Projects

Scottish Ballet’s Elevate. Image credit: Andy Ross

Dancing amid neurodegeneration

Drawing on a dance-centred approach, Dr Emily Davis explores the potential of dance as both a means of health promotion and a method of inquiry in dance contexts for people living with neurodegenerative conditions.

Daniel Jones kneels on a dimly lit stage, holding some yarn Overhead stage lights illuminate the scene, creating a solitary, contemplative ambiance.

Tourette Syndrome is a Palimpsest

Creative practice-led research led by Dr. Daniel P. Jones using performance art to reframe narratives around bodies, impulse, and rhythm in the context of Tourette Syndrome.

COAST Project

Evaluating coastal rural communities’ active and sustainable travel in County Durham and Cornwall

Two women running outside towards the camera.

Moving through Menopause

This project uses go-along interviews, arts-based, and qualitative survey methods to understand how women’s embodied experiences of menopause impacts their encounters with physical activity and the meanings that it holds.

Changing Gears

We are delighted to be continuing work with Dave Buchan (aka Bike Doctor Dave) to explore how participation in an e-bike cycling skills programme might foster new forms of social participation and community building (building on from What (Else) Can Bikes Do?.

Moving Social Work

Moving Social Work is a co-produced training programme designed to support social workers in promoting physical activity to disabled people – moving more often for social justice, wellbeing, and good health.

Weathered Lives

Everyday weather shapes what we see, feel, say, where we go, and what we do when we get there. Using go-along methods and creative practice (poetry workshops), this transdisciplinary programme of work seeks to understand how we live and move well with weather in the context of a changing climate.

A group of people in coats walking away from the camera down a path lined with trees and green grass.

Green Social Prescribing

This project uses ethnographic methods to explore green social prescribing – an initiative that draws on the notion that taking part in activities in ‘nature’ is restorative and refers patients into ‘green’ activities, including walking and gardening.

A woman with brown curly shoulder length hair smiling and looking at the camera.

Kinaesthetic Modernism

Drawing on methodologies from literary criticism, cultural history, and performance studies, combining close reading with archival research in literary and dance collections, this project examines how understandings of kinaesthesia, the sense of movement, shaped modernist literary cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Gabriela Minden smiles at the camera. Gabriela has long blond hair and is wearing a black jumper.

Dance and the Making of Modern Poetic Drama

Combining extensive archival research with textual, choreographic, and performance analysis, this project – led by Dr Gabriela Minden and funded by the Leverhulme Trust – explores how dance shaped the development of modern poetic drama in early twentieth-century Britain, recovering neglected intersections of poetry, embodied expression, and political resistance.