In alphabetical order:
Belief Beyond Boundaries
"...aims to invite exploration of questions relating to the centrality of belief vis à vis experience and outward observance, and the location of boundaries between the 'alternative' and the 'mainstream' at historical, institutional, definitional, traditional, geographical, methodological, and transnational levels."
Link to website
Cross Cultural Identities Research Group
The aim of this group is to promote the study of cultures and identities at The Open University, to facilitate collaborations and dialogues between staff and to provide an open forum for the presentation of research. Promoting one of the Arts Faculty Research Themes, the group is particularly interested in research that approaches cultures and identities through the prisms of power, mobility and change.
Digital Humanities at the Open University
Our goal is to develop collaborative Humanities research across the University. We are especially interested in studying how the use of digital technologies is shaping the research process, and how they can enhance the University’s mission of ‘openness’.
Empire and Postcolonial Studies Research Group
The Empire and Postcolonial Studies Research Group promotes research into the history and impact of empires and imperialism. Our aim is to facilitate collaboration between scholars in the History Department, and between them and the Ferguson Centre, English and Geography Departments, and other parts of the Open University. The group encourages seminars and conferences and mutual support of research students. In the first instance, we hope to support potential synergies between Empire and the OU’s development of a Heritage Studies curriculum, and between Empire and the History Department’s strengths in policing and security.
Link to website
Ethics Centre
The environment... Globalisation... Poverty... War... Corporate fraud... New technologies... Ethical debate has moved to the very top of the world agenda in the 21st century. The Open University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brenda Gourley, has established a visionary new international and interdisciplinary Ethics Centre which will meet these needs". Professor Timothy Chappell, previously Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Scottish Ethics Network, has recently been appointed as Director of the OU Ethics Centre. Under his direction the Centre is developing a range of potentially high-impact projects.
Link to website
Globalization, Identity Politics, and Social Conflict: Contemporary Texts and Discourses
"...is an international collaborative research project" which examines "the relationships between socio-political and economic phenomena such as globalization, identity-politics and different forms of social conflict... encountered and expressed in social/cultural discourses and texts in the public domain"
Link to website
Heritage Studies Research Group
New interfaculty group started in October 2008, led by Rodney Harrison (History Department) and Lotte Hughes (Ferguson Centre and History Department).
Heritage studies is not a ‘traditional’ field of study like history, art history or geography, but a newly emerging inter-disciplinary field of studies. The heritage studies programme is currently overseen by Tim Benton, Rodney Harrison and Susie West. However, many staff at the Open University are involved in the heritage studies programme or research into cognate topics. The aim of the Heritage Studies Research Group is to promote research into heritage studies at the Open University, and to facilitate collaborations amongst staff involved in heritage research. The group hosts regular seminars and conferences, and membership is open to all interested staff at the Open University.
Link to website
Indian Ocean: narratives in literature and law Project
The Indian Ocean: Narratives in Literature and Law project examines how the Indian Ocean has been represented in literary and legal texts from the sixteenth century to the present. Beginning with the literary and legal texts which narrate and attempted to legitimise Portuguese expansion into the Western Indian Ocean, the project examines key subsequent literary and legal texts which have inscribed the Indian Ocean as a defining locale. The project’s research extends from the study of early texts – European literary works like Camões’s Lusiads (1572) and European legal texts like Grotius’ The Free Sea (1609) and legal and literary texts produced from within the lands and islands of the Indian Ocean like Ibn Majid's The Book of Profitable Things (1490) to recent postcolonial literary works like Abdularazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001) and legal disputes such as the Chagos Islanders’ suit against the British government. In all these cases, the interplay between literary and legal discourses is foregrounded: literary texts are analysed with an eye to how they narrate the rule of law or indeed absence of law in the governance of Indian Ocean spaces; and legal texts are analysed with an eye to how they deploy literary tropes in regulating or legitimising conduct in the Indian Ocean.
This project was initially supported by the Ferguson Centre while the Principal Investigator Dr Stephanie Jones worked for the Centre between 2004 and 2006. The project Co-investigator is Dr David Johnson of the English Department.
Link to website
International Development Office (IDO)
The Open University has been working with partners across Sub-Saharan African since 1992. We work with developing countries to:
Find out more about the OU's Development Programmes in Africa, Education in Africa and Research in Africa
Open Arts Archive
The Open Arts Archive is a major website and archive, hosted by the Art History Department at the Open University, which provides open access to a wealth of artistic, cultural and educational resources, featuring work from the ancient to the modern period. These resources include seminars, study days, artist interviews, research projects, curator’s talks and exhibition archives produced by a wide national network of museums and galleries in collaboration with the Open University.
Link to website
Open Arts Journal
The Open Arts Journal is a new, peer-reviewed journal launching in autumn 2012. It will be published online and be accessible to all. Our dissemination is open, spanning diverse cultural, social and academic communities. We are committed to cross-fertilisation between communities – academics, curators, practitioners of art, architecture and design – as well as among academic disciplines. We emphasise innovation. Each edition of the journal engages with a key theme, issue or critical debate.
OpenSpace Research Group
The OpenSpace Research Centre promotes research on geographical and environmental concerns. Our research aims to be conceptually and empirically innovative, and designed to engage with diverse publics. The Centre encourages a vibrant research environment, drawing on research expertise both within and beyond The Open University and academia.
Link to website
Post-Colonial Literatures Research Group
Founded in 1992 by Dennis Walder, the Postcolonial Literatures Research Group has developed over the past two decades into an active community of scholars engaged in a wide range of different activities. Organised as a research collective, the group’s various projects are co-ordinated by Alex Tickell who is the current director.
The main research focus of the group is on postcolonial literatures, broadly conceived to include the range and variety of literary works representing colonial and neo-colonial experience. Initially, research centred on the literatures of South Asia, Southern Africa and the Caribbean, but in recent years this has been expanded by the appointment of new members of staff with research interests in Black British and West African literature. The group has been especially active in the past five years, notably with externally-funded AHRC Projects; through the international journal Wasafiri; and through a number of Conferences and Seminar Series (see Events).
Wasafiri
The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing
Wasafiri is a literary magazine at the forefront in mapping new landscapes in contemporary international literature today. In over 20 years of publishing, it has continued to provide consistent coverage to Britain's diverse cultural heritage and publishes a range of diasporic and migrant writing worldwide. Since its inception in 1984, it has focused on writing as a form of cultural travelling (Wasafiri is Kiswahili for 'traveller') and extended the boundaries of literary culture.
Link to website
In alphabetical order:
Africa Desk
The Africa Desk is a new portal designed to support collaboration between UK and African researchers by enabling them to locate and make contact with colleagues sharing similar research interests and to identify potential future collaborators. The Africa Desk also aims to provide a central source of advice and information for African scholars interested in the activities of the UK Africanist research community, or who wish to apply for research funding or fellowships, establish collaborative projects with UK academics, or get their work published in UK Africanist journals.
British Empire & Commonwealth Museum
The award winning British Empire & Commonwealth Museum is the first major institution in the United Kingdom to present the 500-year history and legacy of Britain's overseas empire. The Museum opened in 2002. It was housed inside Isambard Kingdom Brunel's 19th century railway station at Temple Meads, Bristol, the world's first purpose-built passenger railway terminus and an integral link using Brunel's railway and ships to connect the heart of the empire, London, with Britain's overseas colonies and America. However the main galleries of the museum are currently closed because of the planned relocation to London. For up to date information please visit their website.
Link to website
DISA - Digital Imaging South Africa Project
A joint project run by the Killie Campbell Museum and University of KwaZulu-Natal. The aim of the DISA project, which is expected to last three years, is to make accessible to scholars and researchers world-wide, South African material of high socio-political interest which would otherwise be difficult to locate and use. In addition the project aims to provide experience and develop knowledge and expertise in digital imaging amongst archivists and librarians in South Africa. It is intended that DISA be the first in a series of projects dealing with South Africa's fascinating social and political history.
Link to DISA website
Link to University of KwaZulu-Natal website
Leeds University Centre for African Studies
LUCAS brings together people of different disciplinary backgrounds who share interests in Africa. We aim to promote African studies in the University and city of Leeds and further afield.
Link to website
Moving Worlds Jounral
Moving Worlds is a forum for creative work as well as criticism, literary as well as visual texts, writing in scholarly as well as more personal modes, in English and translations into English. It is open to experimentation, and represents work of different kinds and from different cultural traditions. It reappraises acknowledged achievements and promotes fresh talent. Its central concern – the transcultural – is the movement of cultures across national boundaries, and the productive transformations resulting from these crisscrossings. Its outreach is regional, national and international, that is, towards the diversity and richness of global/local communities.
Link to website
Oecumene, Citizenship after Orientalism
Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism explores how the concept of citizenship is being refigured and renewed around the globe. At a time when tumultuous world events, from Israel to India, call for a deeper understanding of the purpose and power of citizenship, the project opens up the boundaries of citizenship by exploring political subjectivities outside of Europe.
Link to website
Royal African Society
The Royal African Society is Britain’s prime Africa organisation. Now more than 100 years old, its in-depth, long-term knowledge of the continent and its peoples makes the Society the first stop for anyone wishing to know more.
Membership is open to all. Among our members are Africans in Africa and in the diaspora, business leaders working in Africa, academics, politicians, civil servants, teachers and students, health professionals, journalists and writers, artists and musicians, charities and non-governmental organisations and anyone interested in Africa and its future.
Link to website
SALIDAA
The SALIDAA digital archive is a three-year digitisation project (2001-2004) supported by the New Opportunities Fund . This is the first stage of its development and the archive will grow to include more collections and approximately 3000 digitised items by October 2004.
The SALIDAA digital archive aims to showcase the richness and diversity of contemporary South Asian literature and arts in England by digitising a variety of text-based and visual material accompanied by descriptive and contextual information.
Link to website
Tibet Visual History Online
The Tibet Album presents more than 6000 photographs spanning 30 years of Tibet's history. These extraordinary photographs are a unique record of people long gone and places changed beyond all recognition. They also document the ways that British visitors encountered Tibet and Tibetans.
Featuring photographs taken by Charles Bell, Arthur Hopkinson, Evan Nepean, Hugh Richardson, Frederick Spencer Chapman, Harry Staunton and the previously unidentified photographs of Rabden Lepcha.
Link to website
World Oral Literature Project in Cambridge
For many communities around the world, the transmission of oral literature from one generation to the next lies at the heart of cultural practice. Performances of creative works of verbal art - which include ritual texts, curative chants, epic poems, musical genres, folk tales, creation tales, songs, myths, legends, word games, life histories or historical narratives - are increasingly endangered. Globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert complex pressures on smaller communities, often eroding expressive diversity and transforming culture through assimilation to more dominant ways of life. As vehicles for the transmission of unique cultural knowledge, local languages encode oral traditions that become threatened when elders die and livelihoods are disrupted.
Olosh-Oibor Cultural show,
All photos: D. L. Manzolillo Nightingale
Olosh-Oibor Cultural show,
All photos: D. L. Manzolillo Nightingale
Olosh-Oibor Cultural show,
All photos: D. L. Manzolillo Nightingale
Olosh-Oibor Cultural show,
All photos: D. L. Manzolillo Nightingale