Decolonising Part 2: The UKRI studies costing British taxpayers nearly £8 million

Almost £3 million has been given to one university's "Decolonising Arts Institute"

Today on Woke Waste I am returning to a “decolonising” series I started in June (such is the scale of wokery to track that it’s taken me months to resume this simple feature).

To recap, I had been going through every project relating to the word “decolonise” on the UKRI portal, with a view to publishing 10 examples per instalment. Below is part 1, which accounted for over £9 million in funding:

Part 2 (this article) accounts for £7,622,245 in taxpayer funding, with the first (and most expensive) project taking place at a “Decolonising Arts Institute” - fancy!

Without further ado… here are 10 examples (but remember, Labour needs to cut pensioners’ winter fuel payments!):

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£2,947,162

Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage - University of the Arts London

Transforming Collections aims to model and test new and sustainable ways of searching across collections; to expose in-built inequities in collections data; to reconnect, recontextualise and reinterpret the work of 'artists of colour'; and empower diverse stakeholders in discovering the sometimes uncomfortable stories that collections.

£1,989,742

Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts - University of Exeter

The primary impact of Imagining Futures is the Network itself - an intersection of academic and non-academic knowledge to co-produce egalitarian archiving practices, generating community archives that are multi-vocal, accessible and inclusive. It incorporates community actors, academics, architects, practitioners, archivists, memory institutions, governments and NGOs. It will build skills through knowledge-exchange between team experts and engage communities in the Middle East and Africa. Ultimately these practices will activate existing archives and related heritage sites as platforms for discourse, leading to socio-cultural impact. The Network is a bridge for long-lasting partnerships, across diverse contexts allowing us to work towards our Objectives.

£314,712

Nasawe'sx ya'yu'cenxi (Weaving Our Own Justice): Justice and Authority in the Nasa Communities of the Sa'th Tama Kiwe Territory, Caldono, Colombia - University of Cambridge

While many Indigenous peoples in Colombia have always applied justice on their lands, it is only with the 1991 Constitution that the Colombian state recognized Indigenous jurisdiction on Indigenous land. However, many ways of Indigenous governing, justice practices, and Indigenous political structures have been lost over time through colonisation, while the 1991 Constitution both frames Indigenous legal systems and also constrains them by various conditions, too.

£247,483

Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the early 20th Century - Loughborough University

The Fellowship is concerned with the ways in which critical, evidence-based, and holistic historical research on communicative pasts in colonial spaces helps us to rethink and revise dominant theoretical and conceptual approaches, and disrupts received histories to allow a more inclusive study of media and communication. Considering that the core of Westcentrism is historical and its normative assumptions rely on a history that is written with the colonial margins in absentia, it aims to bring history of a colonial margin to the centre of decolonial research in the discipline.

£269,716

Solid Water, Frozen Time, Future Justice: Photography and Mining in the Andean Glaciers - Royal College of Art

The development of a collaborative arts practice will establish de-colonial perspectives from which indigenous ontologies of the life of landscapes as well as concepts of use of natural resources can be recorded. Collaborations with Chilean environmentalists, activists, local communities and museum curators will enable knowledge of the effects of extractivism upon a future stored in solid water, frozen in ice, to be shared with stakeholders, specialist audiences and wider publics, from arts and ecology researchers in universities to corporate shareholders.

£295,165

Komon Sajb'ichil for Ixil Cartographies during the Cold War: Knowledge Exchange for Intergenerational Justice - University of Edinburgh

Cartography has played a crucial role in the colonisation and dispossession of Indigenous territory, including during the Latin American Cold War. As a result, Indigenous and Afro-Latin communities have been undertaking participatory counter-mapping projects across Latin America since the 1970s. These have used participatory mapping technologies such as GIS to strengthen self-determination within their own territories and to document and represent their own conceptions of time, place, and space.

£805,769

Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse) - University of Edinburgh

Findings will be disseminated widely through digital media, including a website, WhatsApp, video, film, a graphic novel, and various popular and academic publications, to reach both Indigenous communities and staff and students in museums and educational institutions in India and UK.

£307,021

The Future of Indigenous Rights and Responsibilities: Ancestral governance, environmental stewardship, language revival, and cultural vibrancy - University of Exeter

The project focuses on Indigenous rights and priorities. Working in the ancestral territories of the K'omox, Pentlatch, and E'iksan (Vancouver Island, Canada) and Maori (Aotearoa, New Zealand), the project will do in-depth work with ancestral leadership, place based origin stories, environmental stewardship, cultural societies, dance groups and language specialists.

£201,013

The Environmental Impact of Filmmaking: Using Star Wars to Improve Sector Sustainability Practices - The Open University

The Phantom Menace addresses the effects of colonisation. And in Solo (2018), characters recognise the effects of war on different eco-systems. Emerging in the 1970s alongside the first mainstream public debates about climate change and other environmental issues, the Star Wars franchise has provided fascinating commentary on how humans change the natural world.

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Visually iconic Star Wars properties appear in fashion magazines (Vogue, 1977, 2002), are referenced by other media such as television shows (Ru Paul's Drag Race UK, 2021), and are crucial to Star Wars merchandising.

£244,462

Diaspora by Design: Migration, Mills and Interiors - University of Exeter

Situated within the fields of design history, social history and diaspora studies, the research and its associated development and engagement activities deploy an intersectional approach in order to consider how new approaches to vernacular design developed through processes of migration and acculturation.

Further reading: