This practice-based research engages with Uruguay’s ongoing deinstitutionalisation process bringing together spatial theories of coexistence and participatory art. It draws on critical human geography to chart deinstitutionalisation as a social and spatial process, with the understanding that the departure from the psychiatric asylum must be negotiated well beyond its walls. This project combines techniques from contemporary documentary filmmaking and pedagogies of Latin American Third Cinema to experiment with audio-visual practice as a device for witnessing difference and reimagining life together within difference. This research will promote encounters between people, between disciplines, and between practice and theory, engaging in transformative community-processes and the public discussion of topical issues. It will operate micro-politically, employing artistic practice to bring into conversation service users, professionals and staff of Uruguay’s mental health system, carers and relatives, and other members of society. By enabling dialogues outside traditional settings and roles and extending the conversations on mental health beyond the bounds of disciplinary discourses and established institutions, this research will contribute to the understanding of mental health in the context of mad studies and critical disability studies, and will advance the dialogical potential of audio-visual practice and its development as a research method. Recent legislation in Uruguay set the deadline for closing all psychiatric asylums by 2025. However, the recurrent employment of confinement in Uruguay means that this occasion could introduce radical changes in mental health care or merely produce new ways of institutionalisation. Considering the deinstitutionalisation process through the lens of coexistence, I will identify the multiple spatialities and temporalities of confinement in contemporary Uruguay and explore the embodied practices that contest confinement and nurture plural coexistence. I will use audio-visual practice, combining documentary filmmaking and post-screening discussions to bring into conversation service users, carers, professionals and staff of Uruguay’s mental health system, and other members of society. By engaging in public discussion promoting encounters between people, between disciplines, and between practice and theory, this research will contribute to a critical understanding of mental health in contemporary Uruguay and will advance the development of audio-visual practice as a research method.

This study will apply a process theoretical approach in examining how MSM’s sexual practices and perceptions of health and illness are constitutively entangled. Privileging ontological performativity and multiplicity, the study aims to build an appreciation of how MSM's sexual practices participate in a larger ecology of practices, so as to examine how possibilities for changing sexual practices might be realised. The study will adopt a relational ontological and constructivist epistemological approach. In-depth, semi-structured interviews will be conducted and 3 different emic perspectives will be obtained from: (a) HIV negative MSM who ‘lapse’ into unprotected anal intercourse (UAI), (b) HIV negative MSM who intentionally engage in UAI and (c) HIV positive MSM. Ethnographic research will also be conducted at a sexual health clinic. Where observation is not possible (e.g. saunas, bars), the ‘interview to the double’ method will be used to represent and analyse MSM’s practices. In line with the study’s aim of exploring how a process oriented approach might address the practical challenges of informing health policy and HIV prevention efforts, a workshop with relevant stakeholders will be arranged to explore how the research can be translated into practical policy and health service delivery. Key words: HIV, health, ontology, practices

I am researching Kew Garden's role in the development of coffee as a commodity crop, using Kew's extensive archive to uncover Kews' historical relationship to coffee as a commodity as well as the agricultural, political and economic cultures surrounding coffee. This research is a collaborative project with Kew Gardens and Goldsmiths University. I am particularly interested in the spaces racial hierarchies and colonial practices produces, particularly how colonialism and, later, capitalism created uneven geographies and unequal distribution of resources, labour and land, as well as cultures and modes of being. So, the framework for the research would seek to develop a spatial history - a non-linear and fragmented journey through spaces and times - of Kew Garden's influence on the development of coffee production across the colonies and the emergence of global coffee supply chains. In addition, this project coincides with the restoration of Kew Gardens' Palm House, the tropical glasshouse on site and still one of Kews' most well-known. As such, this research will contribute to new interpretation and display in Kew Gardens that provides new ways to make colonial practice and decolonial knowledge more transparent, and accessible to / representative of the wider public, in particular those with lived or ancestral experience of colonisation.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

This practice-based research project develops and employs a practice of 'curatorial sympoiesis' to investigate the relationship between the nuclear landscape of the Blackwater Estuary, its communities and technologies. Starting with the premise that contemporary art contributes to academic and public discourse in the field of nuclear culture, I examine how the nuclear is visually represented and perceived by local communities, gaining an insight into how it permeates the daily experiences of its co-inhabitants. Informed by this I will produce a project that commissions and collaborates with artists and others to explore the Estuary, its legacy and future nuclear programmes. The result will be a curated programme of contemporary art and events informed by in-depth field research including interviewing local stakeholders, visiting local archives and documenting the impact of the nuclear industry. A written thesis will critically contextualise the curatorial approach and projects within an interdisciplinary framework drawing from sociology, anthropology, visual art, cultural and curatorial studies, focussing on nuclear landscapes and communities.