The Brigstow Institute at the University of Bristol, has awarded two Collaborative Fellowship awards that seek to critically interrogate structural inequalities that have been particularly highlighted by the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Collaborative Fellowships have been awarded to: “Access and Active Leisure in a Time of the Pandemic: Tales of Two Cities” involving Dr. Melanie Chalder (Bristol Medical School) and Prof. Martin Hurcombe (Modern Languages); and “Including the Excluded: Education and Wellbeing in a time of COVID” involving Dr. Jessica Abrahams (Education) , Helen Thomas-Hughes (Humanities) , Dr. Myles Jay-Linton (Bristol Medical School) and Lana Crosbie (No More Exclusions).

The fellowships will both think through how the social sciences, arts and humanities bring different disciplinary and methodological approaches to critically interrogate these structural inequalities and experiment with solutions driven by the communities most affected.

Access and Active Leisure in a Time of Pandemic: Tales of Two Cities considers how the pandemic has highlighted longstanding social and health-related inequalities around access to and enjoyment of urban spaces, taking a comparative approach based on the study of Bristol and its twin city Bordeaux.  It draws upon, seeks to refine, and extends a range of methodologies that Hurcombe and Chalder have used in earlier work with local communities, combining Hurcombe’s expertise on creative practice, storytelling, and cultural history with Chalder’s wealth of experience in research design, development and ‘real world’ implementation.

Including the Excluded: Education and Wellbeing in a time of COVID brings urgent attention to the circumstances of secondary school pupils who have experienced fixed-term or permanent exclusion from mainstream schooling in Bristol within the last 12 months during the pandemic context. School exclusion rates reflect wider structural inequalities in the education system in England, and Black Caribbean pupils (alongside those who are of Black Caribbean and white heritage) continually experience exclusion in the largest proportions. It seeks to qualitatively illuminate the educational and associated emotional experiences of young peoples who have experienced school exclusion during the coronavirus pandemic, and explore how co-productive methodology and engaged pedagogy can intersect to produce new ways of knowing which inform tangible change in the educational and associated emotional wellbeing of excluded pupils.

Prof. Tim Cole, Director of the Brigstow Institute is enthusiastic about the fellowships: “Fostering new interdisciplinary and co-produced research lies at the heart of Brigstow’s work. We are excited to see what will emerge from these collaborations that focus on interrogating two key areas of inequality – health and education – and co-designing interventions.”