In May 2025, Victoria Bates (School of Humanities Impact Director) sat down with Kelly Sidgwick from Good Chemistry Brewing and Pam Lock from the University of Bristol Department of English, to talk about their long-term collaboration. The conversation covers topics ranging from women in brewing to the mutual benefits of working together, particularly community-building and the joy that it can bring. We also talked about the series ‘Think While You Drink’, including some ‘upcoming events’ (if you listen to this before late June/July 2025), so give it a listen to find out more!

You can listen to the conversation HERE. This is our first recorded conversation, but more will be coming soon on the playlist HERE.

If you want more information about events and activities described in this conversation: details of Think While You Drink are HERE, and She Drinks Beer details are HERE.

Featured: Think While You Drink with Dr Christina Wade and Dr Amy Burnett. Photograph courtesy of Pam Lock.

In this blog, Sarah Jones (History) continues our series on humanities projects funded by the Brigstow Institute.

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I was fortunate to be involved in a recent Brigstow-funded project that explored the impact of Section 28. The project brought together academics from across the University – Lois Bibbings, Peter Dunne, and Liam Davis from Law, Hannah Charnock and I from History, and Surangama Datta from English – alongside artists and local creatives. Central to our collaboration was the performance artist Tom Marshman and his most recent work, Section 28 and Me, a deeply personal piece that reflects on how Section 28 shaped his own childhood. The show interrogates the consequences of growing up in a culture of fear and silence – both for Tom as an individual and for the wider queer community.

Tom’s performance pulls from a host of different stories and retellings of Section 28. Alongside his own memories of the 1980s, he incorporated insights from ‘tea parties’ – community events held in gay bars, museums, and arts centres, where people came together to share rainbow cake, drink tea, and write their memories on paper tablecloths. These gatherings created an archive of emotional responses and personal reflections on Section 28.

Photo Credit: Mark Gray

Throughout the development of the show, Tom also worked closely with our academic team. We held regular ‘show and tell’ meetings in which shared objects and resources from our own research to spark interesting conversations, and stepped into rehearsals to help Tom reflect on the work he was producing. The end product is undoubtedly Tom’s but was shaped by a collaborative approach that combined academic research, Tom’s own experiences, and stories and memories shared by Bristol’s queer community.

Tom as Thatcher.

Photo Credit: Vonalina Cake

It was hugely enjoyable to work with Tom and support his creative process by bringing in some of my own research into gender and sexuality in modern Britain. But, further than that, I found it hugely rewarding as it challenged me to think about historical materials in more creative ways. Workshopping primary sources with someone with such a different perspective and training background to my own made me look at materials differently. At the same time, reading accounts of the 1980s laid out on the tea party table cloths helped me understand some of my sources in new and unexpected ways. Far from simply being there to consult, being part of the project has influenced my own practice the way I think about such a prominent moment in the queer history of Britain.

Our work hasn’t come to an end yet, and our collaboration with Tom continues to grow and thrive even though the Brigstow project has officially come to an end. We’ve produced a series of podcasts where we talk about key themes and contexts, and about the process of working with each other. Lois, Tom, and I also recently spoke to the Association of Family Therapists about history, memory, and community, and will present both a section of Tom’s show and our reflections on collaborative working at a history conference this summer. I’m looking forward to seeing how our collaboration develops in the future and hope we all continue to push each other to ask different questions and see things in new and productive ways.

This is the first in a series of blogs focused on research in the School of Humanities funded by the Brigstow Institute over the last few years. We launch the series with an article by Rob Skinner, Lauren Blake and Lydia Medland, on their project ‘The Listening Table’ from 2024.

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In March 2024, the ‘Listening Table’ made its public debut in Sparks Bristol, an enterprise co-created by the Global Goals Centre and Artspace Lifespace, re-fashioning a landmark retail space in the centre of Bristol to support creative communities and promote the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The installation was an interactive dining table with sounds and stories instead of food. It was developed by artists Amy Rose, Synnøve Fredericks and Pete Bennett who crafted the beautiful wooden table, ceramic vessels, and curated the stories of fisherfolk that can be heard there. Academics Dr Rob Skinner, Dr Lydia Medland and Dr Lauren Blake brought about the opportunity for the table to be made through inviting ideas for an artwork that would help explore the meaning of ‘food justice’. This term is gaining power, not least in Bristol, as people use it to point to issues of a lack of fairness in the food system. Rob, Lydia and Lauren were captured by the idea of a dining table that people could sit around to explore the idea of food justice. The table was developed with the support of the Brigstow Institute and the Food Justice Research Network to encourage discussion and debate focused on the individuals who bring food to our tables but are often hidden from view.

How do academic researchers gain insight into the ways in which activists relate and respond to communities or individuals who might not share their agendas or views? We might, perhaps, closely observe exchanges of views in public meetings, or record and analyse testimony that speaks directly to campaign issues and debates. Sometimes seeking to interact, especially on thorny topics, can be challenging. In a project that took shape amidst the strange conditions of Covid, the Bristol Researchers’ Food Justice Network has developed a novel approach to engaging with activists, artists, and members of the public around provocative and conflicting views of our food system.

The ‘Who’s in our food?’ project was initially designed to stimulate discussion within the network itself, helping members to crystallise ways of thinking about justice and sovereignty in their work as researchers. As a collaboration between creative practitioners and academics, the project aimed to explore questions that have been central to the relationship between academic research and the arts, around the status of ‘research’ versus ‘practice’.

We often assume that the acquisition of knowledge arises out of research, but creative practice provokes knowledge too. Art can highlight aspects of a subject not necessarily brought into focus in academic research: ‘What is interesting and engaging?’, ‘Who are the voices that you don’t normally hear’?

Our discussions with our partners Amy, Synnøve and Pete have forced us to consider our intellectual agendas and aims within the network, including questions around labour and food production, social inequalities and health, environmental issues, and colonial legacies, histories of globalisation and ‘neo-liberalism’. Communicating these agendas to a partner outside the University sharpened our focus on the nature and ambitions of the network.

When we sit around the dining table produced by the project, we find a familiar wooden surface, bowls and plates – everything that signals the sociality of sitting and eating. Amy and Synnøve created a series of objects that evoke the handling and sharing of food. As we move the objects, however, we are confronted with something else: rather than edible food, the sounds, voices and stories that lie behind our meals. The table creates a space in which research exploring injustice in food systems can be shared in innovative and affecting ways. But, early on in the development of the project, another possibility began to emerge: that the interactive table might also be a tool for research.

Image credit: Paul Blakemore

The artwork, as Amy noted in one early meeting, was intended to ‘create an encounter’, and the table could be configured to manufacture tension as easily as it could be orientated towards generating feelings of empathy, or simple pleasure. As a methodological device, the table – or rather, the voices which it can invite – can be a stimulus for discussion that lays bare the attitudes, agendas and values of those that sit around it. For us, as researchers, our interactions with the table, and the voices of the sea and fishing communities that speak through it (the focus of its first iteration), have stimulated a conversation around an evolving definition of food justice. In other contexts, the table will produce a different form of commensality that in turn might reveal something unexpected about the nature of food activism, or indeed, art.

 

[Originally published by the Brigstow Institute on 4th March 2024. This version of the blog also incorporates some of this ‘Working for 5 a day’ blog]