This Fellowship will provide a major study of the relationship between feminism (broadly defined as the aim for equality between women and men) and non-activist women in Britain since 1945. Existing studies of feminism focus on activists. This research examines how feminism affected women outside activist networks. But it goes further than this, by revealing the importance of these women in constituting and developing feminism. My work will offer a new understanding of the relationship between cultural and political action. It will highlight the importance of the cultural sector as a locus where gender roles were challenged and feminist networks established. This is a conclusion I developed in earlier research on Spare Rib magazine and on cultural participation in Manchester. Since then, as co-Director of Oxford's Women in Humanities (WiH) research centre, I have led interdisciplinary networks on women's cultural production and on their political participation. These highlight theatre as a neglected but important nexus that involves amateur and professional writers and performers; viewers, including those of productions adapted for TV or film; and readers, including schoolchildren studying set texts. Advancing on this, my proposed Fellowship will use a case study of the playwright and screenwriter Shelagh Delaney (1938-2012) to examine how women of her generation challenged socio-cultural norms outside activist networks, and specifically within the cultural sector. Analysing the relationship between cultural and political change will develop my intellectual research leadership in modern history and enhance my contribution to interdisciplinary debates. Building on my first two books, which provided an overview of women's lives across the twentieth century, this Fellowship will use a biographical lens to scrutinize the personal motivations and experiences that provoked women's public actions. I will focus on a pioneering generation of women, those born between c.1935 and 1950. They were the first for whom combining work, family life, sexual and emotional fulfillment was an apparently realizable goal. This research challenges scholarly assumptions that feminism emerged, or was rediscovered, in the 1970s. It questions the existing chronological frameworks of studies of feminism, which suggest that feminism was a series of 'waves' of activism, each of which was generationally specific. My focus on non-activist women demonstrates significant chronological continuities since the early 1960s, the importance of cross-generational relationships, and the importance of cultural participation (both for practitioners and spectators) in shaping political change. My research will be communicated through outputs devised to foster dialogue between academic and non-academic users. These include a major book aimed at academic and non-academic audiences, a theatrical performance, an international symposium bringing together scholars, practitioners and activists, and a radio docudrama written in collaboration with a professional writer. In-depth life history interviews with cultural practitioners and spectators will enrich and inform scholarship. Methodologically, the Fellowship will be informed by a groundbreaking collaboration with the cultural and public sectors. Its findings will be informed by, and some preliminary results communicated through, a major theatrical production undertaken with a professional writer, a community theatre company, a social housing provider and its tenants, and theatre audiences. This will generate new knowledge about the influence that cultural participation has on the creation and dissemination of feminist ideas. Building on my existing experience of fostering interdisciplinary debate within Oxford, this Fellowship will develop my leadership by enabling me to create collaborative partnerships between scholars, cultural practitioners and groups with low rates of educational and cultural participation.

This project will develop and extend the impact activities created by the current AHRC project 'Feminism, culture and women's lives in Britain, c.1945-c.2015'. The study on which this project builds examines in detail the relationship between women's lives and feminism, specifically within the cultural sphere. Findings from this work demonstrate that women across several generations share concerns about their vulnerability within the domestic sphere and housing market. Social housing, in particular, has emerged as a key concern. It has become clear that women have frequently taken a lead in campaigning for better housing provision. In addition, participation in housing campaigns has been a key means by which working-class women have engaged in civic life and affected political change. At the same time, many women expressed frustration at the lack of opportunities for them to express their views on housing, both within and beyond their neighbourhood, or to challenge the agenda and objectives of housing providers and policymakers. This is felt to have become much harder since the privatisation of most social housing. Follow-on Funding will assist women tenants in north-west England to express their views and encourage a wide range of audiences to listen to and learn from their experiences. To achieve this, we will develop the impact activities created by our existing AHRC project. Our project created a theatre group, the Delaney Theatre Group, for women tenants in a Salford tower block. The women used this group to produce and perform a play which drew on their experiences of everyday life since 1945, entitled 'Sweetly Sings the Donkey'. This aspect of our project indicated that cultural participation provides a means for women to articulate their concerns and aspirations in ways that they found fulfilling and which enhanced their emotional wellbeing. The play was performed to c.240 people, including housing workers and policymakers, and audience feedback indicated that the performance had altered spectators' understanding of working-class women's ability to make a positive contribution to civic and cultural life. We propose to use Follow-on Funding to further develop the impact of this activity by touring 'Sweetly Sings the Donkey' to theatres and arts festivals which have expressed interest in hosting a performance. We also propose to use this model of cultural participation to enable a larger group of women to reflect on their housing experiences. The current AHRC project has focused broadly on women's relationship to cultural life and feminism. Follow-on Funding would enable participants to develop cultural activities that focus specifically on their experience of, and concerns about, social housing. This will be achieved by expanding the membership of the established Delaney Theatre Group to include a wider range of women, including clients of our new project partner Salford Women's Aid. By broadening the Theatre Group's activities to include writing, the Group will go on to write and perform a new play focused on women's experiences of social housing, which will draw on oral history testimonies created during the original AHRC project. The original project developed strategies designed to enhance working-class women's cultural and civic participation. These strategies were devised in consultation with project partners and with members of the Shadow Cabinet. Follow-on Funding will enable us to develop more targeted policy recommendations which focus on how to encourage women tenants' participation in the design, maintenance and governance of their neighbourhoods. This is timely given local and national concern over the provision and governance of social housing following the Grenfell Tower disaster in June 2017. Follow-on Funding will allow us to accept invitations to write and present two policy papers on this subject to the City of Salford Mayor and to the Shadow Cabinet.

Post-apartheid South Africa (1994) and post-colonial Mauritius (1968) both have a socio-political legacy of oppression within their respective histories. Access to the arts was denied to the majority of South Africans prior to 1994 and stark imbalances still remain. In Mauritius the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude are still found at the root cause of societal divisions. This history is described in the Mauritian Truth and Justice Commission Report published in 2011 as "still open wounds that may fester if deliberate measures are not taken for national reconciliation"(31). In line with arts and culture policy in both countries there is an emphasis placed on the promotion of the arts and culture to address social injustice. Notably after years of neglect within mainstream trade and industry policy the creative industries are also now being recognised as an important growth area for the economies of Low and Middle income countries, including South Africa and Mauritius. It is within this context and in line with arts and culture policy in both countries this project focuses on art practice in sustainable development: encouraging creative excellence, empowering creative individuals and promoting and developing international networks in the arts. This will be realised through a tour of the exhibition Guernica Remakings, the formation of a Learning Lab that accompanies the exhibition and the distribution of the video documentation of the exhibition and the Lab. The Learning Lab consciously creates a democratic environment that will foster discussion on art and social change, support the development of professional art practice through peer to peer collaboration and exchange with artists in residence, and expand the artistic networks of participating artists and Project Partners. Insights and best practice will permeate beyond participants to peers and related organisations; beneficiaries will grow exponentially through the dissemination of the documentary videos of the Learning Lab and the Guernica Remakings exhibition. This project, Guernica Remakings, North with South, builds upon the AHRC funded research: Guernica Remakings, South Africa and continues work with the Project Partner the Keiskamma Art Project. Located in the Eastern Cape, in the poorest region of South Africa, the Art Project has remade Guernica four times since 2010. Their translation of Picasso's iconic anti-fascist artwork transforms its geography, time and narrative from: Spain to South Africa, from the early 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century, from anti-fascism to the HIV/AIDS crisis. The research project focused upon this process of cross-cultural translation through the creation of a fifth Keiskamma Guernica and asked why Guernica? Captured in the 12 part video documentary are some of the supportive, collaborative art making practices developed through the Art Project. Consequently the aims of this follow-on project include: 1.To transfer learning about key empowering collaborative activist art practices through the effective cross-cultural translation of Guernica. 2.To reach new audiences beyond conventional gallery visitors. 3.To develop deep and mutual partnerships with artist led organisations to co-produce knowledge and understanding of the role of art in sustainable international development to inform best practice. 4.To co-create a resource to inform best practice regarding the role of art in sustainable international development.

Theatre has been used as a tool for agitation and organisation in workers' movements for centuries, while movement activists have rehearsed, choreographed, and performed protests and direct-action tactics to achieve their political goals. Previous research has suggested that these strategies can be effective, and, in fact, that rather than an add-on or afterthought to political organising, performance is integral to the articulation and function of workers' movements. There is also evidence to suggest that as well as having an impact on specific campaigns, performance can help a movement cohere and endure, by generating ideas, feelings, and shared activities to build a collective consciousness and a way of life. However, while a vibrant body of research on performance-activism has accumulated in recent years, so far, no in-depth examination exists as to how this pertains to contemporary workers' movements, specifically. There is also a disconnect between recent analyses of performance-activism and historical research on performance-based approaches of organised labour movements of the 20th century. This is despite the international labour movement continuing to evolve in challenging 21st-century contexts, whose activists acknowledge the significance of the creative legacies of their political predecessors on current campaigns. This study starts with the hypothesis that to gain a holistic understanding of how performance operates in the current political sphere, one must attend to these connections. Specifically, it examines how performance is currently deployed by labour movement activists in the form of agitprop theatre, direct-action tactics, and as a mode of political organisation, taking into account the historical lineage of specific approaches. The Fellowship will provide me with the time, mentorship, and development opportunities I need to build on my prior work with trade unions and theatre-makers to develop this cutting-edge research agenda and solidify my position as an expert on labour movement culture. As well as examining significant protests and performances that have not yet received academic attention, I will bring to light underused and, until now, undiscovered archives, including personal and public collections. Project partners and an international advisory board are in place to support this activity and the development of a collaborative theory of performance in workers' movements that will challenge existing knowledge by centring the aims and expertise of those who produce it. A programme of activist-led workshops will illuminate how performance is folded into the day-to-day activity of groups working in the UK, Brazil, and India, pilot innovative research methods, and generate new knowledge and materials to build awareness of performance as it is harnessed for social justice. The workshops also have the potential to catalyse new practice in the field, and to influence labour movement policy. Further training and support will enable me to create activities and resources to deepen disciplinary engagement with key themes, encourage cross-disciplinary exchange between scholars of theatre and performance, art and labour movement history, and political and social movement theory, and facilitate the engagement of people from various backgrounds with materials, practices, and debates. These resources include an academic monograph, a purpose-built, open-source archive, and a Teaching Enrichment Workshop for sixth-form students developed through the University of Exeter's Widening Participation programme. I will gain leadership and management skills through the supervision of the PDRF, an activist-practitioner whose peer-reviewed article for a leading journal will make an important intervention in the field. The Fellowship acts as a launchpad into the next phase of our careers while creating an indispensable resource to increase access to and understanding of working class and activist culture.

In the 1860s global politics had a profound effect on a local economy when, during the American Civil War, the Union blockaded cotton exports from the Confederacy, and the main raw material of much of Lancashire's industry was cut off at a single stroke. The resulting mass unemployment and welfare crisis has been well documented by historians but the poetic response to this event has never been fully explored. Although nineteenth-century Lancashire poetry, particularly that written in dialect, has been studied by scholars, poetry of the Cotton Famine, including its unique aspects of multiple address and function, and fascinating reactions to the American Civil War and global economics, has received scant critical attention. Extrapolating from initial research, we estimate that between 900 and 1100 poems of short to moderate length are in existence which relate to the famine. Through newspapers, broadsheets, and published pamphlets, poetry was an important method of social discourse, and its unique forms of address performed functions including petition, consolation, political commentary, reportage, and memorialisation. Common themes include war, slavery, hunger, poverty, prostitution, unemployment, education, charity, alcohol use, and economics. This project will extend burgeoning recent interest in labouring-class literature by looking at the intersections between literature, regionality, and global politics. Initial research has identified relevant material in contemporary local newspapers, as well as archival material and pamphlets, broadsheets and collections. These full texts, all out of copyright, will form a fully searchable database with accompanying bibliographical information, annotation, essays, and soundfiles. The texts will be organised within the database by locality. For example, Lancastrian towns including Preston, Blackburn, and Burnley will have their own pages, and there will be pages which cover poems with miscellaneous provenance, or poems which were published in abolitionist newspapers in the United States, or poems from contemporary collections. A keyword function will provide full search capability and cross-referencing. The database will have soundfile capability to include recitations of standard English and dialect poetry (which we estimate comprises about 10% of the total texts) and musical performances of the work where appropriate (a small minority of the material is presented as song and occasionally specifies the accompanying tune). The investigators have already attracted enthusiastic interest from performers including Jennifer Reid and the folk group Faustus. Jennifer Reid will be involved in twelve events aimed at the general public and school-age children across the Lancashire region which will promote the database through presentations, vocal and musical performance, and workshops. Faustus will be commissioned to arrange and record material associated with the project in order to promote the database. The project will also be working closely with Lancashire County Council Heritage Learning to promote the database to teachers in the region and train them how to use it. Schoolchildren will be involved in programmes to search for relevant poetry in their local libraries (many local newspaper archives are held on microfilm), and so to contribute directly to the full-text aspect of the database. This process will be managed and edited by the principal investigator. The website accompanying the database will include contextual information and essays composed by the principal investigator, co-investigator, and postdoctoral researcher which will be open access and directed towards the general public and scholars. The texts that will form the database will also comprise the basis for scholarly output from the principal investigator, co-investigator, and postdoctoral researcher which will be published in academic journals.