Bristol Zoo Gardens
Bristol Zoo Gardens
2 Projects, page 1 of 1
assignment_turned_in Project2018 - 2021Partners:UNIVERSITY OF EXETER, University of Exeter, University of Exeter, Bristol Zoo Gardens, Paignton Zoo Environmental Park +2 partnersUNIVERSITY OF EXETER,University of Exeter,University of Exeter,Bristol Zoo Gardens,Paignton Zoo Environmental Park,Bristol Zoo Gardens,Paignton Zoo Environmental ParkFunder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: ES/R009554/1Funder Contribution: 198,531 GBPThe context of the research Every year 700 million people visit zoological gardens worldwide, with more than 30 million of these visits taking place in the UK. Apart from the significant economic role they play as tourist attractions, many zoos also aim to educate their visitors about biodiversity, exposing them to species they would not otherwise have the opportunity to encounter directly and providing information about these species. As part of their educational role, many zoos offer the public opportunities to learn about and engage with conservation and environmental protection projects. Zoos are usually approached as places where animals are, first and foremost, seen. This project, however, aims to transform the way we think about zoos by attending closely to an aspect of these institutions that has previously been neglected or overlooked: their sounds or 'soundscapes'. Its aims and objectives Through close collaboration with two project partner zoos in the UK, this project seeks to trial innovative sound research methodologies to generate detailed knowledge about how sounds are woven into the experience of zoos for visitors, staff, people who live near zoos and for zoo animals themselves. It sets out to explore how listening, and attending to different kinds and qualities of sound can promote new forms of awareness of human and animal behaviour in the zoo context. The project sets out to change the mode in which zoo visitors engage with species on display, prompting the development of an 'acoustic mindfulness' that complicates, challenges and augments a visually-orientated approach to animals in the zoo. It also aims to explore whether silent listening (where groups of volunteers visit the zoo and listen whilst being silent) can have transformative effects, prompting people to be more sensitive to how, for instance, anthropogenic noise impacts upon both human and animal behaviours. The research is interdisciplinary, combining approaches from the social and natural sciences with the goal of producing a multi-species sonic ethnography of the zoo, something that has never been done before but which promises to allow social science to inform environmental awareness and citizenship in new ways. The study will enrich our grasp of the social processes underpinning relationships between humans and animals by providing a sonic perspective. Its potential applications and benefits This project has clear potential benefits for a wide range of academics from a variety of disciplines who have an interest in human-animal relations, especially as these are expressed in the zoo setting. It will complement, but also challenge and develop existing methodological and theoretical approaches to the zoo in the social sciences which foreground vision and acts of looking. In addition to producing outputs for academic audiences, the project will facilitate the production of innovative sonic resources that can be used by the partner zoos to enhance the conservation education and environmental awareness activities they conduct with schoolchildren and other zoo visitors. The project will also generate findings that can be applied by zoo keepers and researchers in order to provide optimum sound environments for the animals in their care. Dissemination of the research findings and sound resources through zoo associations will create opportunities for the project to benefit a large number of other zoos, their users and animals, both nationally and internationally. The findings and impact resources that will be produced through the project also have considerable potential applications and benefits for other settings in which animals are kept in captive conditions, such as farms, laboratories and some human homes.
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For further information contact us at helpdesk@openaire.euassignment_turned_in Project2021 - 2023Partners:Bristol Zoo Gardens, Univ Hosp Bristol & Weston NHS Fdn Trust, University of Bristol, University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust, Bristol Zoo Gardens +3 partnersBristol Zoo Gardens,Univ Hosp Bristol & Weston NHS Fdn Trust,University of Bristol,University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust,Bristol Zoo Gardens,Private Address,University of Bristol,Private AddressFunder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: AH/V000756/1Funder Contribution: 201,879 GBPThere are at least a billion people on this planet who possess 'misfitting' bodies and who are consequently directly affected by disability. Many more people encounter different abilities when families, friends, and colleagues are taken into consideration. Disability - and the structures that create it - really matters. It may be marginal, but it is hardly a minority experience. Indeed, when we take time to look at the animal world, we find that 'extraordinary' bodies are all around us. Some dart through the darkness mapping the world through the art of echolocation. Others flourish in underground rivers via senses that allow them to 'see' without eyes. The way in which people in Britain and North America have understood these ways of surviving and thriving in the world have an important history, and that history reveals much about transforming cultural assumptions about what we have thought to be 'normal' bodies and abilities. Since the early nineteenth century, unusual nonhuman bodies have been imagined as variously 'deficient', 'super', 'expendable' and, most recently, highly 'vulnerable' in the face of environmental transformation. These are familiar labels; we find them at the heart of contemporary and historical conversations relating to human disability Centred on a deep case study of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagination of dark-dwelling creatures and the impact of human systems and structures on their shrouded worlds since the mid-nineteenth century, this cutting-edge research project is really about the ways in which notions of what it means to be 'normal', 'able' and 'vulnerable' have been refracted through the multifarious bodies of animals that live in ways that are radically different from our own. Nocturnal creatures are among the most misunderstood creatures on earth, and that is principally because they are active in an environment from which we are normally excluded. This has facilitated the imagination of nocturnal animal bodies as variously 'abnormal', 'extraordinary', and 'deficient'. Ultimately, misunderstandings of these more-than-human bodies have also rendered them highly vulnerable to exclusion from environments to which they are adapted. By building this case study and generating a brand new research agenda, the project offers an important intellectual and methodological intervention into the allied fields of animal history, environmental history and disability studies. While each of these fields are concerned in varying degrees with the production of identity and the impact of identity politics on the material world, they are yet to interact with each other in mutually generative ways. More-than-human histories need to embrace disability studies approaches in order to better appreciate the wide array of engagements which constitute human relationships with the natural world and the ways in which abled and disabled identities have been constructed and refracted through and via the bodies of our animal kin. Disability studies needs to turn to the more-than-human world as a means of pivoting around the concept of disability itself; to challenge what we think we know about historical discourses of ability and normativity, re-energising a stagnating conversation about the conditions that exclude and marginalise the 'differently-abled'. This research is crucial in other ways, too. In exposing connections between discourses of normalcy, ability, vulnerability and adaptation across the human and more-than-human realms, it may be possible to generate recognition of shared vulnerabilities that transcend the human-nonhuman divide that has permitted the marginalisation of living beings across the course of modernity. Engagement and impact activities benefiting Key Stage 2 children, their teachers, sight-impaired individuals and vision clinicians highlight the potential of thinking creatively about diversity and vulnerability as issues that unite rather than isolate all living beings.
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