The Austerity Awards 2024: Nominations for Best Woke Waste, Round 2 (£2m's worth)

Please vote for your favourite in these diverse nominations. Total value: £2,173,910

Please vote in the most prestigious and diverse awards going.

NB. I am delighted to announce that the following outstanding grant won from Round 1 and will be going forward to the Final: £814,847 - Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: Tracing Divergent Healing Practices Across the Mongolian-Chinese Border.

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£805,769 - Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse)

The continued existence of the Gaidinliu collection in a U.K. museum thus raises important and timely questions about whether and how the objects in the collection should be returned to the Indigenous peoples from whom they were taken, questions that are especially pertinent as U.K. museums discuss decolonising their exhibitions.

£313,201 - Building reproductive justice with indigenous women in the Northeast of Brazil

The project pays particular attention to the role of healthcare professionals and traditional healers in the construction of reproductive justice and how their relationships shape the provision of culturally sensitive SRH services. It does so by organising interviews and participant observation involving doctors and shamans. All findings will be shared with members of the Indigenous communities, policy makers and healthcare professionals through two feed-forward Workshops, two training sessions, the production of a Final Report, and educational materials produced in collaboration with a local artist.

£243,360 - Buzzers for Bedwetters: Incontinence and the Urinary Body in Britain, 1870-1970

The project will focus on four key incontinent bodies prominent in the period - the child; the reproductive (including the post-partum woman and the male masturbator); the war veteran and the elderly - in order to chronologically trace the impact of medicalisation, commercialisation and stigmatisation across the life cycle and across the social dynamics of class, gender, race and (dis)ability. Its focus on these incontinent bodies will demonstrate the centrality of incontinence to Britain's modern moralising mission, and by extension the significance of the urinary body to everyday life.

£185,627 - Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism

This fellowship will provide the foundational infrastructure for a new wave of trans-led research investigating the cultural tensions between cis (non-trans) regulation (otherwise termed 'cisgenderism') and trans self-determinism. The PI, as a trans woman and leading performance scholar, will provide the first major study of how the UK and Scottish government's Gender Recognition Act (GRA) consultations in 2017-20 impacted the commissioning, production, and reception of trans-led cultural practices. As one of many 'trans cultures', trans performance makers have been celebrated over the last decade for interrogating trans lived experiences through autobiographical works.

£113,220 - The Vagina Museum

£112,907 - Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Engagement Fellowships Pilot

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is pleased to announce

Fellows will work with communities to explore topics including:

• the loneliness epidemic in LGBTQ+ communities

• the forgotten relationship between the city of Bath and Ethiopian culture.

The fellows will be supported by a total investment of over £850,000 which will be used to engage diverse audiences with their outstanding research.

£201,028 - Translating for change: Anglophone queer cinema and the Chinese LGBT+ movement

This project analyses the use of Anglophone (North American, British, Australasian) queer cinema as a means of developing LGBT+ culture and rights in China. Despite the plethora of research on this cinema (e.g. Aaron 2004, Griffiths 2006, Rich 2013, Juett and Jones 2010) and global queer cinema (e.g. Schoonover and Galt 2016, Pecic 2016), there is little research on the translation of Anglophone queer films and their interactions with regional LGBT+ movements. Little or no research has studied how the consumption of these films in translation has been shaped by changing media ecologies.

£81,878 - Self-worth as a community asset: co-authoring and extending burlesque's protected and deregulated spaces as good practice

Burlesque creates encouraging, supportive and inclusive community spaces where participants feel a profound sense of wellbeing, which is at times life changing. This sense of wellbeing has significant impact on feelings of self-worth, both in terms of body positivity and confidence - of valuing and gaining agency over one's own body and its worth - but also in terms of belonging - of feeling that one's unique contribution is valued and supported as worthwhile by the group. We discovered whilst undertaking the current research project that these grassroots approaches to safety were valuable and highlighted urgent steps forward that could make night-time spaces safer for all by improving night-time safety initiatives, by informing policing. understandings, by broadening cultural participation and by improving confidence, support and a sense of belonging for other marginalized groups.

£35,285 - Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions

Right-wing agendas have consistently identified feminism, gender equality and anti-racism as a problem, and have used 'anti-gender', 'anti-feminist', and anti-migrant feeling as a way of garnering support for nationalist, cultural, religious or political agendas.

£81,635 - Listening to the 85%: exploring how recording and listening to underwater sounds can increase environmental awareness on Isle of Man.

We will use underwater sound recording to increase understanding and engagement amongst the public and school pupils in relation to the Isle of Man (IoM)'s environmental challenges. We will also use and disseminate the relatively-unknown eco-poetic stories of Malcolm Lowry who wrote about the IoM as an environmental model.

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