DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

UWE academics Jonathan Dovey and Shawn Sobers are part of a successful large AHRC 'Communities, Culture and Creative Economies' grant. The DCRC are pleased to announce the success of a joint AHRC grant application: "Media, community and the creative citizen", led by Prof. Ian Hargreaves, University of Cardiff. This £1.4m grant aims to assess the value of citizens' creativity in civic, cultural and economic terms, viewed from the standpoint of the individual citizen and the community.

Over 30 months, researchers from six universities will address three main strands of research that will be conducted around: 'hyper-local publishing', 'community-led-design' and 'creative communities'. This work will produce knowledge that will inform policy-makers in their search for enhanced community-based, voluntaristic models for design and service provision in areas such as planning, design and public service media. The research will co produce a number of creative media interventions with our partner organisations in order to test methods for supporting the development of creative citizenship.

UWE's Prof. Jonathan Dovey and Dr Shawn Sobers will be leading the third strand of this innovative and important work, focusing on 'creative communities'. The research team will work with partners: South Blessed, Knowle West Media Centre, and the Moseley Exchange, which are community-based networks of creative citizens. South Blessed's work on a local mobile video platform exemplifies the innovative ambition in such networks. Organisations of this type, however, face difficulties accessing resource and other benefits of formalisation. The research asks: how can this abundance of informal creative content be harvested and shaped to maximise individual, community and economic benefit?

Further information about this research will be made available in the DCRC website in due course. Please follow our blog for updates about the broader range of research conducted by the research centre.