Air Space
Creating a Community-Integrated Network of Interdisciplinary Research on Socio-Atmospherics.
Key people: Professor Sophie Woodward, Dr Stephen Hicks, Dr David Dobson
Illustrator: Domenique Brouwers
This is a one-year, UMRI (University of Manchester Research Institute) funded exploratory project, from August 2023 to July 2024.
This project brings together an interdisciplinary research team interested in air and atmospheres to collaboratively explore:
- air’s role in health and welfare inequality;
- the political and contested nature of air and how it is used,
- polluted, measured and changed;
- the spatial politics of air as a part of urban environments and shared living spaces;
- and the social functions and meanings of air as part of home, community and everyday life.
Currently, research on air is siloed in disciplines where important issues have been developed and research advanced. But this segregation of knowledge has led to lack of opportunities to synthesise and explore new possibilities for studying air and bringing about change in health, wellbeing and equality.
The project has worked with community groups Ardwick Climate Action, Love Old Trafford, Manchester Climate Alliance and Sackville Gardens Friends Association to scope their agendas concerning the local community and environment and place them into context with existing literature on air and atmospherics.
The aim here being to co-produce and agenda for a future interdisciplinary project focused on home, environment, air and wellbeing.
Asking questions about what our local community activist groups, and also academic disciplines, concerns are relating to air quality, concerns about pollution, but looking at how local communities are developing.
Dr Stephen Hicks
Concerns about environmental pollution/impact, a range of health and social inequalities, sustainability and the ways in which communities and cities are designed and experienced have all highlighted questions about atmospheres and, particularly, air quality/pollution.
This seems particularly timely given the impact of COVID-19 and subsequent anxieties concerning air quality, circulation and the potential to reduce the spread of infection. In addition, the contributions of atmospheric sciences, as well as sociological work focused on ‘socio-atmospherics’ (Mason, J. (2018) Affinities), have raised environmental concerns about communities, air quality and impact on climate.
Air poses challenges for existing research methods, and so this project has explored how we can develop creative methods to understand it. Using a ‘street sociologies’ approach, the project has brought social research to the locations people live in – initially via creative approaches to co-production and citizen social science.
Co-production seeks to develop a collaborative, diverse and peer-led approach to the identification of and action on local agendas for research and development.
This project has interdisciplinarity at its core, bringing together all three Faculties within the University, Creative Manchester, the Morgan Centre and local residents/communities and groups.
This is vital as there has been little conversation across disciplines concerning these topics and there is a pressing need to develop policy in this field that works with all aspects of environment, community, health, housing and wellbeing.
The project has worked closely with residents from a range of ages and ethnic backgrounds, stakeholder groups and researchers, also making use of an advisory board including experts by experience.
Four focus groups and ten urban walks (resident and stakeholder interviews), as well as photography and sketching workshops alongside the input of graphic artist Domenique Brouwers, have been used to develop and document key research questions and concerns regarding local environments.
Air Space builds on a range of recent collaborations within the Morgan Centre involving visual artists and photographers and has experimented with methods to assess which might be best used to help design a larger, longer-term project with community stakeholders.
Alongside this fieldwork, the project has undertaken a scoping review on air and atmospherics to enable consolidation of learning, in ways that can feed into specific concerns raised by the community groups.
This work has helped identify specific avenues for interdisciplinary work to facilitate both the furthering of knowledge and the work community groups are engaged in, in ways that that go beyond what existing discipline specific work has so far achieved.
- Hicks, Stephen (PI)
- Woodward, Sophie (CoI)
- Balmer, Andrew (CoI)
- Ashton, Jenna (CoI)
- Evans, James (CoI)
- Lewis, Camilla (CoI)
- Topping, David (CoI)
- Jankovic, Vladimir (CoI)
- Dobson, David (RA)
The primary outputs for this project are:
- a scoping review of existing literature;
- a future research council funding bid for a larger, longer-term project;
- a paper delivered at the BSA (British Sociological Association) Virtual Conference 2024 ‘Crisis, Continuity, and Change’;
- sketches by the graphic artist and by local residents which will exhibited in Creative Manchester Glass Corridor Exhibition Space in July 2024;
- a report to funders;
- and an academic article.
We also worked with Professor Nick Dunn to present a workshop focused on engaging with nocturnal atmospheres, a feature of everyday life that has been hinted at in data so far but with which we have not directly engaged.
Additionally, we ran a community-based workshop event where we discussed some of our findings. This included an exhibition of some of the photos and sketches created during fieldwork and gave participants a platform to talk about their ongoing projects in their local communities.
The City After Dark: Air Space Night Walk
In 2024, we hosted a night walk around Central Manchester with the team from the Air Space Project.
The event explored walking as a research method for creative practice and allowed participants to examine their relationship with the urban atmosphere at night.