Please visit the OpenSpace Research Centre website for a list of current research projects.

Visual Dialogues: New Agendas in Inequalities Research (January 2010 - January 2012)

Organisers: Dr Helen Lomax (University of Hertfordshire); Dr Janet Fink (Open University); Prof Gillian Rose (Open University); Richenda Gambles (Open University); Lisa Whiting (University of Hertfordshire)

This ESRC funded seminar series brings together academics, practitioners and policy makers from across the arts and social and health sciences in order to explore the potential of the visual for understanding the forms and experiences of inequality that shape societies, communities and individual lives. Organised around the themes of Photography; Film, T.V. and Video; Art; Design and New Visual Technologies, the aim of the series is to generate an intellectually rigorous, policy focused visual research agenda while also stimulating wider public conversations about inequalities and the role of the visual in sustaining and/or ameliorating these.

Seminars will take place throughout 2010 and 2011. Please visit the Visual Dialogues project website for more details.

Biosecurity Borderlands: Making biosecurity work in a complex landscape (2009-2013)

Principal Investigator: Prof Steve Hinchliffe (Exeter)
Co-investigators: Prof John Allen, Dr Nick Bingham and Dr Simon Carter (Open University)

This project aims to investigate the competing demands on biosecurity. The economic and social costs associated with communicable animal diseases, particularly after recent swine flu, foot and mouth, avian influenza and bluetongue outbreaks in the UK, have made biosecurity both a key policy goal and a widely used if poorly understood term. Given retailer-led cost reductions, a diversified food market, organic, free range and wildlife friendly farming methods and a need for an accessible countryside, biosecurity fits within a complex landscape. Finding ways to meet biosecurity standards at the same time as managing other concerns is a major challenge for policy-makers.

CREPE - Cooperative Research on Environmental Problems in Europe (2008-2010)

Principal Organiser: Dr Les Levidow (Development Policy and Practice).

Co organisers: Steve Hinchliffe (Geography) and Sue Oreszczyn (Development Policy and Practice)

CREPE is a large project funded by the 'Science in Society' programme of the European Commission. The project involves cooperation between academics and civil society organisations (CSOs) on a range of biotech and agricultural issues. For further details see 'Co-operative Research on Environmental Problems in Europe (CREPE)' (PDF document, 14kb)

Overseas Trained South-Asian Doctors and the Development of Geriatric Medicine Project (2007-2009)

Priniciple Investigators: Prof Joanna Bornat, Dr Leroi Henry and Dr Parvati Raghuram

This Economic and Social Research Council funded project will record the experiences of twenty serving and forty retired South Asian doctors who have worked in geriatrics in the UK. The researchers will undertake oral history interviews exploring reasons for going into geriatric medicine, career moves and strategies for personal advancement, sources of support and barriers to career advancement and intercultural aspects of patient care and the work environment. The interviews will be analysed alongside those conducted by Margot Jefferys with other pioneers in geriatrics, making a major contribution to methodology in the increasingly important area of reusing qualitative data.

For more details visit the project website

Contact: Leroi Henry, l.w.henry@open.ac.uk

Emergent Publics (2008-2009)

This two-year Research Seminar Series, funded by the ESRC, running from the start of 2008 to end 2009, challenges assumptions about the decline of the public sphere in the face of 'neo-liberal' challenges to public institutions, processes of individualization and transformations of collective solidarities. It reorients analysis towards understanding the development of new practices, sites and definitions of publicness.

Further details can be obtained from Clive Barnett or visit the Emergent Publics website

Urban Aesthetics: a comparison of experiences in Milton Keynes and Bedford town centres (2007-2008)

Principal Investigator: Prof Gillian Rose

This eighteen month project is investigating how people experience designed urban environments. Many commentators have assumed that changes in how towns look have implications for how towns feel to the people who use them. In 'aestheticised' town centres, so the argument goes, people respond differently to the urban environment: they find it attractive, they are seduced, even dazzled, by its visual appearance. This project tests these claims, by undertaking large-scale surveys and observation, and small-scale, more intensive research with individuals. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the project involves Dr Begum Basdas and Professor Gillian Rose, both at The Open University, and Dr Monica Degen from Brunel University.

Further information can be found on the Urban Aesthetics website

Contact: Begum Basdas, b.basdas@open.ac.uk

Interdependence Day (2005 - )

Principal Investigator: Joe Smith

Interdependence Day describes a series of projects and events designed to provoke new thinking about how we should act in our interconnected world through collaborations between researchers, publics, artists and performers, NGO's and the media. Seminars, publications, direct public engagement, e.g. through the Interdependence Day public event, and a reach to wider publics through broadcast and webcast, the project aims to develop key ideas for social learning and environmental change. The 2006 public event was supported by the BBC and Open Broadcast Unit, and the Open University. Funding for public events and research project 2007 is coming from DEFRA's climate challenge fund (£30K). For more details see Research/seminars website; Interdependence Day events; BBC Radio 4 Material World special edition.

Contact: Joe Smith, j.smith@open.ac.uk

Recently completed research projects include:

Governing the subjects and spaces of ethical consumption

Principal Investigator: Clive Barnett

An AHRC/ESRC Cultures of Consumption Programme research project, running from 2003-2006, involving collaborative research with colleagues from Bristol, Exeter, and Southampton. The institutional, organisational and social dynamics behind the growth in ethical consumption initiatives in the UK were investigated. Particular attention was paid to the ways in which campaign groups, private businesses and policy-makers develop strategies to articulate people's everyday concerns with 'global' agendas of environmental sustainability, human rights, trade justice, or climate change. The project was judged as 'outstanding' by its reviewers. For more details see Governing the subjects and spaces of ethical consumption

Habitable Cities

Habitable Cities was a two-year project, directed by Steve Hinchliffe and Sarah Whatmore (Oxford) and funded by the ESRC. This research sought to highlight the importance of urban sites to people and to wildlife and raised important issues facing urban nature groups and sites. The research led a number of papers and other outputs, including a film, and led to invitations to the researcher to respond to various policy initatives. The research was judged as outstanding by ESRC reviewers.

Berlin Models

Michael Pryke, Allan Cochrane and John Allen. This research, funded by the ESRC, explored the changing role of Berlin in the context of wider dynamic tensions. The focus of the research addressed Berlin's revised position as capital of a unified German nation-state at precisely the moment when the role of nation-states is being called into question by claims of globalization and the associated rise of global cities. Further information can be found at the website Tracing economic rhythms through visual and audio montage.

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