The advancement of knowledge knows no borders, and everyone can contribute to and demonstrate the creativity that underpins research.
The fundamental principle behind UK Research and Innovation’s approach to international partnerships is to find the most effective ways to facilitate collaboration that can best unleash this creativity.
This informed the launch of our bilateral partnership with Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in 2018, and the collaboration has reinforced this principle ever since.
Underpinning academic excellence
Six years and 110 projects on, it has developed into a flourishing example of how international collaboration underpins academic excellence.
It is also a key element of a productive, mutually beneficial relationship between the UK and Germany as leading research nations.
The partnership brings together researchers at UK and German universities and independent research organisations to conduct discovery-led research across the gamut of the arts and humanities, with a collaborative approach to research design and delivery.
Empowering researchers
Crucial to the success of the scheme is the fact that the researchers are empowered to pursue areas of international research significance as identified through their own work.
Therefore, the projects supported through the partnership embody both the societal significance of arts and humanities research, while also coming at challenges and opportunities through often surprising routes.
Broadening understanding
For example, the work of researchers at the universities of Birmingham and Cologne has broadened our understanding of how signs and their multiple meanings are understood by deaf children.
Their study of iconicity – the direct relationship between form and meaning – could lead to new interventions for deaf children learning to sign as their first language, and cognitive maps for deaf people which could also be used to explore conditions such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Researchers at Goldsmiths College and Konstanz University are working at the cutting edge of how robotics and artificial intelligence will transform and enhance creativity while ensuring the centrality of human experience.
Bold projects
Be it using big data techniques for the first time to study the language of conflict, finding ways to secure the future of national parks and internationally-significant conservation areas, or exploring the ethics of vaccine hesitancy with a view to improving science communication, these are bold projects applying adventurous thinking to the span of human history and experience.
Now we are delighted to announce a further 16 projects to be supported through the sixth iteration of the partnership, which the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is supporting with an investment of more than £5 million and which is match-funded by the DFG.
Diverse disciplines
These new projects span disciplines as diverse as linguistics, archaeology and music and will interrogate subjects as varied as the technology of touch, toxic heritage and educational mobility across western Europe.
They will be followed by several further rounds; the seventh round of this bilateral funding opportunity opened in October and will close in February. Round eight will then commence in October 2025.
I have no doubt that the projects we will fund through subsequent rounds will, as those we have just announced, continue to bear the torch for the ingenuity and independence of spirit that so defines great arts and humanities research.
Top image: Credit: Jan Habarta, iStock, Getty Images Plus, via Getty Images
