Sapling Fund supports three projects rooted in social justice, activism and public engagement.
The Sapling Fund, delivered by the Cultural Institute and LAHRI, supports three research projects across the arts and humanities.
What is the Sapling Fund?
The Sapling Fund is designed to provide a springboard to larger-scale or longer-term projects and activities, particularly with external partners and across disciplines.
Funded projects receive up to £5,000 to explore areas looking at: art, health and wellbeing, and social justice and public engagement.
This year we’re supporting three projects looking at archives in digital space, abolitionist futures and anti-caste print culture.
Affect, Algorithms, and Archives: Reclaiming Emotions and Relationality in Digital Spaces
Academic lead: Dr Dibyadyuti Roy, Lecturer (Assistant Professor), School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
Co-Lead: Dr Liz Stainforth, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
Partner organisation: Milli Archives Foundation
‘Archives ensure stories are continued to be told and passed on’, especially as they become more widely accessible in digital formats, Dr Roy explains.
This interdisciplinary project contextualizes the current rise in algorithmically-mediated practices as representing a drive towards standardizing archival information, often within traditional and colonial registers.
In partnering with Milli Archives Foundation, an India-based network invested in nurturing and enabling diverse archival stories, the team will run workshops between India and the UK, exploring how affective responses elicited from audiences of digital archives can be captured, in order to expand and/or modify the remit of an archival object.
The respondents’ experiences will be juxtaposed with AI-mediated responses, ultimately introducing a new descriptive metadata field called “emotion/affect/response.”
Arts and Abolitionist Futures
Academic Lead: Prof Aylwyn Walsh, School of Performance and Cultural Industries,
Partner organisation: Abolitionist Futures
Led by Prof Aylwyn Walsh, ‘Arts and Abolitionist Futures’ will look at the role of arts in building a future that is less reliant on criminal punishment in collaboration with Abolitionist Futures.
Abolitionist Futures is a grassroots collective of community organisers and activists in Britain and Ireland working together to build a future without prisons, police and punishment.
Ally, Leeds poet Dalton Harrison and Abolitionist Futures will be working with a community of Yorkshire-based artists and those with lived experience of the impacts of prison to highlight the role of the arts in envisioning the impacts of prison, criminalisation and the legacies of incarceration.
Building on a long-term collaboration between Walsh (2018) and the WY probation service and hostels for people leaving prison (specifically Ripon House), the project aims to apply an arts-based approach to criminology using archival means from selected issues of ‘The Abolitionist’ a 1980s journal published by the Radical Alternative to Prison (RAP).
From Paper to Pixel: Exploring Anti-caste Print Culture
Academic lead: Professor William Gould, School of History
Partner organisation: Neelam Publications
Led by Professor William Gould, School of History, From Paper to Pixel will be researching the role of print culture and community printing press in anti-caste and Dalit movements in South India.
Professor Gould explains that ‘print functions as a medium for social justice activism in South India and beyond.’
This project examines the historical trajectories of print activism among low cast Dalit movements in south India, and its continued significance across the country today.
Together with Neelam Publications, an anti-caste publishing house in Chennai, India, the project conducts a case study of Siddhartha Press.
The Siddhartha Press is a pioneering anti-caste printing press and was one of the earliest Dalit printing presses and was a pioneer in bilingual publishing — English and Tamil.
By tracing the local impact of Siddhartha Press, the project will also explore how new technologies have facilitated a global Dalit readership and international activist community.
All three projects will complete by July 2024, preparing them to strengthen their research areas, and to allow them to develop further research grants.
LAHRI and Cultural Institute have announced a second round of Sapling funding: the Bradford Edition. Supporting three projects leading to longer term community collaboration and partnerships. Projects should be in, with or for Bradford. Find out more.
