The research project will analyse the use of both necessary and unnecessary touch within current dementia care. A distinction has been made between 'necessary' touch, for example dressing a wound or examining a patient, and 'non-necessary' touch for example holding a patient's hand, putting a hand on their shoulder, or hugging them. 'Non-necessary' touch is regularly used by healthcare practitioners caring for patients with dementia but is rarely seen in other healthcare settings. However, the distinction between 'necessary' and 'unnecessary' touch may be an oversimplification as we do not understand what interactional purpose touch serves in this context. (Pilnick, 2023)

This doctoral study will interrogate overlooked 'subversive' stitched artefacts made by female patients in C19th asylums. That is, items made by the women, not as part of their prescribed work or occupational therapy, but independently under the radar of the autorities. It will demonstrate how these objects, alongside examination of institutional records, can reveal untold stories that resonate with women's experiences today. I will use data collected from textile and UK/european archives to inform my textile practice: through critical making I will create a series of stitched and pieced textile works that evoke the women's narratives and embodied memory. The proposed project aims to question current assumptions about C19th asylums and contribute new knowledge to the debate, with particular reference to opportunities for patients' creative and therapeutic making. Its relevance to present day experience will have implications for current mental health care approaches. I therefore propose to undertake participatory research with women from marginalised groups who use stitch practice to support their own mental wellbeing. Together we will derive policy recommendations for mental health interventions in Greater Manchester, using their experience and the outcomes of my archival and practice-based research. There are extant examples of C19th patient-made textiles that scholars have analysed such as Richter's jacket (1895, Heidelberg), Heaton's petition-panels (c1850, Wakefield and H|ll) and Bulwer's samplers (c1893, Norfolk and Leeds), but none from northwest England. I will use literature review and local fieldwork to locate previously unidentified artefacts from Manchester asylums, where I have established access to rich archives. Archival study will involve object analysis using material culture theory (Stallybrass,1993; Sorkin 2001) to understand intention and use; and thematic review of the content of asylum documents such as patients' casenotes, staff handbooks, annual medical superintendent reports and budgets to assess institutional ethos, culture and routines and patient experience. The results of the archival study will inform my own practice-based enquiry and the participatory workshops. Research methods for the workshops will be developed through discussion with the participating women but are likely to include sewing activities, semi-structured interviews and/or recorded discussions. Research findings will be shared through workshops, exhibition of material works, publication and presentation of conference papers.Purpose of the proposed research This research project seeks to reclaim the value of women's subversive and therapeutic stitch, to understand the purposes and benefits to patients of textiles in the C19th asylums and to support mental health today. It will explore and propose new ways to materially re-present their conflicting, layered narratives and to highlight how craft practice can help us reflect on our own lives. Specifically, it seeks to understand patients' emotional and therapeutic intent both during their creative making, and subsequently through their use of made items. There will be continuous dialogue between these theoretical investigations and critical-making processes.Aim: To investigate the extent to which textile artefacts made by female patients in C19th lunatic asylums can be used to inform contemporary practice and mental health approaches today. Objectives: 1. To undertake archival research a. into the textiles stitched subversively by women patients in C19th lunatic asylums b. using asylum documents to build a picture of women's experience and opportunities within the asylums 2. To produce a series of stitched and pieced textile works through critical-making practice to reflect women's complex, contradictory and layered narratives. 3. To use stitched and pieced textile works to facilitate debate about craft practice and mental health.

This project will investigate the potential for poetic intervention in the post-industrial landscape, concentrating on Brutalist and Modernist architecture scheduled for demolition, regeneration, or left in various states of disrepair. I will insert myself into these spaces, embodying my poetic practice in remnants of industrial Northern heritage and the politics of urban development, with a focus on working-class histories and narratives. Irreplaceable industrial objects, such as Fiddler's Ferry Power Station in Widnes and the Dorman Long tower in Teeside are being removed from the environment at an alarming rate, and, along with this, visual evidence of working-class history in the landscape. Research Questions 1. How does urban planning policy psychologically impact the people who live in and know a particular area? How is language deployed within policy infrastructures? 2. Can we experience our relationship with architecture as a form of kinship? How can we seek to preserve, reform, and learn to live with our buildings rather than destroy and replace them? 3. How can creative writing and a mythogeographic approach to Brutalist and Modernist architecture function as activism and intervene in debates around regeneration? Objectives 1. To critically evaluate how narratives of urban development are shaped and played back to us, with particular consideration given to the so-called regeneration of Northern towns and cities. 2. To produce a body of poetry in dialogue with the post-industrial city environments of the North of England. 3. To produce a theoretical framework for approaching, considering, and relating to undervalued public spaces and structures, and to promote creativity, imagination, and small-scale myth-making as a method of response/resilience, highlighting the value of topographic associative memory. RESEARCH CONTEXT Owen Hatherley calls Brutalism "a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people", (Hatherley, 2011), and suggests that many Brutalist architects were Northern and from working-class backgrounds, while "most Brutalist buildings were council housing" ("Strange, Angry Objects", LRB, 17 November 2016), making the destruction of such architecture, or its regeneration for a new demographic, appear as a "ruthless rubbing out" (Hatherley, 2011) of working-class industrial histories. In Cities of the North (2016), Jones and Matthews talk about being born into the ruins of the industrial revolution in a way that implies Northern cities are apologetic or embarrassed by their own decline ("the problem for the North is that it has been in relative decline for a hundred years"). Minton, in Ground Control, discusses the dangers of selling off civic assets to third parties, and the surreptitious privatisation of once-public realms (2009). Post-industrial Northern cities, stripped of their prior identities and defined by what they are not, are vulnerable to "reconceptualis[ation] as hubs for property development and consumption" (Hatherley, "Manchester's New Ruins, Ten Years On" GMHA, 4 June 2020) and sites of dereliction, neglect, and construction are commonplace. Meanwhile, overlooked and non-commodified architectural spaces "open up possibilities for regulated urban bodies to escape their shackles in expressive pursuits and sensual experience" (Edensor, 2005), and sites without clear function, in "fluid states of material becoming" (ibid.) offer spaces to play, interpret, and experience. Bollas talks of the ambiguity of structures, of buildings as "play-space[s] in the death zone," and of how "the living animate" the object, which is by nature "evocative" (2008). He claims our environment is always acting on our "idioms of self" (ibid.).

I conceive of this research project as being a parallel movement both backwards and forwards in time, a reencountering of past practice as a mode of communal wayfinding in the present performance ecology of Manchester and the UK, and a manifesting of the slipperiness and incompleteness of any archival project in performance project(s) that work across generations to open a future as much as memorialise a past. The focus of this funded studentship, the proposed phases of research and methodology play directly into my interests, experience and personal history as a theatre maker. The opportunity it provides to think and work through legacy and it's relation to the current moment is exactly the opportunity I am looking for at this moment in my career as I seek to more fully integrate my work as a practitioner and my role as an academic through developing my research experience and profile.

Over 5.4 million people in the UK suffer from asthma. The total economic cost of asthma in the UK was estimated to be £6 billion in 2023. A small population of patients (5-10%) in the UK have severe asthma, who need more specific treatments to control their symptoms, and that accounts for 65% of asthma healthcare budget, annually. Severe asthma affects the patients' quality of life to a level that is considered a disability in the UK. Different triggers including, respiratory viruses make it harder for asthma patients to breathe (asthma attack). Particularly in severe asthma, even when the disease is under control by taking optimal doses of medications, respiratory viruses can cause asthma attacks, leading to hospitalisation and even death. Vaccination is the major protection against viruses like flu, however its effectiveness is challenged by new strains of viruses. No specific treatment can significantly amend the clinical outcome related to asthma attacks after flu infection. Our goal is to address this unmet need by detecting specific markers that predict asthma attacks due to flu, and identifying more effective targets for interventions. People with asthma have sensitive airways that make it more difficult for them to breathe. The outer lining layer of the airway is called the epithelium which is made of epithelial cells. Airway epithelium is the first protective barrier between flu virus and the internal environment of lungs. In asthma patients, epithelium fails to defend against flu. The flu virus further damages the epithelium, causing asthma attacks. The airway epithelium represents a good resource for identifying markers predicting asthma attacks, and a good therapeutic target. While multiple genetic factors are involved in the development of asthma, it is the impact of the environment on genes that explains much of the variation seen in the disease. Our focus is therefore on how external environmental factors (flu virus) affect genes' products (mRNAs) through specific markers, known as microRNAs. To achieve our goals, we will evaluate these markers (microRNAs) which control genes' products (mRNAs) responsible for the airway epithelium damage, after flu infection. We will deliver our research in 4 steps. During steps-1,2&3, we will obtain epithelial cells from severe asthma patients and healthy participants in the clinic. In the laboratory, we will grow these cells in similar conditions to the human body and infect them with flu virus to mimic what happens to epithelial cells in the patients' airways who have flu. We will then compare the global microRNAs (markers) and mRNAs (genes products) in cells obtained from asthma patients, with and without infection with those from healthy donors (step-1). Hence we will detect markers that are specifically affected genes products responsible for epithelial damage in asthma before and after flu infection. We thereafter investigate the role of specific microRNAs, and their targets (genes products) in cells from asthma patients (step-2) to be able to restore airway epithelial integrity after flu infection (step-3). Finally, we will confirm our findings using lung slices obtained from asthma patients and healthy participants (step-4). We will use state-of-art technologies of tissue culture, gene sequencing, and protein detection techniques. These enable us to provide specific markers that may predict or be used as potential new treatment targets for asthma attack after flu infection, to reduce the winter NHS burden and improve patients care in future.