2021/22 projects

1. Re-making the Performance Repertoire: Equality and Diversity in the Drama Classroom

As part of our ongoing work to decolonise the curriculum in Drama at The University of Manchester, staff and students have been discussing how and what we teach. Students of African, East Asian, South Asian, Arab and Black heritage have told us they feel inadequately represented in the work we ask them to encounter and their experience is echoed by artists and scholars we have encountered in other decolonising and anti-racist working groups and fora. There is clearly a gap in the preservation of small-scale work by artists of Black, African, East Asian and South Asian and Arab heritage and this affects the efforts of teachers, students and practitioners to experience, research and be inspired by this work. The aim of this project was to explore existing initiatives to diversify the performance repertoire (e.g. Black Theatre Live and Eclipse Theatre, the National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive) and to consider how these might be integrated into teaching, learning and research and what other resources and initiatives might support diversifying the performance repertoire.

The student team began by compiling a list of all projects and initiatives running or that have been running in the UK since 2000; summarised their aims, key personnel, sources of funding and mode of work; and evaluated the usefulness of these resources and initiatives for their own study and practice at the undergraduate level. They then compiled an overview of UK undergraduate Drama curricula at select universities, as well as an overview of GCSE, A Level and BTEC Drama and English Literature set texts/practitioners. This work informed the primary aim and output for the project team, which was to identify gaps in provision and make recommendations for how these projects could be integrated or better integrated into existing curricula.

This work contributed to an ongoing project run by Kate Dorney and Simon Parry, funded by the Creative Manchester Social Responsibility Fund.

Project lead: Dr Kate Dorney.

Undergraduate scholars: Amber Barrow, Eve Kurt-Elli and Leo Krenzer.

 2. The Hulme Hippodrome and Working Class Entertainment in Hulme, Manchester

The Hulme Hippodrome is a 120 years old Grade 2 listed Edwardian theatre in Hulme, currently on the Theatre’s Trust, Theatres at Risk Register. In its time, it has been known as the Grand Junction Theatre and the Floral Hall. The Hippodrome was initially built alongside the Hulme Playhouse (1902) and they were both designed by the same architect, Joseph John Alley. In February 2021 a campaign called Save Hulme Hippodrome was created by a local group to bring the building back into community use and save it from demolition. This project had students look at the history of the building as a local performance venue, how it developed initially as part of the Broadhead circuit of Variety Theatres, through to its use as a BBC Television studio for live broadcasts in the 1960s.

Students explored various archives to trace this history in detail, including the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Centre and the Manchester Local Image Collection, to understand how the building has engaged with local, multi-racial and working-class audiences.

Project Lead: Dr Victoria Lowe.

3. Reproducibility in studying speech dynamics

Speech is a very complex system that involves continuous physical body movement as well as abstract discrete units that carry a specific meaning. There must be a systematic mapping between the two that allows humans to communicate, but the nature of that mapping is not yet well understood. Part of the issue is that studying vocal tract movements requires careful instrumental experimentation, and the resulting data require careful reduction to allow us insights into the systematic events in speech.

In this project, students had an opportunity to observe and analyse articulatory data, a visual representation of articulator movement during speech. As a team, they tried to identify systematic properties of vowel sounds using specific measurements. The focus of the project was to establish how we can make such observations reliable and reproducible. Training was given on using tools for parsing articulatory gestures, and the task of the students was to investigate whether different analysts can obtain the same results, and to develop a protocol for achieving consistency. Below is a figure produced by the students that represents some of that work.

Project Lead: Dr Patrycja Strycharczuk.

Undergraduate scholars: Esme Davies and Zhengli Fang.

4. Conducting Corpus-based Research on Spoken Language

Studying the language of written texts is relatively straightforward but the study of spoken language, however, is a whole different animal. In this project, students learned how to analyse spoken language professionally and competently. They became familiar with the relevance of theoretical transcription guidelines, involving issues such as time stamps, tokenization, disfluencies and spelling conventions; the state-of-the-art “tier transcription system”, with different levels for speakers, extra-linguistic noises, comments, etc., associated software, as well as text and audio formats; ways to find speech samples from public sources; the importance of proper documentation of a speaker, including dialect, age, social, individual and situational variables; basic analysis techniques in the study of linguistic features that are predominantly found in speech.

The outcome of this project was a professional, publicly accessible corpus of high-quality transcripts. Each student contributed two transcriptions of 5 minutes and 25 minutes of speech to this corpus and then used to analyse one feature of spoken language of their choice. Visit the website of spoken corpus.

Project lead: Dr Richard Zimmerman

Undergraduate scholars: Sadie Barlow and Xiaohui (Iris) Chen. 

Watch a video of their presentation below.

5. Beyond Measurement: Quantifying Cultural Value

Students on this project were invited to consider how we value culture, and to reflect on innovative ways to identify and describe the multidimensional contribution of arts and cultural practices to economic development. They began with a focused, non-exhaustive literature review on multidimensional human and economic development, well-being, substantive value for economics, political economy of culture and social progress. Next, using the toolkit of multidimensional indicators produced by Dr Leandro Valiati in partnership with 30 Arts Organisations in Brazil and the UK (www.culturalvalue.org), they created a small set of indicators that expressed the dimensions found in their literature review. These indicators - stemming from secondary data, structured interviews, or surveys – functioned as examples of the impact of the arts and culture in socio-economic development from a multidimensional perspective. Finally, they tested these indicators, using a cultural activity performed by one of the Arts Spaces at The University of Manchester as a case study.

Students became acquainted with the basic notions of heterodox economic development and wellbeing theory; became familiar with research instruments and their applications; and developed basic data analysis skills.

Project lead: Dr Leandro Valiati