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Community Grass Roots
The number of SIP applications has been higher than anticipated. Most encouragingly, many of the applications have come from faculties that are not normally associated with traditional ‘enterprise’ activities.
An excellent example of this is a project between South Riverside Community Development Centre (SRCDC) in Cardiff and two academics from The Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the ATRiuM. Inga Burrows from Arts and Media and Ruth McElroy from Communication, Cultural and Media Studies are working together to develop a creative strategy for disseminating research findings of an Oxfam-funded report on poverty back to the two Cardiff communities where this original research was undertaken (Riverside and Splott).
 Ruth and Inga at the Wyndham Centre, Riverside with a board illustrating findings of the report ‘Making Ends Meet’, designed in conjunction with Frédérique Santune:
We manage, but the ends don't meet
We cope, but where's the childcare we need?
We rely on our family's support...
But we need to care for carers in Riverside.
The report ‘Making Ends Meet’ explores what constitutes sustainable livelihoods in different ethnic, urban communities where poverty rates are high and where tactics for managing poverty are very diverse. This report will typically be used by NGOs like Oxfam to inform lobbying campaigns, but Inga and Ruth’s project will ensure that the findings will be accessible to the very communities in which they were generated, by working with SRCDC and Splott Credit Union. These grass-roots organisations will act as the link to communities that are traditionally distant from university researchers, inviting original participants and others from Splott and Riverside to take part in a series of game-creation workshops. Results will be used to develop a community-based site to disseminate advice and information on how to address poverty and ultimately develop a fun board game as a kind of anti-monopoly!
 Eddy Richards of North West Global
Education Network, working on the
game design
This SIP project will enhance knowledge around the role of creative methods in social science research, inform the design of creative methods for projects and encounters, and establish a working relationship with grassroots community action to increase understanding of social research within Cardiff. In doing so, the project will raise the profile of the ATRiuM within Cardiff and increase the University of Glamorgan’s Third Mission activity. It will also develop inter-disciplinary dialogue to produce live and published research outputs that may be suitable for further development into a Knowledge Transfer Partnership or Knowledge Catalyst project.
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Hip Hop Science Success!
A successful SIP placement aims to develop a long term partnership with the Science Museum in London to develop the University’s Rap Science programme as a medium for wider science communication.
By co-developing strategies on the use of fiction, science, creativity and hip hop culture, Mark Brake, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Glamorgan, believes that the Rap Science programme will engage the public in schools, museums and the wider community to communicate alternative futures to the young people of Wales and the UK.
This SIP placement will develop the work of Jonathan Chase who recently hit the national news headlines with his ‘Astrobiology Rap’ commissioned by NASA, which aimed to make science more accessible and easier to understand by using an entertaining, informative style of rap in story form.
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