries or cultural-linguistic communities.
Then fourthly, there is cultural exchange between different media of expression (textual, material, visual, aural, performative, interactive).
These last two dimensions, the cross-national and the intermedial or intermediate ones, were, at the time when the proposal was formulated, seen as innovative challenges ideally suited to the international and interdisciplinary format of the HERA instrument itself. In this focus, “Cultural Dynamics” was also picking up the emerging trends of approaches which meanwhile have consolidated themselves as the “transnational turn” and “intermediality”. The transnational turn was heralded by the development of an interest in Polysytem Theory, “Cultural Transfers” and histoires croisées. These were all inspired by the rejection of “methodological nationalism” or “internalism”: the a priori tendency to explain processes in a given country as arising solely from causes within that same country. This mono-national tunnel vision was also challenged in the concept of “Cultural Dynamics”, and from hindsight we can see this as part of an emerging transnational comparative alternative to internalism, which has by now become widespread in the humanities at large.
The HERA projects “Investigating Discourses of Inheritance and Identity in Four Multilingual European Settings”, “The Role of Language in the Transnational Formation of Romani Identity” and “Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia and the Ukraine”, are particularly apt examples of this transnational orientation in understanding the dynamics of culture. In this last project, as in the previously-mentioned “Cultural memory and the resources of the past”, its can also be seen how the HERA call caught the rising tide of Memory Studies as an exciting new perspective in the historical sciences: the historical investigation, not just of the past, but of the experience and successive meanings of the past, of how people made sense of their past. The media involved in that process – manuscripts or photographs, music or a language itself, both as carriers of historical meaning, and as objects themselves of historical transmission – were addressed in the projects “The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript”, “Photographs, Colonial Legacy and Museum in Contemporary Europe”, “Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity” and the aforementioned “The Role of Language in the Transnational Formation of Romani Identity”.
The intermedial interest derived initially from an insight in canonisation studies that canonicity is not a static, singular condition, but intimately bound up with the power to adapt to new media (turning Shakespeare’s Othello into an opera, or Victor Hugo’s Les Misérabes into a musical). This process of re-mediation, which emerges as a centrally important aspect of the dynamics of cultural self-perpetuation, proved, in the research projects that were inspired by it, to involve also the shifting boundaries between popular culture and “high” culture, and the role of emerging media as carriers of historical memories. The projects “Rhythm Changes: Jazz cultures and European Identities” and the abovementioned “Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity” illustrate this.
As all these cases show, their common denominator is that the processes of communication and transmission are what constitutes cultural, social or national identities in Europe. Consequently, these identities are demonstrably objects (rather than subjects) of negotiation and appropriation, and culture by its nature communicates as much between as within societies and traditions – as is well illustrated by the project “Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: Exploring the Tradition of Greek and Arabic Literatures”.
The full complexity of the dynamics of culture lies in the fact that the various dimensions in which transmissions and exchanges occur (across generations, social strata, nations and media) are all in play simultaneously, not just singly one at the time – like a four-dimensional Rubik’s Cube. The fact that practically all funded projects can be cited to present more than one of these dimensions as themes shows how creatively the challenge was picked up by Europe’s academic community, and how timely the HERA call must have been to elicit such a response. It is to be hoped that, if cultural exchanges constitute identities, then all this scholarly cooperation helps cement the identity of a European research community in the Humanities.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THEME II: HUMANITIES AS A SOURCE OF CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
PROFESSOR JOHN CAUGHIE, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, CHAIR OF THE WORKING GROUP FOR THE HERA JRP THEME ‘CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION’
It is important to establish the historical context of this programme, focusing as it does on creativity and innovation. The specification, written in late 2007, states the context thus: Historically, critically and practically, creativity is a central term in the vocabulary of the arts and humanities. Implicitly or explicitly, it informs our value systems and our critical discourse. Historically, it contributes to our sense of the periodisation of culture. Then practically, it defines the aims and aspirations not only of the creative and performing arts but also of new thinking in almost any area of intellectual endeavour. This includes science, medicine, engineering and technology, which would all lay legitimate claim to creativity as a central term of their research and development. And yet, despite its centrality, the nature of creativity – its defining conditions, its workings in different arenas, and its values – seem often to be assumed rather than critically understood.
In recent years, creativity has come to be absorbed almost formulaically into a new conjunction, ‘creativity and innovation’, which is proposed as a key driver of the economy. Not only in the ‘creative industries’, but also in business and industry more generally, creativity and innovation are seen as forces to be harnessed in the service of economic growth. Policy reports and publications such as the Lisbon Declaration (2000) argue that creativity and innovation are central to progress and development, and the goal for Europe to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based community in the world by 2010 has put innovation at the top of the European research agenda.
This conjunction of creativity and innovation can be perceived both as a threat and as an opportunity. On the one hand, there is legitimate concern that the values of creativity – the imaginative leap, the risks of the genuinely new, the iconoclasm in the face of established conventions of thought – are tamed and instrumentalised when they are placed at the service of the economy. On the other hand, the very centrality of the conjunction offers arts and humanities research the opportunity for real interdisciplinary engagement with the ways in which the terms of creativity are being revalued by science, technology and the wider economy. It offers the chance to bring our own research to a better understanding of what it means to link creativity to innovation, culturally, socially and economically. It is the aim of this programme to seize this opportunity.
The programmes outlined below do exactly this: they seize the opportunity, and in creative, innovative, and surprising ways. While one might have anticipated some engagement with issues of the measurement of impact, or of authorship or preservation in the digital age, it is a surprise and delight to find research engaging with issues of creativity and innovation in the Bronze Age or in early modern fashion, in ways which draw in, contemporary artists and innovators while building on their work.
Historically, after the various banking and financial crises of 2008 (the year in which this programme was launched), it became even more difficult to approach the magic formula of ‘creativity and innovation’ without some degree of caution and scepticism. With the collapse of financial markets and the public rescue of banks, what had perhaps been missing from the formula was ‘risk’ - creativity, innovation, and risk. This made it even more apparent that there were questions of value, ethics and public responsibility buried in the easy formula.
It is difficult also to approach the Arts and Humanities as a source or panacea for creativity and innovation. This always seemed to risk being profoundly instrumentalist, offering a promise that Humanities research was not being conducted ‘for its own sake’, but was part of an agenda of social improvement and economic impact. On the contrary, it seemed to me, precisely what Humanities brought to the mantra of ‘Creativity and Innovation’ was that humanistic scepticism the Humanities have been bringing to sacred languages and final vocabularies since the Renaissance. Rather than providing a mechanistic source, the Humanities might return creativity and innovation to questions of value, imagination, and ethics. Somewhat to my relief, although the projects are undoubtedly about creative and innovative practices, about how they work, how they are regulated, and how they are valued in a number of very interesting contexts, the researchers seem to have shared some of my scepticism and have largely avoided the search for the illusive (and illusionary) source. They have done what Arts and Humanities researchers characteristically do: they have been properly, appropriately, and intellectually subversive. Even a project like HERAVALUE, which sets out to measure the societal impacts of universities' research into arts and the humanities, and which seems to take the title of the programme on its own terms, manages to recast the question of impact from economic value to public value. The strength of the projects is in opening up a field of enquiry around fields of creativity and innovation – mapping a topography - rather than fencing it off behind instrumental, mechanistic or formulaic boundaries.
My other concern was that the rhetoric of creativity and innovation seems to reverberate with the present and the future and there was a risk that history might be absent. I was clearly wrong. Not only is one of the projects, CinBA, on Bronze Age craft, another on the history of fashion (Fashioning the Early Modern), but others – on authorship in the digital environment (OOR) or on the digitisation of cultural heritage (CULTIVATE) are clearly historical in their analyses and are quite explicit in challenging the relentless ‘spectacle of the present’. In fact, it is this capacity – this predisposition - to think historically, which seems to me to be characteristic of Humanities research; and it is exactly what the Humanities brings to Creativity and Innovation: a historical scepticism about formulaic, closed language, which in turn opens the formula up to questions of value, ethics and progress, of emerging and residual meanings.
At the centre of the HERA programmes is cross-border European collaboration. This is the first Joint Research Programme run by HERA, and it represents collaboration, and a quite remarkable level of engagement with the public and with creative communities, on issues which are genuinely enriched and complicated by working across national and cultural boundaries, and across academic and non-academic sectors. Projects on the cross-fertilisation between creative artists and creative, commercial and technological industries and businesses (TEF), or on the creative communities of electronic literature (ELMCIP), or on the ways in which globalisation may hamper or stimulate cultural production (CIM), or on the impact of scarcity on design-led architectural creativity (SCIBE), are clearly central questions, and they could be addressed within national boundaries as national Research Council projects. Each of the projects however seems to me to be both richer and more productively complex by bringing together disciplinary and national perspectives, and by engaging with practitioners and a wider public. On a reading of the reports, the interest is precisely in the internationality and engagement, in the cultural perspectives from which they come and in the comparisons which they enable. That is where the surprising insights lie, and it is where the paradigms begin to shift. From a research perspective, the reports are testimony to the value of collaboration, of internationality and of interdisciplinarity in opening the research to questions that cannot be contained within frontiers and could not be addressed as ‘local’ intellectual or practical problems.
Issues of instrumentalism and impact are not going to go away, and public funding is going to continue to ask questions about the societal value of publically-funded research. In many ways, I think this is right, and if our research is of the kind that needs the injection of public funding then issues of value for money are legitimate. I think part of the business of arts and humanities research is to complicate instrumentalism and take a different view of the impact, while addressing the associated questions. And I think the projects here have accomplished that. Research in Arts and Humanities is an area in which intellectual advance is not always made by discovery but by constantly revisiting and re-opening debates. The question of research value is not always about findings and outputs, but about processes and outcomes. As with the Large Hadron Collider, the real lasting value may not just be about discovery, but about the processes of collaboration, of crossing national, disciplinary and professional/public boundaries, and of the technologies that allow us to do this and imagine research differently.
On that count I feel both pleased and privileged to have been involved with this first HERA Joint Research Programme, with the people who have worked in HERA to develop and support it, and with the modes of working and the possibilities of research which it has enabled.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROFESSOR SEAN RYDER, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY
CHAIR, HERA NETWORK BOARD
It is with pleasure, and some pride, that we mark the conclusion of HERA’s first Joint Research Programme. The projects undertaken in that programme ranged widely, from the study of prehistoric fabrics, to contemporary electronic literature, to an examination of the relationship between scarcity and creativity, to the transnationality of jazz – and so much more between.
On the one hand this is an occasion for celebration: the conclusion of nineteen innovative humanities-based projects under the two themes of “Cultural Dynamics” and “Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation”. Collectively, they represent so much new knowledge, many new partnerships, and new possibilities for the future.
On the other hand, it is also an occasion for reflection: a time now to assess what can we learn from the projects themselves, and also from the process of establishing and managing a big transnational research programme, involving 13 countries and scores of talented researchers. Are there aspects of the work we have done that are worth doing again, or things to avoid? What does humanities research need in terms of funding and research programming into the future? These are questions we will continue to pose in HERA as we plan for future research programmes.
The origins of HERA go back to 2002 when the Danish, Dutch and Irish Research Councils established a European Network of Research Councils that was later renamed “Humanities in the European Research Area” (HERA). From 2004 to 2009 the HERA network was supported with top-up funding by the EU Framework Programme 6's ERA-Net scheme, the objective of which was to bring national research programmes together in order to strengthen the European platform for the humanities. During that time the HERA partners pooled resources to produce reports on best practice in management of research, on peer review, on impact assessment, and so on. But its primary activity was the establishment in 2009 of the three-year Joint Research Programme (JRP) that has now come to its conclusion. It was an experiment, to see if there was appetite in the humanities for such funding programmes, and to see whether it was possible to establish and run such a programme organically, as it were, from the initiative of the countries themselves, rather than in top-down fashion from the European Commission. As far as the appetite is concerned, I think that has been proved. There were 234 applications for the first JRP; the frustration is that our funding allowed us to fund only 19 of those. But HERA continues to grow in membership, and with that, to grow in funding power. As we expand and build into the future, we hope that more and more researchers will be able to benefit from HERA funding in the years to come.
From the start, HERA has had some distinctive features as a funding programme. The first is its unashamed focus on the humanities. While there are more frequent (and welcome) calls nowadays for interdisciplinarity to reach across the full range of research domains, including physical sciences, engineering, medicine, information technology, social sciences and humanities, it is also true that there is plenty of scope for interdisciplinarity within the domain of the humanities alone. The differences of national traditions, of differing disciplinary methodologies and languages can be nearly as strong among literary scholars, historians, philosophers, linguists, geographers, archaeologists and legal scientists as they can be between the humanities and so-called “hard sciences”. By working across national boundaries as well as disciplines, HERA researchers have gained valuable experience and confidence that will we hope enable more humanities researchers to be successful in large-scale interdisciplinary programmes such as Horizon 2020. But they have also shown that just within the field of humanities itself, so much valuable new knowledge can be generated through collaboration and teamwork.
The second feature of HERA has been its strong focus on “knowledge transfer” – not just as “impact” in narrow or economic sense, but rather in the sense of disseminating and exchanging the results of research with the widest possible audience. One of the most exciting dimensions of the HERA projects has been the way in which they have engaged various non-academic individuals and organisations – artists, craft workers, cultural institutions and others – in the research process, demonstrating how energising the relationship between the academy and the wider society can sometimes be.
Our commitment to knowledge exchange and impact goes far beyond simply providing the taxpayer with value for money – instead it is informed by a more fundamental the belief that humanities research has a crucial role to play in creating a society that is enlivened by the blossoming of ideas and creativity, that relishes respectful debate, that promotes critical thinking and that believes that innovation of any sort only comes through the discovery and thoughtful evaluation of alternatives. A society that sees the present as part of a continuum with the past, and the past as a complex place always in need of reinterpretation. A society of citizens who are not just trained in skills, but are educated and informed in a deep and broad way – a society that cultivates intellectual energy, and daring, and curiosity all levels, not just in the generation of profits and products. A “knowledge society”, not just a “knowledge economy”.
It is HERA’s ambition to contribute to the achievement of such a vision. But even if we come down to the level of short-term and immediate impact, I think we can say that HERA has achieved some results already. Firstly, it has shown that it is possible to pool the resources of a several national research councils in a truly pan-European spirit, overcoming the challenges and obstacles of differing national traditions, eligibility rules, funding mechanisms and so on. Secondly, it has demonstrated the value of team-based research (which is not to deny the continuing role of the solitary scholar, though perhaps that figure is in fact something of a myth in the first place – all scholars continually share and collaborate among colleagues in a myriad of informal ways). Structured team research is not easy, of course. There is no denying the real difficulty and challenge of building and managing research projects involving multiple countries, disciplines, and personalities, as I’m sure all of the HERA project leaders will attest: but there is always the belief that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts – and the acknowledgement that some research questions by their very nature require teamwork to be tackled.
HERA has shown that thematic research programmes can produce innovative, curiosity-driven research, of the kind we see as we witness the results and peruse the reports of these projects. Congratulations are due to all the projects leaders and researchers for having brought our first research programme to such an inspiring conclusion – although it is also clear that the new partnerships that have been established, and the further questions and possibilities that these projects have raised, will ensure that the work begun here will continue to have a life well into the future.
List of Websites:
www.heranet.info
TRANSNATIONAL COOPERATION IN HUMANITIES
A joint open call for transnational projects in two humanities research areas: 'Cultural Dynamics: inheritance and identity' and 'Creativity and Innovation' was opened in January 2009. Nineteen collaborative research programme proposals involving consortia of at least three partners from three or more HERA JRP countries were awarded in December 2009. More information about those projects can be found on the HERA website: www.heranet.info.
The total amount of funding available for the two themes, which fit within the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Work Programme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), is worth EUR 16.4 million. All available funds have been pooled into a real common pot. With the coordination of substantial research support mobilised by national funding agencies, the HERA JRP complements the existing FP7 research funding instruments to offer more flexible funding opportunities for transnational collaborative research.
Beyond funding, the HERA JRP will closely monitor the progress of transnational collaborative research projects. It will also monitor the financial management of the projects, ensuring maximum efficiency of allocated funds. The national partners have allocated additional funding to the HERA JRP to realise knowledge transfer activities ensuring that the knowledge resulting from the research projects will become widely available and used. The ESF has been contracted as handling agency.
Although it is a central aspect in the field of arts and humanities, the nature of creativity is more assumed than understood critically. Creativity influences European value systems and critical thinking, contributes to our sense of culture and inspires progress and development. In recent years, creativity has been linked to innovation, particularly in the Lisbon Declaration, with the aim for Europe to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based community in the world. Humanities research will help develop a better understanding of what it means to link creativity to innovation.
Under the HERA JRP, creativity in all its aspects will be addressed. This includes the study of our perceptions, understandings and views about creativity; how they have been formed; and how they are being re-formed. New research into the processes and conditions of human creativity will add new understandings of the value systems of the humanities and the practices and conditions of the creative, visual and performing arts, and a much better understanding of how these values and processes might contribute to cultural, social and economic innovation. The HERA JRP specifically also allows for examining creativity and innovation in a practical and empirical way in various environments. This may include cooperation of academia with cultural institutes, as well as with the (creative) industry.
Particular emphasis might be placed on national comparisons with a view to offering models of successful practice generating new knowledge and developing new perspectives on creativity and innovation. Bringing an European transnational dimension to research in this theme will provide added value to national research efforts which will strengthen European competitiveness.
An equally important theme for Europe is cultural dynamics and the role of culture in the formation of identities. It examines culture as a process rather than a product, addressing the cultural process as an interplay of complex dynamic systems. The focus is more on the way in which cultural exchanges and dynamics cross between countries, social strata and media. Culture will not be studied as the output of a society or time period, but rather as a form of traffic between communities and generations.
In practical terms, research is planned into how globalisation and global mobility are creating multicultural societies worldwide, where religious loyalties are competing with national loyalties, and where the Internet is creating a 'network society' that results in increased individualisation. This paradigm is superseding state culture, even if the state maintains cultural identity through education, cultural traditions and academia.
Subjects that may be funded under the HERA JRP may pertain to the collective identities of European states, the basis for the rise of national culture canonization within a globalizing world , and the difference between collective memory and the insights of academic historians. another possible research topic is the study of exchanges between 'low' and 'high' culture, as exemplified by the influence folk music has exercised on classical music. The resulting analyses of all these topics will help identify how culture is evolving, how it is canonised, and how it should be financed. Should it depend on the invisible hand of the market place or should a European dimension be maintained against commercial pressures? The insights of history are also important for evolving cultural practices, as is citizens’ need for identity and cultural continuity.
The results of the HERA JRP are translated into social, economic and cultural benefits through implementing a knowledge transfer and networking strategy to disseminate the observations and knowledge resulting from the transnational research projects funded under the two HERA JRP themes. Dissemination will also be specifically aimed at non-academic audiences. This may include interactions with policy makers, politicians, the media sector, museums, galleries, exhibitions, as well as with the (creative) industry. Thus the HERA JRP aims to improve the quality of the ongoing European debates on basic human values, cultural identity, ethics and gender issues and have a positive impact on the competitiveness of the European Union.
In summary, the HERA JRP knowledge transfer strategy stimulates stronger public awareness about the important contributions of humanities research and trends. With new insight into research that addresses major social, cultural and political challenges facing Europe, this is expected to effect a significant change in the way European humanities research is viewed, conducted and funded.
Project Context and Objectives:
In order to strengthen the European Research Area, thirteen national research councils decided in 2008 to pool a substantial amount of their resources and set up a joint research programmes. On 9 January 2009, the HERA Joint Research Programme (HERA JRP) partners launched a joint call for transnational projects in two humanities research areas: “Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity” and “Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation”.
The Call was open to scholars located in Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and United Kingdom, irrespective of their nationality. Successful proposals required the building of consortia of three or more partners based in three or more different HERA JRP countries. The total amount of funding made available for both the transnational research programmes funded under the HERA JRP themes is 16,5 M€, 4 M€ of which is the ERANET PLUS grant. For managing the selection process, the HERA JRP Board contracted the European Science Foundation (ESF) as HERA JRP Handling Agency. Upon suggestions from the HERA JRP Board members, the Handling Agency composed two joint international Review Panels consisting of independent international experts both from HERA JRP and other countries. The selection process involved two stages – Outline and Full Proposals, where Full Proposals, in addition to the Review Panel, were each evaluated by at least three external expert referees.
The HERA JRP call had an excellent take-up: 234 proposals were submitted in the Outline Proposals stage and 55 in the Full Proposals stage. The total budget requested by the 55 submitted Full Proposals amounted up to € 49.6M. The two HERA JRP Review Panels have recommended 19 Full Proposals for funding. On 13 December 2009, the HERA JRP Board met in Berlin and decided to accept the Review Panels’ recommendation. The contract negotiations between the HERA JRP Handling Agency and the 19 projects recommended for funding were completed in September 2010. The total budget awarded to the 19 successful proposals amounts to € 16,3M. The HERA JRP grants were centrally managed by the Handling Agency. Just like in the Framework programme projects – and unlike virtual pot ERANET joint calls or EUROCORES programmes – grants are transferred in full to the Project Leader thus enabling each project leader to properly lead and coordinate the transnational projects.
The monitoring of projects involved the evaluation and approval of annual progress and financial project reports. The Handling Agency collected the first year progress reports in April 2011 and managed the evaluation process. All research progress reports were evaluated by the two HERA JRP Review Panels, where each report was evaluated by two Panel members. These evaluations and comments were subsequently approved by the HERA JRP Board. In 2012, the Handling Agency collected project reports for the second year of research, which were evaluated by the HERA JRP Board members. In January 2014, the final project reports had been submitted and subsequently evaluated by the Review Panel members and validated by the HERA JRP Board. The financial reports of all annual and final reports were checked, commented and validated by the Handling Agency.
In addition to supporting excellent humanities research, HERA aims to increase awareness of the impact of funded humanities research beyond academia and promotes knowledge exchange. A subset of the HERA JRP Board has opted to function as the HERA JRP Knowledge Transfer Advisory Committee (KTAC), chaired by the AHRC. At the beginning of the programme, the KTAC formulated a Knowledge Transfer Strategy outlining examples of actions HERA and the HERA JRP projects could do to promote knowledge exchange. The implementation of the strategy has been the task of the Handling Agency, whose work involved organising the HERA JRP launch and final conferences as well as a series of Knowledge Transfer and Networking activities bringing together academic and non-academic partners from the HERA JRP projects. The HERA JRP funding organisations have provided additional funding of 1.5 M€ for these accompanying measures.
The two theme-specific Launch Conferences “Humanities as a Source of Creativity” and “Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity” took place in Vienna on 23 and 25 June 2010. The conference provided an opportunity for the transnational projects to discuss the HERA JRP Knowledge Transfer Strategy together with the KTAC members. KTAC has convened two more times in 2010 (in Dublin on 20 October and in Lisbon on 3 December) in order to refine the Strategy and the implementation plan. As a follow-up from the Launch conferences, three HERA JRP KT workshops have been organised: the workshop “Data curation and web presence for the HERA JRP workshop” in Dublin on 20-21 October 2010, the “HERA workshop on Impact” initiated and organised by AHRC in April 2011 and the workshop “Humanities with Impact” in Zagreb on 30 June - 1 July 2011. Finally a call for proposals was organised, as a result of which three knowledge transfer events proposed by teams involving several HERA JRP projects were provided with additional funding. The Final Conference of the HERA Joint Research Programme was held in the British Library, London on 30 May 2013. It was followed by the Humanities Festival “The Time and The Place” on 31 May – 1 June.
As regards the HERA JRP communications, in addition to the publication of the HERA JRP overview brochure at the beginning of the programme and media announcements of the HERA JRP launch, the Handling Agency refined the structure of the website with the newly contracted IT provider, the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin. More vibrant and interactive, the website allowed all the HERA JRP transnational projects to have their own web pages on the HERA website and to publish information about their results, the upcoming events and news as well as to upload documents via secured individual access.
The 19 HERA JRP transnational projects produced an enormous number of academic publications. Only some seminal publications per project have been included in this report. However also a listing of project websites is included via which all publications can be found.
The final programme brochure was prepared in 2014 to provide the overview of the main achievements of the HERA JRP projects as well as a description of the programme and the governing and implementing bodies. The brochure also included a number of case-studies that highlight knowledge transfer and exchange activities within a number of the HERA JRP projects and demonstrate the wider value of HERA funding beyond academia.
Project Results:
SHORT DESCRIPTION PROJECT RESULTS AND IMPACTS
HERA JRP Theme I Cultural Dynamics : Inheritance and Identity
CULTURAL MEMORY AND THE RESOURCES OF THE PAST, 400-1000 AD (CMRP)
This collaborative project set out to explore the value of the Early Middle Ages for understanding national and cultural identities in modern Europe. Every age exploits the past as a resource, and early medieval Europe exploited both classical antiquity and the Bible. This collaborative research project was jointly carried out by between the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Utrecht, Cambridge and Leeds.
The project as a whole explored the diverse ways in which the post-Roman successor states of Western Europe in the early middle ages digested and made use of the cultural resources of their immediate past. This revolved around two principal aims. Firstly the project set out to determine the role played by the resources of that immediate past in forming the identities and communities of early medieval Western Europe. This work has highlighted the importance of Rome, Roman history, and the integration of Christian and imperial Rome into the cultural memory of early medieval Europe.
Secondly there was the hope of identifying elements of the complex process by which the new discourses, ethnic identities and social models of early medieval Europe have come to form an essential part of modern European national and transnational identities. The extant manuscript material from the early Middle Ages constitutes a major resource to shed new light on the process of codification and modification of the cultural heritage, and for the study of cultural dynamics in general.
These aims were pursued via four separate but closely interrelated projects, ‘Learning Empire – Creating Cultural Resources for Carolingian Rulership’ (Vienna), ‘Biblical Past as an Imagined Community’ (Utrecht), ‘Otherness in the Frankish and Ottonian Worlds’ (Leeds), and ‘Migration of Roman and Byzantine Cultural Traditions to the Carolingian World’ (Cambridge).
The presentation of CRP achievements has culminated in the final collaborative volume ‘Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past in Early Medieval Europe’. The volume is finished in manuscript form and is currently being prepared for publication by Cambridge University Press.
The CRP has produced project website (http://cmrp.oeaw.ac.at) a Facebook page and two project folders, one presenting the outline of the project, the other containing short abstracts of most important output of each sub-project as presented in the Final Volume (see link above).
Project Leader:
Professor Walter Pohl, Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
Principal Investigators:
Professor Mayke De Jong, History Department, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Professor Rosamond McKitterick, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Professor Ian Wood, School of History, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
8 PhD students: Vienna (2), Utrecht (2), Leeds (2), Cambridge (2)
9 Associated PhD students: Vienna (3), Utrecht (3), Leeds (2), Cambridge (1)
Website: http://cmrp.oeaw.ac.at/index.htm
Contact: Walter Pohl (Project Leader); Email: Walter.pohl@oeaw.ac.at
INVESTIGATING DISCOURSES OF INHERITANCE AND IDENTITY IN FOUR MULTILINGUAL EUROPEAN SETTINGS (IDII4MES)
This project investigated the range of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people in cities in four countries, Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in order to explore their cultural and social significance and to investigate how they are used in the context of inheritance and cultural identities. At the same time the project focused on development of innovative research methods to fulfil these aims, with the ultimate objective of making relevant and valuable contributions to policies and practices relating to support for minority languages in Europe.
In this study a research team across four universities investigated how cultural heritage and identity are dealt with in and beyond educational settings, and how multilingual young people relate to inheritance and belonging. The aim was to extend current understanding of cultural heritage in the context of local, national, and global identities.
The project pursued five related objectives leading towards its central question. Firstly the range of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people in the four European settings was investigated. Secondly the cultural and social significance of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people was explored in these four European countries. Thirdly, researchers investigated how the language and literacy practices of multilingual young people in the four European settings are used to shape and define their inheritance and identities. Fourthly innovative multi-site, new methodologies based on interlocking case studies across national, social, cultural, and linguistic contexts were developed for the project as a whole, taking account of ethnographic differences.
Then finally the project’s findings are being applied to help formulate educational policy and practice over inclusion of non-national minority languages in the wider European educational agenda.
Project Leader:
Professor Adrian Blackledge, School of Education, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Professor Jens Normann Jørgensen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Professor Jarmo Lainio, Department of Baltic Languages, Finnish and German, Stockholm University, Sweden
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
5 PhD students were linked to the project
Website: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/education/mosaic/index.aspx
Contact: Adrian Blackledge, Email: a.j.blackledge@bham.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MEMORY AT WAR: CULTURAL DYNAMICS IN POLAND, RUSSIA AND UKRAINE (MAW)
The Memory at War project set out to expand the boundaries of Memory Studies by shifting the focus to post-socialist Eastern Europe. The ‘memory boom’ that has overtaken Western Europe and North America at both a popular and scholarly level since the last decades of the 20th century, has centred overwhelmingly on West European memories of the Holocaust and Nazism. Meanwhile, East European memories of the 20th century, which differ sharply in both form and content, often contradicting and clashing with their West European counterparts, have been relatively under-studied. Memory at War aimed at addressing this emerging dichotomy between West and East European memory. With a focus on three main target countries, Poland, Russia and Ukraine, an international team of scholars mapped and analysed the dynamics of cultural memory in the region, and developed new tools and concepts for approaching and understanding memory in Eastern Europe. The team focused on the interplay between memory, identity and political developments more broadly in this region that has gone through dramatic and incomplete transformations in recent decades. At the same time, through the context of Eastern Europe, the project also set out to investigate and refine the field of Memory Studies itself.
The project approached the subject from six different innovative directions, a transnational perspective; transdisciplinary approach; from post-socialist digital memories; through collaborations within the humanities; by mapping, interpreting and debating events as they unfolded in real time; and finally by challenging and refining the whole concept of Memory Studies in the East European context.
Project Leader:
Dr Alexander Etkind, Department of Slavonic Studies, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Dr Sander Brouwer, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Dr Markku Kangaspuro, Finnish Centre for Russian and East Finland European Studies (Aleksanteri Institute), University of Helsinki, Finland
Dr Maria Mälksoo, Institute of Government and Politics, University of Tartu, Estonia
Dr Ellen Rutten, Department of Comparative Literatures, Bergen, Norway
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
There were five PhD students attached to the MAW project at Cambridge, and four students in other participating universities
Website: http://www.memoryatwar.org/
Contact: Alexander Etkind (Project Leader) , Email: ae264@cam.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHOTOGRAPHS, COLONIAL LEGACY AND MUSEUMS IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN CULTURE (PHOTOCLEC)
PhotoCLEC was an international research project studying the role the photographic legacy of colonialism has played in helping determine the multi-cultural identities of modern Europe. Partners from the UK, the Netherlands and Norway explored this through museums, as these are major sources of historical narratives.
Europe’s current multi-cultural societies have roots in their colonial history for most of the larger countries and this project analysed some of these connections through the photographic record in museums. This prompted various questions concerning the way in which varied but linked experiences from the colonial past have been translated into the postcolonial present and in turn shaped the photographic archive and current engagements with it. One key question was in what ways changing conceptual approaches to collections have been determined by social developments in European communities and their relations with their former colonies that have since become independent nations. A fundamental question was to determine what kind of historical narratives are being constructed with photographs and for which groups of people. The exact part these photographs have played in perceptions of the past, present and future of Europe and in its global relations, especially with the colonies, were all key questions. In turn it was asked whether this legacy has the potential to enhance or hinder cultural understanding. This led to another fundamental question, concerning the ways in which photographs, with their particular intimacy and directness, are themselves sources of tension and controversy between social groups and institutions in relation to shared and contested inheritance, identity, memory practice or even amnesia.
Networking with museums and museum professionals played a pivotal role in PhotoCLEC’s activities. Working with museums involved a significant amount of ‘intangible’ Knowledge Exchange in the course of the research. These discussions are encapsulated in PhotoCLEC’s major public outlet, its website http://photoclec.dmu.ac.uk.
The perspectives, methods and practical results of PhotoCLEC also addressed questions that are central to the HERA programme Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity. With its emphasis on process and complexity as they relate to histories and identities in a dynamic European dimension, PhotoCLEC addressed collective identities before and after the nation state and has helped with HERA’s remit to explore questions concerning the making of European and global heritage.
A major result of PhotoCLEC relevant to the HERA JRP is the insight that photographs in museums enable us to rethink how mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in society, European as well as colonial, connect with feelings of belonging and estrangement within the contemporary postcolonial societies in Europe.
Project Leader:
Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Susan Legêne, History Department, Faculty of Arts, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands
Professor Sigrid Lien, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies (LLE), Kunsthistorie, University of Bergen, Norway
Website: http://photoclec.dmu.ac.uk
Contact: Elizabeth Edwards (Project Leader), Email: eedwards@dmu.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POPULAR MUSIC HERITAGE, CULTURAL MEMORY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
LOCALISED POPULAR MUSIC HISTORIES AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE FOR MUSIC AUDIENCES AND MUSIC INDUSTRIES IN EUROPE (POPID)
The POPID project examined the strengthening role and significance of popular music in shaping cultural identity and heritage at both a local and national level. The project took a comparative approach by focusing on different countries and various localities within them to build as complete a picture as possible of popular music’s contribution to cultural memory across Europe. To tackle this, the project assembled a team of internationally established academics in the fields of popular music studies, sociology of the arts, media research, and cultural studies.
The breadth and scale of the POPID project, embracing the work of music archivists, historians, journalists, curators, exhibitors, broadcasters, music producers, event organisers, policy agencies and tourism bodies, as well as the thoughts and perceptions of a diverse range of music listeners across the four countries, provided an unprecedented overall view of the music heritage sector in Austria, England, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. The POPID project recognised and exploited the wide range of meanings that the term “heritage” has and explored the different ways in which it is used and interpreted. The project was able to examine how heritage is practised by individuals, groups and organisations in different European countries, as well as how groups and organisations across different sectors and countries use the associated language and discourse for certain ends (especially marketing) and for constructing a sense of shared musical identity and history.
In examining heritage issues as seen by individual audience members’ and practitioners’ through their understanding and appreciation of popular music, the project demonstrated that heritage, in addition to its connection with space and place, may also have a pan-European dimension that is preserved and expressed across generations. This is bound together through shared understanding of generic styles such as rock and punk, along with locally produced popular music that is seen as socially and culturally significant. The POPID project provided a wealth of information and insight for organisations and practitioners in the music industry, as well as the fields of heritage, tourism, and public cultural policy, in showing how cultural memories and identities centring around local popular music may be used to re-connect and engage with audiences that at first sight appear to have been dispersed and disengaged in contemporary societies as a result of ongoing processes of globalisation/internationalisation, individualisation, and rapid technological change.
Project Leader:
Professor Susanne Janssen, Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Principal Investigators:
Professor Sara Cohen, School of Music, Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
Dr Andreas Gebesmair, Business Department, St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences, Austria
Dr Peter Stanković, Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Professor Alfred Smudits, Institute for Musicology, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Austria
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
6 PhD students linked to the POPID project
Website: http://www.eshcc.eur.nl/hera_popid/
Contact: Susanne Janssen (Project Leader), Email: s.janssen@eshcc.eur.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RHYTHM CHANGES: JAZZ CULTURES AND EUROPEAN IDENTITIES (RHYTHM CHANGES)
The project Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities examined the inherited traditions and practices of European jazz cultures in Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK. The project developed new insights into cultural exchanges and dynamics between different countries, groups and related media. It was broken down into five work packages that linked directly into the theme of Cultural Dynamics, aiming to develop a broader understanding of the relationship between counterpoint, tradition and myth, community and identity. Over a three year period, Rhythm Changes achieved a significant impact on the field of jazz studies, offering a model for cross-disciplinary working, networking and Knowledge Exchange.
The project began with background research, literature reviews and establishment of the communications and knowledge exchange framework, including a website, initial data gathering, networking, media dissemination and partner liaison, training, performances and workshops. There were also conference presentations and Knowledge Transfer events. Then during the second year, the first Rhythm Changes conference took place in Amsterdam and the project team continued to work on reports about jazz scenes in partner countries. Research was presented at leading international conferences and high profile Knowledge Exchange projects, while performance events were staged with a range of European partner organisations. There was also a commissioned photography exhibition from National Portrait Photography Prizewinner, Paul Floyd Blake, in preparation for the 2013 Rethinking Jazz Cultures Conference, which took place at the University of Salford's Media City UK campus. The exhibition, entitled 'Rethinking Jazz', featured 30 photographs taken at three leading European Jazz Festivals (Copenhagen, North Sea and London) and provided a fitting opening to the showcase event, which featured over 100 speakers from 22 countries.
Rhythm Changes was the first collaborative humanities project to explore the complexities of jazz as a transnational practice and in particular its relationship with changing European identities. The project generated a body of work that has challenged the way in which jazz cultures are represented and understood. Issues of collectiveness, transnationalism, cultural identity and place have played out in complex ways within each work package. A large number of academic publications were produced and an enormous amount of knowledge exchange activities were carried out.
Project Leader:
Professor Tony Whyton, School of Arts & Media, Salford Music Research Centre, The University of Salford, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Dr Anne Dvinge,Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Dr Petter Frost Fadnes,Department of Music and Dance, University of Stavanger, Norway
Professor Franz Kerschbaumer,Institute for Jazz Research, University of Music and Performing Arts of Graz, Austria
Professor Walter Van De Leur ,Institute of Culture and History, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
3 PhD students linked to the Rhythm Changes project
Website: www.rhythmchanges.net
Contact: Tony Whyton (Project Leader)
Email: t.whyton@salford.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SHARING ANCIENT WISDOMS: EXPLORING THE TRADITION OF GREEK AND ARABIC WISDOM LITERATURES (SAWS)
SAWS developed modern digital methods to explore the large collections of ancient sayings that provided a crucial mechanism for exchange of ideas in medieval Mediterranean and European societies over many centuries. This material has often been neglected since it is difficult to handle in printed form, but is now ripe for analysis, to demonstrate what concepts were considered worth preserving and transmitting. The metaphor of picking flowers was regularly used to describe this selection process, giving us the terms anthology (from Greek), or florilegium (from Latin). Selections of this kind are always useful, but they were of particular value in a world before printing, when large texts were costly to produce.
Working in a pioneering field the project had to cope with rapid changes in methods available during its course and made a significant contribution to these itself. Many things that were difficult at the beginning of the project were much simpler by the end, yet some resources or tools were still not available. For example the new catalogue of ancient authors at Perseus only became public during the final month of the project. The development of the Alpheios project at Harvard persuaded the team to alter its approach to Arabic sources, since there was no point in doing the same thing twice, but it was impossible to link to them in their current state of development. It would have been very helpful to be able to link the materials to the new Diktyon website of Greek manuscripts, which will provide permanent identifiers for the information currently held in Pinakes.
This means that in some ways the team’s accomplishments will date quite quickly, as new possibilities emerge, but this will be driven in large part by what the SAWS project itself has accomplished. One reason why the material has been made freely available in XML is that, in a few years’ time, a new transformation and enrichment of all the texts will be quite feasible. The team is very grateful to have been part of this process, and to have been able to demonstrate the key role of European collaborative research in the humanities.
Project Leader:
Professor Charlotte Roueché, Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Stephan Procházka, Institut für Orientalistik, University of Vienna, Austria
Professor Denis Searby, Department of French, Italian and Classical Languages, University of Stockholm, Sweden
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
The SAWS project included no fully-funded PhD students. But several students working for associated PhDs were trained and employed. Of these six were co-authors of the final outputs: London (1), Uppsala (2), Vienna (3). Many more contributed to the project in a variety of ways, and from a variety of places: Bologna (1), Georgetown (1), Halle (3), Ioannina (2), Liège (1), London (5).
Website: http://www.heranet.info/saws/index
Contact: Charlotte Roueché (Project Leader), Email: charlotte.roueche@kcl.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ASSEMBLY PROJECT – MEETING PLACES IN NORTHERN EUROPE AD 400-1500 (TAP)
Assembly places and practices are fundamental to our understanding of how medieval society in Northern Europe was transformed from a network of small scale local power-structures to a competing system of large kingdoms with royally driven administrative infra-structures. The assembly or thing was an institution that emerged in a variety of shapes and forms in different parts of the North Sea zone, and provided an arena within which authority and power could be negotiated, consolidated and territorial control extended.
This project was set up to establish a critical understanding of the role of the assembly in the consolidation and maintenance of collective identities and emergent kingdoms in medieval Northern Europe.
TAP showed that over time assembly exerted a powerful influence on political consciousness at local to supra-regional levels. In particular it revealed how assembly exerted a phenomenal hold over local consciousness and identity for generations and how even major structural shifts in ruling systems failed to dismantle such local networks. A far-reaching discovery is that far from attempting to overwrite systems and places, elites and colonisers engaged strategically in a more reconciliatory approach, attempting to absorb and reshape existing places and systems.
The sites themselves often have remarkable trajectories, sometimes active for over a thousand years, which is a considerable achievement for places lacking major devotional or regal standing structures such as churches or palaces. These places, often through their monuments or role as landmarks, have acted as powerful curators of local memory and identity across generations. Yet assembly places are frequently overlooked in modern scholarship and in museum exhibitions, interpretation and educational dissemination. TAP redressed this omission through extensive public communication, through a major exhibition in Norway, work with museums in the North East and its social networking presence, as well as new academic networks. The aim was to re-engage museums, heritage and the public with the idea of assembly as something powerful for local and regional identity.
Project Leader:
Dr Frode Iversen, Department of Archaeology, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway
Principal Investigators:
Dr Natasha Mehler, Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte, Universität Wien, Austria
Dr Alexandra Sanmark, Centre for Nordic Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands, United Kingdom
Dr Sarah Semple, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
3 PhD students linked to The Assembly Project
Website: http://www.heranet.info/tap/index
Contact: Frode Iversen (Project Leader), Email: frode.iversen@khm.uio.no
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DYNAMICS OF THE MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT: TEXT COLLECTIONS FROM A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE (DYNAMICSOFTHEMEDIEVALMANUSCRIPT)
Modern editions of medieval literary texts tend to give the false impression they have come down to us in single-text manuscripts or well-ordered anthologies, with only minor revisions along the way. The truth is very different, since in reality most medieval texts, though perhaps originally composed individually, evolved and were read in multi-text manuscripts, organised in a variety of ways. Throughout the Middle Ages, these texts were copied and recopied by scribes to yield different manuscripts in a variety of contexts. With each new copy and changing of context, both the works and their meanings evolved, often significantly. This project was set up to investigate the textual dynamics of this revision and rewriting process and the implications both for contemporary readers of the manuscripts and the concept of authorship in pre-modern and pre-print cultures. The project also sought to understand how these dynamic processes shaped readers’ identities in the later Middle Ages, one of the most important formative periods for the cultural and social fabric of modern Europe.
This was the first large-scale study to investigate multi-text codices from a wider European perspective. The project sought to answer nine specific research questions, with three more added during its course to make up 12.
Project Leader:
Dr Bart Besamusca
Department of Dutch, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Principal Investigators:
Professor Matthias Meyer, Institut f. Germanistik, Philologisch-kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Universität Wien, Austria
Professor Karen Pratt, Department of French, King's College London, United Kingdom
Professor Ad Putter, English Department, School of Humanities, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project: 4
Websites: http://dynamicsofthemedievalmanuscript.eu/
www.everycodextellsastory.eu
Contact: Bart Besamusca (Project Leader), Email: A.A.M.Besamusca@uu.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN THE TRANSNATIONAL FORMATION OF ROMANI IDENTITY (ROMIDENT)
The Romident project was overdue given the rapid ascent of the Romani language over the last two decades following the collapse of communism in former Eastern Bloc states. Romani is now by far the biggest first language in the European Union that is not spoken by a majority of people in any region or country, with at least 3.5 million speakers living in dispersed communities. Traditionally an oral language whose use was largely limited to informal interaction in the family domain, over the past few decades Romani has gradually expanded in function to embrace formal usage including various functions in public discourse. Having started in the 1960s, this development gained momentum after the early 1990s following the democratisation process in Central and Eastern Europe, where the majority of the Romani-speaking population resides. Romident set out to investigate the ongoing role of language in forging the modern Romani identity and in turn shed light on our theoretical understanding of trans-national and diasporic identity formation in the age of globalisation.
The project set out to investigate what roles language has played in forging the modern Romani identity. These roles include as a key cultural asset providing a foundation for identity, as an emblem of identity, and as a medium through which identity is presented and communicated. It assessed what social conditions and attitudes support pluralism or diversity in the formation of identity, and at the time the forces that encourage convergence or uniformity. The project explored the role new technologies play in the innovative use and shaping of language and the extent to which European-led initiatives and processes have helped raise the profile of Romani in individual countries. It tried to address the more specific question of how local initiatives, emanating from Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), local authorities and individual activists, are reacting to a recent Council of Europe initiative on Romani. Another key question was how members of Romani communities are inspired to engage in ‘language activism’ through trans-national encounters. In a broader sense the project was taking the Romani model in its pluralist and trans-national context as a case study for enhancing theoretical understanding of trans-national and diasporic identity formation in the age of globalisation.
Altogether, the project has heralded the emergence of a language policy that may be characterised as non-territorial in its outreach, transnational in its strategic approach, and pluralistic in its practical implementation. The project’s resources as presented in its Romani Virtual Library will help understand and implement teaching and learning strategies that follow this pluralistic process, i.e. cater for the language needs of a trans-national audience and make use of the opportunities of digital technology for both language promotion and analysis.
Project Leader:
Professor Yaron Matras, Department of Linguistics, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Peter Bakker, Linguistik, Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, Aarhus Universiteit, Denmark
Professor Dieter Halwachs, Institute for Language, Plurilingualism and Didactics, University of Graz, Austria
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
1 PhD student linked to the ROMIDENT project
Website: http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/atmanchester/projects/RomIdent.shtml
Contact: Yaron Matras (Project Leader), Email: yaron.matras@manchester.ac.uk
SHORT DESCRIPTION PROJECT RESULTS AND IMPACTS
Theme II: Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation
COPYRIGHTING CREATIVITY: CREATIVE VALUES, CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS AND SYSTEMS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (CULTIVATE)
The digitisation of cultural archives makes them more accessible to the public but also creates difficult challenges relating to copyright and intellectual property that were previously either irrelevant or had been thought to have been settled. CULTIVATE was set up to address these challenges through a three-year research collaboration between the Universities of Copenhagen, Uppsala, London, Utrecht and Iceland, as part of the HERA Joint Research Programme for the theme ‘Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation’.
With its interdisciplinary combining of legal studies and cultural heritage research, this project has overall potential to revise the understanding of the importance of intellectual property for the humanities as well as of the role of creativity in the arts, giving credit to adaptation as well as originality. It has already had a tangible impact in one instance, with The Performing Rights Society of Iceland (STEF) making a radical change in policy with regard to traditional music.
The project has furthermore highlighted the position of cultural heritage institutions as both ‘consumers’ of copyright protected works and as ‘producers’, and therefore rights holders, to copyright protected works. It has shown how modern science emerges in the intersection of celebrity culture, through the power of print culture, and under the influence of intellectual property. It has offered proposals for resolving the impasse created by the failure of the law, internationally and nationally, to recognise the conflicts that arise when private property rights and community/public rights co-exist in relation to the same intangible cultural subject matter.
Finally, the work on Festivals looks set to make a conceptual breakthrough that will benefit scholarship in the humanities (and economics) and policy-formation in the cultural sector.
New funding opportunities are actively being pursued; collaborations and partnerships are set to continue.
Project Leader:
Professor Helle Porsdam, The SAXO Institute, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Principal Investigators:
Professor Madeleine De Cock Buning, Centre for Intellectual Property Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Professor Valdimar Hafstein, Department of Folkloristics/Ethnology, University of Iceland, Iceland
Professor Fiona Macmillan, School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom
Professor Eva Hemmungs-Wirtén, Department of ALM (Archival Science, Library & information Science and Museology), Uppsala University, Sweden
Website: http://cultivateproject.dk/
Contact: Helle Porsdam (Project Leader), Email: porsdam@hum.ku.dk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATIVITY AND CRAFT PRODUCTION IN MIDDLE AND LATE BRONZE AGE EUROPE (CINBA)
Studies of creativity frequently focus on the modern era, yet creativity has played an important role throughout human history. Creativity can therefore only be properly understood by complementing present-day studies with investigations of the past. This collaborative research project aimed to fill that gap by exploring creativity during Middle and Late Bronze Age Europe (1800-800/500BC), looking at developments in decorative motifs, techniques and skills for three different materials:
This project investigated Bronze Age objects as a means of gaining insights into the development of creativity before the written word. This is a fertile period for such study because changes in material culture were driven largely by developments related to creativity rather than technology, which saw only modest changes. Types of loom remained basically the same, while methods for casting objects were being established and potting techniques were not substantially altered. The main shifts were the result of developments not in technology itself but in the skills needed to apply it and the creativity to exploit the potential of materials, in particular their surfaces and different degrees of plasticity.
The research comprised comparative studies of these materials in three regions on a north-south axis: Scandinavia, Central Europe and South East Europe. It focused on the development of craft-skills and stylistic characteristics, comparing their similarities and differences. Examination of contemporary engagements with Bronze Age objects helped elucidate the relationship between ancient and modern creativity.
The number and range of outputs has enabled CinBA to maximise impact while also directing these at particular stakeholders, including academics and students, contemporary craftspeople, cultural heritage institutions, tourism and craft centres, and the wider public. The research led to a policy document on the potential of creative expression for heritage institutions. Major European museums (National Museum of Denmark; Natural History Museum, Vienna; Archaeological Museum in Zagreb) have engaged with the project through exhibitions and visitor activities, using CinBA research to enhance content and delivery of outreach programmes. At the same time the CinBA Live Project involving contemporary crafts students and Maker Engagement Project have been successful. The public access part of the CinBA website has proved very popular. It offered two collaborative art projects designed by CinBA, ‘Chinese Whispers’ and ‘Motifs Tracking’, which presented opportunities for the public to participate by producing and transforming images originating in Bronze Age motifs.
Project Leader:
Dr Joanna Sofaer, Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Lise Bender-Jørgensen, Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Dr Flemming Kaul , Danish Prehistory, National Museum of Denmark, Denmark
Dr Anton Kern, Prähistorische Abteilung, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria
Dr Ivan Mirnik, Department of Numismatics, Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, Croatia
Dr Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
3 PhD students paid directly by the project, 3 affiliated to CinBA, 1 Masters student
Website: http://cinba.net/
Contact: Joanna Sofaer (Project Leader) , Email: jrsd@soton.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN A WORLD OF MOVEMENT (CIM)
CIM explored the dynamics of cultural production and creativity in an era of intensifying globalisation and transnational connectivity. Instead of assessing the relative novelty of end products, the project took a processual approach by analysing practices of appropriation, consumption and (re)contextualisation in the spheres of (popular) art, religion and museums. Acknowledging the significance of individual or group-specific understandings of ‘creativity’, the project explored critically how different notions of cultural value and processes of authentication, authorisation and commoditisation affected people’s engagements with objects and images. A broad perspective was obtained by investigating concrete, partially interlinked processes across five continents.
The overall aim was to investigate concrete discourses, practices and embodied experiences of creative production, and identify the distinctions and potential conflicts that arise between local, national and global trends or influences.
Research in various locations in the different continents found that artists and gallery owners worked within multi-layered and changing local, national and transnational art markets. They responded to market demands that valued practices of copying and innovation in different ways. Artists had often limited control over the contextualisation of their works. Despite the rhetoric of equal exchange and interaction, artists and curators at an exhibition of Surinamese art in the Netherlands, for example, were not equal partners in a single ’global contemporary art’ community. Dutch funding bodies and curators who were embedded in local processes of place-making strongly influenced the framing of their works at the exhibition.
The concept of ‘artification’ identified processes of value transformation in the Indian fashion industry, a strategy used by a number of Indian fashion designers to increase the price and status of their products, presenting them as unique masterpieces. Linking the products to the magical aura of high art and alluding to ideas about the authenticity of pre-colonial Indian traditions, the designers claimed creative agency, downplaying the creative input by the embroiderers who manufactured the items. As with some of the other cases explored by the CIM, the commoditisation process clearly reproduced economic inequalities.
Project Leader:
Dr Maruška Svašek, Department of Anthropological Studies, School of History and Anthropology, Queens University Belfast, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Øivind Fuglerud, Department of Ethnography, University of Oslo, Museum of Cultural History, Norway
Professor Birgit Meyer, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dr Leon Wainwright, Department of Art History, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
3 PhD students were paid by CIM to do part of their PhD research; 10 PhD students participated in ROIE, the interdisciplinary Postgraduate Forum, entitled 'Researching Objects-Images-Emotions' (ROIE), established by CIM as part of their HERA project. 12 PhD students presented papers at the Postgraduate conference ‘‘Material Lives: Objects, Images and Emotions in a World of Movement’, organised by CIM/ROIE
Website: http://www.qub.ac.uk/CIM
Contact: Maruška Svašek (Project Leader) , Email: m.svasek@qub.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS A MODEL OF CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN PRACTICE (ELMCIP)
This three-year collaborative research project was set up to investigate how creative communities form and engage on a multi-cultural and transnational basis in the modern world of globalised and distributed communications. The project focused on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, studying its formation and interactions. It also aimed to advance electronic literature research and practice in Europe.
ELMCIP achieved several important results with lasting impact and providing scope for further research. These are:
• A cohesive but interdisciplinary European research community in the field of electronic literature. Before the ELMCIP project, there were many researchers and creative artists working in the field of electronic literature, but lacking the common enterprise or network already existing within the field in the Americas. After the conclusion of the ELMCIP project, Europe is squarely in the centre of the international field. In 2013, the two most significant international conferences in the field, the Electronic Literature Organization conference, and the E-Poetry Festival, were both held in Europe, in Paris and London, respectively.
• A robust digital humanities research infrastructure. After three years of continuous development, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base is currently the most extensive open access research platform in the international field, including thousands of records and used daily by researchers and in classrooms across Europe and internationally.
• A strong foundation for research, education, and policy. The ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature, the Remediating the Social book, the European Publishing Venues Report and the many other publications of the ELMCIP project not only address specific research questions but also provide a basis for further research, for classroom teaching, and for policy makers considering how best to integrate digital culture and its study into future policy and culture programmes.
One of the project’s major and most lasting successes was the basis for knowledge exchange it has created. By reaching across disciplines, traditional boundaries between academia and the arts, different sectors of the public, means of distribution, and platforms, the project has achieved an extended reach that will far outlast it.
Project Leader:
Professor Scott Rettberg, Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies, Faculty of Humanities, The University of Bergen, Norway
Principal Investigators:
Professor Simon Biggs, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Dr Maria Engberg, Department of Culture and Communication, School of Planning and Media Design, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Mr Jerome Fletcher, Department of Performance, School of Media and Performance, University College Falmouth, United Kingdom
Dr Raine Koskimaa, Digital Culture, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Dr Janez Strechovec, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Dr Yra Van Dijk, Moderne Nederlandse Letterkunde, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
1 PhD student was formally attached to the project, at the University of Edinburgh. 3 PhD students at the University of Bergen, funded by UiB, have also participated in various aspects of the project.
Website: http://elmcip.net
Contact: Scott Rettberg (Project Leader) , Email: scott.rettberg@uib.no
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FASHIONING THE EARLY MODERN: INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY IN EUROPE, 1500-1800 (FASHIONING THE EARLY MODERN)
This interdisciplinary project sought to understand the role of early modern fashion in creativity and innovation and the way it operated within society in setting trends and distributing textile products. It also aimed to generate wider public understanding of European creativity and innovation, both past and present. This included collaborations with museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A, UK), the Royal Armouries and the National Museum of Denmark. Results of the research have helped with ongoing work to create the new European Galleries, 1600-1800 at the V&A, which opens in 2014, as well as ideas that had fed into our understanding of museum collections in Denmark and Sweden. The results have also supported broader engagement with key questions of European copyright and design, exploring how a better understanding of creativity and innovation in the past can inform actions for the future.
The project has achieved its ambition of leaving a legacy for ongoing collaboration and knowledge exchange. It adopted an impact and knowledge exchange strategy focused on working with three communities:, museum curators, design professionals, and copyright and intellectual property lawyers who were interested in how contemporary rights to fashion innovations are protected. The project was established from the start as a collaboration involving museum professionals including curators from National Museums as either Principal Investigators (PIs) or Associate Partners.
Above all, the project was highly successful in extending its network and creating new international connections. It was able to bring together curators from across Europe to discuss the challenges and opportunities of new ways of displaying fashion and textiles to the public, also working closely with Danish designers and artists to explore their responses to early modern fashion. At the close the project had produced almost 60 publications including two major edited collections of essays. In addition to the publications, the project focused on supporting the next generation of researchers. Over the three years, 42 early career scholars joined the project, which was then able to support the development of Marie Curie fellowships gaining an additional 450,000 Euros for early career development.
Project Leader:
Professor Evelyn Welch, Department of History, School of Arts and Humanities, King's College, London, United Kingdom
Principal Investigateurs:
Professor Marie-Louise Nosch, The SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen, The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research, Denmark
Dr Paula Hohti, University of Helsinki, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland
Professor Peter McNeil, Stockholm University, Sweden
Dr Lesley Ellis Miller, Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department, Victoria & albert Museum, United Kingdom
Dr Maj Ringgaard, Nationalmuseet / National Museum of Denmark, Denmark
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
42 PhD students were trained as part of one of the workshops.
Website: www.fashioningtheearlymodern.ac.uk
Contact: Evelyn Welch (Project Leader) , Email: evelyn.welch@kcl.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MEASURING THE SOCIETAL IMPACTS OF UNIVERSITIES’ RESEARCH INTO ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES (HERAVALUE)
The ultimate aim of the project HERAVALUE was to develop better ways of evaluating Arts and Humanities Research (AHR) that are more consistent across projects and disciplines and yet take account of the implicit or societal value and not just the measurable economic impact.
The project made a significant contribution in three academic areas that together will help policy makers improve the way they measure and assess the public value of AHR. These three areas are:
1. It was found there can never be an agreed way of measuring public value of AHR so a need was identified for new hybrid concepts that bridge the different stakeholders’ interests. The project adopted the term multi-scalar slipperiness to explain this phenomenon.
2. By exploring the three national research policy systems and developing the concept of ‘public signalling behaviours’, the project attempted to resolve this debate about evaluating culture in society.
3. The project derived a multi-scalar theory of the public value of research. This reframes the public value of all research and not just AHR in terms of its contribution to societal capacities.
The thesis here was that AHR has often been undervalued compared with STEM because it is not seen as a driver of innovation or wider societal change. The project has remedied this deficiency by developing a model based on the understanding of public signalling behaviours, showing how individual transactions (i.e. research projects) generate activities that in turn create new innovative capacities for societal action not previously present. These include individual transactions between scholars and ‘aggregation actors’ (e.g. the media), who embed the ideas in artefacts and services. They also embrace the intermingling of the public with those actors through mass transactions, such as watching TV. Furthermore these ideas then circulate in society by influencing and shaping public discourses, behaviours, and institutions, enhanced in recent years by social media.
This approach puts AHR on the same level as STEM research, whose benefits are already measured in multi-scalar terms, extending to how knowledge transfer leads to new firms and products, creating jobs and stimulating spending, in turn fuelling economic growth. Now there is a similar theoretical basis for measuring the wider AHR impact.
Project Leader:
Dr Paul Benneworth, Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, Netherlands
Principal Investigators:
Dr Magnus Gulbrandsen, NIFU STEP, Olso, Norway
Professor Ellen Hazelkorn, Directorate of Research and Enterprise, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
1 PhD participated in the project and graduated on research partly related to HERAVALUE
Website: http://www.utwente.nl/mb/cheps/research/current_projects/heravalue/
Contact: Paul Benneworth (Project Leader) , Email: p.benneworth@utwente.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OF AUTHORSHIP AND ORIGINALITY: RECLAIMING COPYRIGHT IN SUPPORT OF CREATIVE COLLABORATION IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT (OOR)
The project 'Of Authorship and Originality' (OOR) queried how insights from various humanities disciplines can inform concepts in copyright law, to collective creative practices in the digital environment for producers of artworks in different media and genres. To do this, OOR obtained insights from literary theory, music studies, film/visual studies and other Humanities' disciplines, focusing on the two key and inextricably linked concepts in copyright law of the author and the work.
OOR was divided into three individual projects, two dealing with authorship and one on the work. These were Authorship in Collective Arts, Multiplicity of Authors, and The Work as Creative Expression.
The practical value of the OOR research lies in its joint focus on the work and on authorship, two areas where copyright norms have received little critical assessment in recent years, the scope and enforcement of copyright being center stage. The research was also timely in that it coincided with significant revisions that are taking place in international copyright law, particularly within the EU (European Union).
In the construction and analysis of copyright norms, economic and technological concerns have long dominated the debate. The HERA OOR project has helped to bring insights from the arts and humanities research to the fore in this area that traditionally has been driven by technology and commercial market requirements. As harnessing ’creativity’ is an increasingly important topic on both national and international research agendas (e.g. in the EU Horizon 2020, in the programmes of the Dutch national research council and of UK research councils), the work commenced with HERA is being continued and built on. At a time when Arts and Humanities research is under pressure to show its value for society, but also finds itself moving into the promising new avenues of digital humanities, arguably the regulation of cultural production is an area where it will have much to contribute. The OOR projects and its sister projects in the HERA programme are an important first step.
Project Leader:
Dr Mireille van Eechoud, Institute for Information Law, Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Principal Investigators:
Professor Lionel Bently, Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, Faculty of Law, Cambridge University, United Kingdom
Professor Jostein Gripsrud, Department of Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway
Website: http://www.ivir.nl/HERA.html
Contact: Mireille van Eechoud (Project Leader), Email: M.M.M.vanEechoud@uva.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCARCITY AND CREATIVITY IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT (SCIBE)
SCIBE was set up to investigate the relationship between scarcity and creativity for the built environment at different scales from neighbourhoods to whole cities. The research had two complementary strands, firstly development of a theory of scarcity relevant to the production of the built environment and secondly an analysis of case studies in four European cities, London, Oslo, Reykjavik, and Vienna. These two strands fed and reinforced each other, resulting in a productive understanding of scarcity relevant for practitioners and policy makers.
The research showed that far from being a threat, scarcity provides the context for new forms of creativity. Rather than being directed towards production of the new, creativity should be exercised on what already exists. From this comes a range of creative strategies around redistribution, adaptation, optimisation, and restarting. These strategies challenge standard conceptions of design creativity, particularly in architecture, which has been so closely associated with ‘innovative’ objects. The project’s research has opened up new debates within the design and planning community along these lines.
A key part of the project lay in ensuring that its findings and outputs were accessible and useful to a wide audience of academics, professionals and policy makers, and wherever possible directed towards future practice. With this in mind, the team engaged with a broad range of policy makers, designers and the general public in order to test and develop the research findings. This involvement ranged from high level policy forums (e.g. World Bank, Salzburg Congress on Urban Planning and Development) to very public outlets (e.g. London’s Evening Standard, Vienna Public Radio, Icelandic newspapers, BBC Festival of Ideas), with a focus on professional and practice-based activity in the middle. The project was extensively engaged in education and training, running studios, workshops and summer schools in a wide range of locations.
Project Leader:
Professor Jeremy Till, Central St Martins, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Christian Hermansen, Institute of Architecture, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway
Dr. Andreas Rumpfhuber, Technische Universität Wien, Austria
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project
3 PhD, one in each team
Website: www.scibe.eu
Contact: Jeremy Till (Project Leader), Email: j.till@arts.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TECHNOLOGY, EXCHANGE AND FLOW: ARTISTIC MEDIA PRACTICES AND COMMERCIAL APPLICATION (TEF)
The TEF project explored the relationship between creativity and innovation within the contemporary European media sector. It questioned how interaction between cultural categories in Europe, such as industrial/advertising film and new media arts on the one hand, and commercial exploitation of audio-visual media on the other, have been radically transformed at key times. As such it was intended to prepare the way for thinking about new media environments when the distinctions between the consumer and the producer are no longer valid or viable. The project was based around three distinct European examples of artistic practices and their commercial applications: (1) early advertising and experimental film at the times when the technologies of production became more widely available, (2) post-war industrial films and early television commercials, and finally (3) the emerging category of prosumers in contemporary media distribution around games.
The project was innovative in its scope, breadth, and research focus. Its originality was not just in the topics addressed or in the unique combination of research into practitioners and producers who have hitherto been regarded as distinct, but also in its forms of public engagement and dissemination. The findings have uncovered interconnections and acknowledged key factors for future policy and research. The project highlighted in particular the impact and potential of the participatory qualities of advertising in their interconnections with experimental film form and games cultures as they build on user participation, perceptual properties and aesthetics that stimulate new viewing practices in these related disciplines. In this way it countered the common view that technological innovation drives creative qualities and subsequently the creative industries.
The project contributed to the research outputs and dissemination in the form of a final exhibition, conferences and symposia, publications and knowledge exchange events. A unique exhibition at the Kunsthalle Vienna in March 2013 highlighted user-led interpretation and shared knowledge production with the engagement of audience participation through interactive gaming platforms. Substantial knowledge exchange activities drawing on related insights from aspects of the HERA TEF and CIM projects were delivered at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum and EYE Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam in April 2013. In these events audiences were invited to engage with advertising materials in various contexts and forms of presentation and to inform experts how they evaluated these experiences. In a follow-up evaluation event stakeholders were invited to consider how this modification of the interactive dynamic might impact on their theory, practice and policy in relation to decision making about archiving, heritage and research priorities.
Project Leader:
Professor Michael Punt, School of Computing, Communications and Electronics, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom
Principal Investigators:
Professor Bert Hogenkamp, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands
Professor Margarete Jahrmann, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria
The number of PhD students linked to (and trained in the framework of) the project:
1 PhD linked and trained as part of the Framework
Website: www.trans-techresearch.net/tef
Contact: Michael Punt (Project Leader) , Email: michael.punt@plymouth.ac.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Potential Impact:
HERA JRP IMPACT
As a final result from the HERA Joint Research Programme a special edition was produced summarizing all the results and impacts from the 19 transnational projects that were funded. In addition it included an analysis of the results and impact by three humanities scholars who played an important role in the set up and the implementation of this first HERA Joint Research Programme.
These three are:
* Professor Joep Leerssen, University of Amsterdam: Chair of the Working Group for the HERA JRP theme ‘Cultural Dynamics – Inheritance and Identity’
* Professor John Caughie, University of Glasgow: Chair of the working group for the HERA JRP theme ‘Creativity and Innovation’
* Professor Sean Ryder, National University of Ireland, Galway: Chair HERA Network Board
Their conclusions are presented below.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROFESSOR JOEP LEERSSEN, UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM, CHAIR OF THE WORKING GROUP FOR THE HERA JRP THEME ‘CULTURAL DYNAMICS – INHERITANCE AND IDENTITY’
When “Cultural Dynamics” was conceptualised as a HERA theme, the intention was to highlight how a specifically Humanities-oriented perspective could address the topic of culture. There was at the time an ingrained scholarly habit to associate the notions of “culture and society” in such a way that culture was either reduced to a passive, static ambience, a mere container for habitual social behaviour, or else seen just as a “mirror” or reflection of social developments. In that traditional frame, to understand “culture” meant to analyse its underlying socio-economic causes. Culture was, in this model, the mere by-product or context of social agencies or social actors, never an agency in its own right.
One way to break out of this reductionist view was to stress that culture is not just a product but a process. The picture we hang on a wall (which wall? whose wall?), the books on our shelves (which? whose?), or the repertoire of music on our airwaves, are all just ephemeral instances in complex processes of gestation, creation, transmission, adoption, adaptation, appropriation, contestation, reconfiguration and recycling. Humanities crucially inquire not just into the nature or essence of things, but into their meaning. Then the production of meaning (which, by the way, would be a good definition of the term “culture” in the first place) is a dynamic, transgenerational process – and a process, moreover, of such complexity that to reduce it to a mere manifestation of societal-infrastructural parameters would be like explaining War and Peace by analysing the book’s paper and ink.
There was more then to the notion of “cultural dynamics” than just a glib phrase. Culture was to be addressed as something taking place over time in a process of communication and transmission involving multiple trajectories of exchange. The exchanges/trajectories that were foregrounded in the HERA proposal were fourfold.
To begin with, there was the transgenerational perpetuation of cultural presences across different successive audiences (hence the subtitle of “inheritance and identity”). The diachronic study of historical changes, continuities and transmissions has always been the core business of the humanities. The project “Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past, 400-1000AD” is a fine case in point.
Secondly, there was the exchange between “high” (prestigious, canonised, and formalised, elite), culture and “popular” (informal, spontaneous, mass-audience, mass-participation, demotic) culture. This is an exchange that works backwards and forwards in multiple ways, each of them crucial to our understanding of “canonicity” or conforming to established norms, and the position of culture in society at large.
Thirdly, there is the cultural exchange between different societies, countries or cultural-linguistic communities.
Then fourthly, there is cultural exchange between different media of expression (textual, material, visual, aural, performative, interactive).
These last two dimensions, the cross-national and the intermedial or intermediate ones, were, at the time when the proposal was formulated, seen as innovative challenges ideally suited to the international and interdisciplinary format of the HERA instrument itself. In this focus, “Cultural Dynamics” was also picking up the emerging trends of approaches which meanwhile have consolidated themselves as the “transnational turn” and “intermediality”. The transnational turn was heralded by the development of an interest in Polysytem Theory, “Cultural Transfers” and histoires croisées. These were all inspired by the rejection of “methodological nationalism” or “internalism”: the a priori tendency to explain processes in a given country as arising solely from causes within that same country. This mono-national tunnel vision was also challenged in the concept of “Cultural Dynamics”, and from hindsight we can see this as part of an emerging transnational comparative alternative to internalism, which has by now become widespread in the humanities at large.
The HERA projects “Investigating Discourses of Inheritance and Identity in Four Multilingual European Settings”, “The Role of Language in the Transnational Formation of Romani Identity” and “Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia and the Ukraine”, are particularly apt examples of this transnational orientation in understanding the dynamics of culture. In this last project, as in the previously-mentioned “Cultural memory and the resources of the past”, its can also be seen how the HERA call caught the rising tide of Memory Studies as an exciting new perspective in the historical sciences: the historical investigation, not just of the past, but of the experience and successive meanings of the past, of how people made sense of their past. The media involved in that process – manuscripts or photographs, music or a language itself, both as carriers of historical meaning, and as objects themselves of historical transmission – were addressed in the projects “The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript”, “Photographs, Colonial Legacy and Museum in Contemporary Europe”, “Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity” and the aforementioned “The Role of Language in the Transnational Formation of Romani Identity”.
The intermedial interest derived initially from an insight in canonisation studies that canonicity is not a static, singular condition, but intimately bound up with the power to adapt to new media (turning Shakespeare’s Othello into an opera, or Victor Hugo’s Les Misérabes into a musical). This process of re-mediation, which emerges as a centrally important aspect of the dynamics of cultural self-perpetuation, proved, in the research projects that were inspired by it, to involve also the shifting boundaries between popular culture and “high” culture, and the role of emerging media as carriers of historical memories. The projects “Rhythm Changes: Jazz cultures and European Identities” and the abovementioned “Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity” illustrate this.
As all these cases show, their common denominator is that the processes of communication and transmission are what constitutes cultural, social or national identities in Europe. Consequently, these identities are demonstrably objects (rather than subjects) of negotiation and appropriation, and culture by its nature communicates as much between as within societies and traditions – as is well illustrated by the project “Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: Exploring the Tradition of Greek and Arabic Literatures”.
The full complexity of the dynamics of culture lies in the fact that the various dimensions in which transmissions and exchanges occur (across generations, social strata, nations and media) are all in play simultaneously, not just singly one at the time – like a four-dimensional Rubik’s Cube. The fact that practically all funded projects can be cited to present more than one of these dimensions as themes shows how creatively the challenge was picked up by Europe’s academic community, and how timely the HERA call must have been to elicit such a response. It is to be hoped that, if cultural exchanges constitute identities, then all this scholarly cooperation helps cement the identity of a European research community in the Humanities.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THEME II: HUMANITIES AS A SOURCE OF CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
PROFESSOR JOHN CAUGHIE, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, CHAIR OF THE WORKING GROUP FOR THE HERA JRP THEME ‘CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION’
It is important to establish the historical context of this programme, focusing as it does on creativity and innovation. The specification, written in late 2007, states the context thus: Historically, critically and practically, creativity is a central term in the vocabulary of the arts and humanities. Implicitly or explicitly, it informs our value systems and our critical discourse. Historically, it contributes to our sense of the periodisation of culture. Then practically, it defines the aims and aspirations not only of the creative and performing arts but also of new thinking in almost any area of intellectual endeavour. This includes science, medicine, engineering and technology, which would all lay legitimate claim to creativity as a central term of their research and development. And yet, despite its centrality, the nature of creativity – its defining conditions, its workings in different arenas, and its values – seem often to be assumed rather than critically understood.
In recent years, creativity has come to be absorbed almost formulaically into a new conjunction, ‘creativity and innovation’, which is proposed as a key driver of the economy. Not only in the ‘creative industries’, but also in business and industry more generally, creativity and innovation are seen as forces to be harnessed in the service of economic growth. Policy reports and publications such as the Lisbon Declaration (2000) argue that creativity and innovation are central to progress and development, and the goal for Europe to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based community in the world by 2010 has put innovation at the top of the European research agenda.
This conjunction of creativity and innovation can be perceived both as a threat and as an opportunity. On the one hand, there is legitimate concern that the values of creativity – the imaginative leap, the risks of the genuinely new, the iconoclasm in the face of established conventions of thought – are tamed and instrumentalised when they are placed at the service of the economy. On the other hand, the very centrality of the conjunction offers arts and humanities research the opportunity for real interdisciplinary engagement with the ways in which the terms of creativity are being revalued by science, technology and the wider economy. It offers the chance to bring our own research to a better understanding of what it means to link creativity to innovation, culturally, socially and economically. It is the aim of this programme to seize this opportunity.
The programmes outlined below do exactly this: they seize the opportunity, and in creative, innovative, and surprising ways. While one might have anticipated some engagement with issues of the measurement of impact, or of authorship or preservation in the digital age, it is a surprise and delight to find research engaging with issues of creativity and innovation in the Bronze Age or in early modern fashion, in ways which draw in, contemporary artists and innovators while building on their work.
Historically, after the various banking and financial crises of 2008 (the year in which this programme was launched), it became even more difficult to approach the magic formula of ‘creativity and innovation’ without some degree of caution and scepticism. With the collapse of financial markets and the public rescue of banks, what had perhaps been missing from the formula was ‘risk’ - creativity, innovation, and risk. This made it even more apparent that there were questions of value, ethics and public responsibility buried in the easy formula.
It is difficult also to approach the Arts and Humanities as a source or panacea for creativity and innovation. This always seemed to risk being profoundly instrumentalist, offering a promise that Humanities research was not being conducted ‘for its own sake’, but was part of an agenda of social improvement and economic impact. On the contrary, it seemed to me, precisely what Humanities brought to the mantra of ‘Creativity and Innovation’ was that humanistic scepticism the Humanities have been bringing to sacred languages and final vocabularies since the Renaissance. Rather than providing a mechanistic source, the Humanities might return creativity and innovation to questions of value, imagination, and ethics. Somewhat to my relief, although the projects are undoubtedly about creative and innovative practices, about how they work, how they are regulated, and how they are valued in a number of very interesting contexts, the researchers seem to have shared some of my scepticism and have largely avoided the search for the illusive (and illusionary) source. They have done what Arts and Humanities researchers characteristically do: they have been properly, appropriately, and intellectually subversive. Even a project like HERAVALUE, which sets out to measure the societal impacts of universities' research into arts and the humanities, and which seems to take the title of the programme on its own terms, manages to recast the question of impact from economic value to public value. The strength of the projects is in opening up a field of enquiry around fields of creativity and innovation – mapping a topography - rather than fencing it off behind instrumental, mechanistic or formulaic boundaries.
My other concern was that the rhetoric of creativity and innovation seems to reverberate with the present and the future and there was a risk that history might be absent. I was clearly wrong. Not only is one of the projects, CinBA, on Bronze Age craft, another on the history of fashion (Fashioning the Early Modern), but others – on authorship in the digital environment (OOR) or on the digitisation of cultural heritage (CULTIVATE) are clearly historical in their analyses and are quite explicit in challenging the relentless ‘spectacle of the present’. In fact, it is this capacity – this predisposition - to think historically, which seems to me to be characteristic of Humanities research; and it is exactly what the Humanities brings to Creativity and Innovation: a historical scepticism about formulaic, closed language, which in turn opens the formula up to questions of value, ethics and progress, of emerging and residual meanings.
At the centre of the HERA programmes is cross-border European collaboration. This is the first Joint Research Programme run by HERA, and it represents collaboration, and a quite remarkable level of engagement with the public and with creative communities, on issues which are genuinely enriched and complicated by working across national and cultural boundaries, and across academic and non-academic sectors. Projects on the cross-fertilisation between creative artists and creative, commercial and technological industries and businesses (TEF), or on the creative communities of electronic literature (ELMCIP), or on the ways in which globalisation may hamper or stimulate cultural production (CIM), or on the impact of scarcity on design-led architectural creativity (SCIBE), are clearly central questions, and they could be addressed within national boundaries as national Research Council projects. Each of the projects however seems to me to be both richer and more productively complex by bringing together disciplinary and national perspectives, and by engaging with practitioners and a wider public. On a reading of the reports, the interest is precisely in the internationality and engagement, in the cultural perspectives from which they come and in the comparisons which they enable. That is where the surprising insights lie, and it is where the paradigms begin to shift. From a research perspective, the reports are testimony to the value of collaboration, of internationality and of interdisciplinarity in opening the research to questions that cannot be contained within frontiers and could not be addressed as ‘local’ intellectual or practical problems.
Issues of instrumentalism and impact are not going to go away, and public funding is going to continue to ask questions about the societal value of publically-funded research. In many ways, I think this is right, and if our research is of the kind that needs the injection of public funding then issues of value for money are legitimate. I think part of the business of arts and humanities research is to complicate instrumentalism and take a different view of the impact, while addressing the associated questions. And I think the projects here have accomplished that. Research in Arts and Humanities is an area in which intellectual advance is not always made by discovery but by constantly revisiting and re-opening debates. The question of research value is not always about findings and outputs, but about processes and outcomes. As with the Large Hadron Collider, the real lasting value may not just be about discovery, but about the processes of collaboration, of crossing national, disciplinary and professional/public boundaries, and of the technologies that allow us to do this and imagine research differently.
On that count I feel both pleased and privileged to have been involved with this first HERA Joint Research Programme, with the people who have worked in HERA to develop and support it, and with the modes of working and the possibilities of research which it has enabled.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROFESSOR SEAN RYDER, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY
CHAIR, HERA NETWORK BOARD
It is with pleasure, and some pride, that we mark the conclusion of HERA’s first Joint Research Programme. The projects undertaken in that programme ranged widely, from the study of prehistoric fabrics, to contemporary electronic literature, to an examination of the relationship between scarcity and creativity, to the transnationality of jazz – and so much more between.
On the one hand this is an occasion for celebration: the conclusion of nineteen innovative humanities-based projects under the two themes of “Cultural Dynamics” and “Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation”. Collectively, they represent so much new knowledge, many new partnerships, and new possibilities for the future.
On the other hand, it is also an occasion for reflection: a time now to assess what can we learn from the projects themselves, and also from the process of establishing and managing a big transnational research programme, involving 13 countries and scores of talented researchers. Are there aspects of the work we have done that are worth doing again, or things to avoid? What does humanities research need in terms of funding and research programming into the future? These are questions we will continue to pose in HERA as we plan for future research programmes.
The origins of HERA go back to 2002 when the Danish, Dutch and Irish Research Councils established a European Network of Research Councils that was later renamed “Humanities in the European Research Area” (HERA). From 2004 to 2009 the HERA network was supported with top-up funding by the EU Framework Programme 6's ERA-Net scheme, the objective of which was to bring national research programmes together in order to strengthen the European platform for the humanities. During that time the HERA partners pooled resources to produce reports on best practice in management of research, on peer review, on impact assessment, and so on. But its primary activity was the establishment in 2009 of the three-year Joint Research Programme (JRP) that has now come to its conclusion. It was an experiment, to see if there was appetite in the humanities for such funding programmes, and to see whether it was possible to establish and run such a programme organically, as it were, from the initiative of the countries themselves, rather than in top-down fashion from the European Commission. As far as the appetite is concerned, I think that has been proved. There were 234 applications for the first JRP; the frustration is that our funding allowed us to fund only 19 of those. But HERA continues to grow in membership, and with that, to grow in funding power. As we expand and build into the future, we hope that more and more researchers will be able to benefit from HERA funding in the years to come.
From the start, HERA has had some distinctive features as a funding programme. The first is its unashamed focus on the humanities. While there are more frequent (and welcome) calls nowadays for interdisciplinarity to reach across the full range of research domains, including physical sciences, engineering, medicine, information technology, social sciences and humanities, it is also true that there is plenty of scope for interdisciplinarity within the domain of the humanities alone. The differences of national traditions, of differing disciplinary methodologies and languages can be nearly as strong among literary scholars, historians, philosophers, linguists, geographers, archaeologists and legal scientists as they can be between the humanities and so-called “hard sciences”. By working across national boundaries as well as disciplines, HERA researchers have gained valuable experience and confidence that will we hope enable more humanities researchers to be successful in large-scale interdisciplinary programmes such as Horizon 2020. But they have also shown that just within the field of humanities itself, so much valuable new knowledge can be generated through collaboration and teamwork.
The second feature of HERA has been its strong focus on “knowledge transfer” – not just as “impact” in narrow or economic sense, but rather in the sense of disseminating and exchanging the results of research with the widest possible audience. One of the most exciting dimensions of the HERA projects has been the way in which they have engaged various non-academic individuals and organisations – artists, craft workers, cultural institutions and others – in the research process, demonstrating how energising the relationship between the academy and the wider society can sometimes be.
Our commitment to knowledge exchange and impact goes far beyond simply providing the taxpayer with value for money – instead it is informed by a more fundamental the belief that humanities research has a crucial role to play in creating a society that is enlivened by the blossoming of ideas and creativity, that relishes respectful debate, that promotes critical thinking and that believes that innovation of any sort only comes through the discovery and thoughtful evaluation of alternatives. A society that sees the present as part of a continuum with the past, and the past as a complex place always in need of reinterpretation. A society of citizens who are not just trained in skills, but are educated and informed in a deep and broad way – a society that cultivates intellectual energy, and daring, and curiosity all levels, not just in the generation of profits and products. A “knowledge society”, not just a “knowledge economy”.
It is HERA’s ambition to contribute to the achievement of such a vision. But even if we come down to the level of short-term and immediate impact, I think we can say that HERA has achieved some results already. Firstly, it has shown that it is possible to pool the resources of a several national research councils in a truly pan-European spirit, overcoming the challenges and obstacles of differing national traditions, eligibility rules, funding mechanisms and so on. Secondly, it has demonstrated the value of team-based research (which is not to deny the continuing role of the solitary scholar, though perhaps that figure is in fact something of a myth in the first place – all scholars continually share and collaborate among colleagues in a myriad of informal ways). Structured team research is not easy, of course. There is no denying the real difficulty and challenge of building and managing research projects involving multiple countries, disciplines, and personalities, as I’m sure all of the HERA project leaders will attest: but there is always the belief that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts – and the acknowledgement that some research questions by their very nature require teamwork to be tackled.
HERA has shown that thematic research programmes can produce innovative, curiosity-driven research, of the kind we see as we witness the results and peruse the reports of these projects. Congratulations are due to all the projects leaders and researchers for having brought our first research programme to such an inspiring conclusion – although it is also clear that the new partnerships that have been established, and the further questions and possibilities that these projects have raised, will ensure that the work begun here will continue to have a life well into the future.
List of Websites:
www.heranet.info