Large Public Engagement Grants

Awarded 2024-25

Project Leads: Dr Vanessa Muirhead (Institute of Dentistry), Prof Arunthathi Mahendran (Institute of Health Sciences Education), Dr Stephan Taylor (School of Geography), Ceri Durham (Social Action for Health)

Oral health encompasses more than the state of a person’s teeth but includes their ability to speak, eat, socialise, and smile without pain and embarrassment. This definition highlights the compelling need to move beyond Dentistry and disciplinary silos, which is the reason why this project is located in the new HEALS joint centre for Health, Humanities and the Arts in the FMD and HSS.

Oral health research has largely focused on disease, often highlighting Tower Hamlets (TH) as the borough with the worst oral health outcomes and the lowest number of service users. However, TH also hosts 1,300 voluntary organisations, including charities and faith groups supporting health-related activities. From this perspective, what would happen if the perception of TH residents shifted from passive recipients of health services to active participants in health research? This asset-based approach recognises community strengths and wellness rather than disease to pose the question: “what makes people well?”

The “Big Mouth” project facilitates this shift using conversations to capture residents’ and QMUL researchers’ ideas about the oral health research that should be prioritised to help people achieve wellness. The name “Big Mouth” reflects the goal of empowering residents to voice their perspectives and influence research priorities and impacts.

The aims are to:

1. Capture the views of TH residents about the oral health topics and research questions that they think will improve oral health and wellbeing.
2. Facilitate a dialogue between residents and QMUL researchers to identify opportunities for interdisciplinary and participatory research.

Award 2024-25

Project Leads: Dominic Johnson (School of English and Drama), Dr Ragreshri Dhairyawan (Sexual Health, HIV All East Research Group (SHARE)), Richard Martin (Whitechapel Gallery), Dr Renée West (Positive East)

Hamad Butt was a British-Pakistani artist who made pioneering sculptural installations that created novel dialogues between art and science in the time of HIV/AIDS before his AIDS-related death in 1994, aged 32. Butt’s works invoke fear and imply physical risk or endangerment. I am curating the first retrospective exhibition of Butt’s work, which opens at Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin (December 2024–May 2025) and tours to Whitechapel Gallery, London (June–September 2025). Public engagement activities will accompany the exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Funding from CPE will support an ambitious programme of public engagement in Tower Hamlets involving HIV/AIDS researchers at QMUL (Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan, SHARE) and local HIV/AIDS service-provider Positive East.

Butt was described as epitomising the new ‘hazardism’ in art of the 1990s. He was highly regarded in his lifetime yet has largely fallen from view since his death: his career was drastically curtailed, and systemic oppressions arguably hindered his institutional acceptance, as a Muslim, LGBTQ+, British South Asian artist. A challenge is that there is little shared knowledge of his work among audiences to build on. Active, dynamic and inventive public engagement is essential: to raise awareness of Butt’s work and use it as a lens through which to raise public awareness of core topics: how artists responded to HIV/AIDS in the UK; the vibrant ways British South Asian artists create intellectually and conceptually sophisticated art; stigma and health inequalities; and the complex relations between religion, ethnicity and sexuality in contemporary art.

Awarded 2024-25

Project Leads: Dr Jennifer Randall (Wolfson Institute of Population Health), Tess Woolfenden (Debt Justice), Shayla Schlossenberg (Release), Jane Slater (Anyone’s Child)

Students join ǪMUL to not just learn something new but to become someone different. This identity transformation also includes a desire and hope to become agents of social justice, to work not only as individuals but to be part of a collective effort to instigate change.

This work expands on Jennifer Randall’s National Teaching Fellow winning project Sowing Empowering and Engaging Discussions on Substances (SEEDS), which aimed to “seed” conversations through the students’ networks on important public health topics. Forty students developed materials that distil information in accessible formats including conversation cards that explain key concepts in English, Bengali, Somali and online videos.

This project further develops this work through a scaffolded, structured, paid, training experience for 20 of our alumni and students from global public health and medicine. Two teams of ten participants will be recruited to work alongside a range of third sector organisations to develop materials for facilitating dialogue within two themes: Harm Reduction and Debt Justice, which will culminate in three days of action. Participants will also receive training on lobbying their MP, join a parliamentary lobby and engage in a knowledge exchange event at the House of Commons.

The legacy of this project is to transform classroom concepts into engaging conversations, shared knowledge and collaborative-learning. This initiative aims to raise awareness about harm reduction and the intersecting debt and climate crises. This will support the collective efforts of Debt Justice UK and the broader Global Debt Movement and local harm reduction services.

Partnering organisations will gain dedicated teams for three months to assist in developing, facilitating and disseminating their messages. By training students on developing materials and engaging in challenging and impactful conversations, it seeks to empower them as agents of change.

Award 2023-24

Project Lead: Alison Blunt, Alistair Owens and Elsa Noterman (School of Geography), Jennie Savage and Anna Gibbs (London Borough Tower Hamlets)

The ‘Green Grid’ is a concept for planning policy focused on increasing green infrastructure - enhancing access to key destination green and blue areas and providing ecological corridors for wildlife. The aims of the Tower Hamlets Green Grid Strategy include safer pedestrian routes, enhancing access to open space, enhancing biodiversity, improving health and wellbeing, and improving access to water spaces. Gender inclusive design looks at the undercurrents and causes of gender inequality and considers how public spaces can articulate and value inclusivity and support systemic change.  

This project considered how gender inclusive design can enhance the development of green infrastructure and planning in Tower Hamlets. In collaboration with colleagues in the Place Directorate at Tower Hamlets Council, the project engaged with young women aged 16-30 who live, work and study in the borough about how they understand and use green/blue spaces on Tower Hamlets’ Green Grid, via workshops, participatory mapping and a design charrette. The project focused on young women because they often feel excluded from public space and designed out of the city, with teenage girls in particular ‘largely excluded and excluding themselves from parks and green spaces because they don’t feel safe, included or welcome’. As the Make Space for Girls ParkWatch Report (2023) notes, ‘most parks have more facilities for dog waste than for teenage girls.’  

The project’s public engagement activities were underpinned by the development of a public Green Grid ‘kit’, designing scalable gender inclusive infrastructure for different areas across the borough. We also worked with participants and an artist to develop a visual identity for the Tower Hamlets Green Grid to enhance public recognition and encourage educational institutions, businesses and individuals to help cultivate and expand the Green Grid across the borough. 

Awarded: 2022-23

Project Lead: Shane Boyle (School of English and Drama), Paul Garayo (Stitches in Time)

A collaboration between Stitches in Time (SiT) and Dr Shane Boyle, 'A Changing Tapestry of Limehouse' will use textile making and group discussion as an opportunity for Limehouse residents to learn about and share experiences of the role that arts activism plays in defining the social landscapes of Limehouse.

Since the closure of the London Docklands a half century ago, the demography of and opportunities for employment and education in London’s river-bound East End have changed dramatically, shaped by both the regeneration programme of the London Docklands Development Corporation but also through the social activism of local residents. This project uses the creative methods of SiT, a Limehouse-based textile arts charity, and Dr Boyle’s historical research on the London Docklands to provide a conversational forum for Limehouse residents, new and old, to reflect on the past and future role of arts activism in advocating for civic inclusion and fairness of opportunity.

Through three public workshops, six community-led consultations, and a final showing of work at Limehouse Town Hall, SiT and Dr Boyle will engage three groups, including migrant women of Bangladeshi origin, elderly residents, and local artists, to imagine the role that arts activism can play in the future of Limehouse. The project will highlight the challenges faced by local minority ethnic and elderly communities, and facilitate the voice they wish to raise on these issues. Taking the form of collective textile making and teaching, this project will equip participants with skills and networks useful in future art-led activist efforts.