Identity, Inclusion, Diversity and Social Justice

This theme encompasses topics related to linguistic diversity, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, civil liberties, and marginalized sexual and gender identities. It reflects a commitment to addressing social inequalities, embracing cultural diversity and inclusion. This is reflected in a commitment to ethical research practices and methodologies.

Examples: resistance movements, indigeneity and other minoritized communities, diversity and inclusion in languages and cultures, working with local communities to counter social exclusion and promote cross-cultural understanding.

A Somali Village in Colonial Bradford (Fozia Bora)

This project, led by Dr Fozia Bora in collaboration with the Anglo-Somali Society, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Everyday Muslim, Bradford City of Culture 2025, the University of Bradford and the Bradford Literature Festival, will uncover the buried history of ‘A Somali Village in Colonial Bradford’.

In May-October 1904, the Great Exhibition in Lister Park, inaugurating Cartwright Hall and promoting Bradford's businesses, displayed its star attraction: the Somali Village. 100 Somali individuals lived in a walled compound – 60 men, 20 women and 20 children – attracting 348,550 visitors, the most profitable of the entertainments. This Sapling-funded project will enable the first steps towards Bradford marking the Somali Village to speak to a range of new audiences: the UK Somali community with its critical research questions; the multilingual Bradford community; the public at large who will visit Bradford City of Culture 2025.

Via this project, Bradford can build on self-critical responses in German provincial towns, addressing their colonial histories, e.g., the 2005 Oldenburg State Museum’s exhibition, “The Somali Village in Oldenburg 1905 – A Forgotten Colonial History”. We will tell the stories of these ‘Villagers’ – often polyglot cosmopolitans – by centring British Somalis in the public reinterpretation of this history, and enabling the local and contemporary art/culture scene to address issues including the white ethnographic gaze and “looking back” as an act of resistance, crucially avoiding re-display of the Somali community in its internal diversity.

This inclusive approach in co-curating with the very community whose ancestors were put on show is ground-breaking, surpassing exhibition practices developed in France, Germany and the UK over 30 years. Somali voices, often absent or deeply obscured in metropolitan and provincial colonial archives, will speak back from the past through recovery of family and oral histories of the carwo (“people of the fair”), and co-create both the research and the cultural outputs.

Remediating soft power: global streaming services and national film cultures (Vlad Strukov)

This project, led by Professor Vlad Strukov (PI) and Professor Stephanie Dennison (CO-I) and funded by the British Academy, provides a multidisciplinary scoping assessment of the extent to which global streaming services such as Netflix are influencing the strategic narratives embedded in national soft power initiatives. The project also investigates how global and national streaming services negotiate identities and engage in discussions of cultural diversity and social justice such as portrayals of indigenous communities, examinations of gender-based violence, and the visibility of LGBTQI+ experiences.

The project takes as its focus Brazil, Korea, Mexico, and Turkey, chosen for their combination of well-developed soft power strategies and audio-visual industries, similar geopolitical positionings and concerns, and their considerable engagement with global streaming services. The project involves analyses of the ways in which international film festivals—Busan, Guadalajara, Istanbul, and Sao Paulo—have engaged with streaming services. Through interviews with film festivals directors, practitioners in the audio-visual industries, and representatives of streaming media, we have charted the geopolitical orientation of streaming media at national and international levels.

Embracing Linguistic Diversity (Gisela Tomé Lourido)

This interdisciplinary satellite or research cluster within Language@Leeds aims to enable a better understanding of linguistic diversity and inequalities. We’re essentially a working group developing initiatives to celebrate linguistic diversity and minimise language-based prejudices and discrimination, starting from our University context and working across several different Schools. We’re also interested in how linguistic diversity can be incorporated into the language classroom to raise awareness of linguistic and cultural differences and help students improve their comprehension of different varieties of the target language.

Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity (Thea Pitman)

Professor Thea Pitman’s research over the last 20 years has focused on Latin/x American digital cultural production, from electronic literature and net art to community websites and computer games. Her most recent University of Leeds Enhancing Research Cultures-funded project, AIAI: Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity explores Indigenous representation and self-expression through the use of AI imaging tools. It involves a network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics, artists, writers, traditional knowledge holders and community leaders, spread across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, as well as Ireland and the United Kingdom, working together to explore the shortcomings of current AI image generator tools and experiment with creating our the project team’s prototype image generator. The same group has also recently explored what ‘the digital good’ means from an Indigenous perspective through the ESRC-funded INDIGENIA project. Here the focus was on questions of digital inclusion for Indigenous peoples in the light of the debate on digital wellbeing aligned to Indigenous principles.

LGTBQ Area Studies network (c/o Helen Finch)

The LCS Queer Area Studies Network is a friendly and supportive network which brings together the diverse range of research in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies that engages queer topics and methodologies. Ranging from research on classical antiquity to the history of sexuality in Spain, from queer communities in Ceuta and Manila to contemporary queer artists in Thailand, from queer histories of the Holocaust to indigenous queer artivists in Brazil, and more, our research interests all share a common discipline of area studies.

Among the many projects underway at present is Richard Cleminson's Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Fellowship on the subject of the reception of ideas on homosexuality in the Lusophone labour movement in the early twentieth century. This project, generously funded by the Foundation, will run from October to December 2024 and will produce a variety of outputs including the dissemination of its results to a postgraduate audience at Lisbon University, one public-facing piece and another article to be published in an academic journal.