Highlighted projects

Founded in 2018, APR has engaged over 1000 students in practical explorations of anti-racism through curricular, informal and co-produced programming, including artists talks, student-led workshops, gallery visits, in-conversation events, symposia and summer schools.

These programmes explore ways to challenge disparities faced by BIPOC and marginalised individuals who may feel isolated in a higher education environments with respect to their cultural identity and lived experience.

In addition to these pedagogical and career development provisions, APR is developing an active research strand pioneering approaches to participatory knowledge production with ambitions to influence structural change and improve access and inclusion for marginalised students in art education and careers.

APR has forged partnerships between HE and multiple arts and cultural organisations including South London Gallery, Autograph, UAL: Camberwell, Carlos Ishikawa, Raven Row, Gasworks, Bloc Projects, Thomas Tallis School and Kettle's Yard.

APR has also collaborated with a growing list of emerging and established artists including Keith Piper, Kobby Adi, Simeon Barclay, Clémentine Bedos, Sutapa Biswas, Harold Offeh, Hetain Patel, Raju Rage and Olivia Sterling in addition to APR’s facilitators who share their practice and experience of being artists with students.

Project website: aparticularreality.co.uk

This collaborative project addresses from the bottom-up the workings of racial profiling, defined as selective and racializing police work that (re)produces, and operates through, ideas about race, language, religion, and nationality origin.

While community groups in Italy are increasingly organising against racial profiling, and ‘celebrity cases’ of racist police action occasionally make international news, there is little recognition of racial profiling in public and policy debate in Italy, and European and global publications and initiatives on the topic are yet to identify Italy and its migratory landscape as fundamental site in the production and reproduction of racial profiling.

A collaboration between Dr Alice Elliot (Goldsmiths Anthropology) and Occhio ai Media, one of the very first groups in Italy tackling racial profiling, and working in partnership with longstanding social action projects on policing in the UK including Account Hackney, the project tackles racial profiling by collating first-hand experiences of policing, setting up spaces for collective knowledge exchange across national, generational, and disciplinary lines, and developing community research, action, and legal support.

More about the project.

Home, heritage, and community language education constitutes a key pillar of migrant life. Seen as a source of enrichment and connection, it is crucial in sustaining the languages, cultures, and histories of individuals and communities and normalising quotidian linguistic diversity in broader society.

Taking as an illustrative case the teaching and learning of Greek in francophone Switzerland, Vally Lytra asks what home, heritage, and community language education serving an increasingly heterogeneous student population with diverse biographies, migration trajectories and language abilities might look like in today’s globalised world.

The project advances a translingual and transcultural orientation to home, heritage and community language teaching and learning that leverages and expands learners’ entire linguistic and cultural repertoires and meaning-making practices and amplifies multiple ways of knowing and being.

Outputs

Lytra, V. (2023) “Greek heritage language teachers as emergency grassroots policy makers: reconciling learner centered responses with textbook heavy pedagogies during Covid-19 lockdown”. Current Issues in Language Planning,

Lytra, V., Darzenta, K., Atzemian, M. and Eleftheriou Kapartis, M. (2023) “Enhancing children’s early language and emergent literacy in a Greek pre-kindergarten heritage language classroom through a translingual and transcultural stance” Babylonia Multilingual Journal of Language Education 1/2023, 58-63. doi.org/10.55393/babylonia.v1i.246

Lytra. V., C. Ros i Solé, Anderson, J. and Macleroy, V. eds. 2022. Liberating Language Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Spiralling down into the archives, sitting under the nave of the post-war modernist Coventry Cathedral, this project collaborates on specific propositions for engaging with archives left on the side of stories regularly told about the site. Archives involve different kinds of materials and feelings. My spatial practice, involves rooms, letters, models, rock, acorns, animals, photos and conversations that make it a ‘living archive’ (Stuart Hall, 2001).

I handle experiments as spinning tops from the past, spiralling towards what a cathedral can become. The task of focusing on what is out of the frame, enfolds multiplying leads for assembling. Specific kinds of matters of care (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), are found in the fertile grounds of the archives, as I rummage in boxes, filing cabinets and in-between conversations.

By reading both along and against the grain (Anne Stoler, 2008), I squirrel between the regularised index. Stretching what could be possible, as well as what was possible right from the word go in the sixties, when the new cathedral was built.  

This project builds on and extends a curatorial methodology and practice over the past 20 years, including exhibitions co-curated on campus, with staff and students, in the Kingsway Corridor. Transforming the space into a passageway of learning with: Bourdieu in Algeria: testimonies of uprooting , Space and Gaze: Edward Said and Jean Mohr in Palestine, and Migrating Dreams and Nightmares at the café-art gallery Common Ground.

Read more on the work at Coventry Cathedral.