The Pandemic and Beyond: The Arts and Humanities Contribution to Covid-19 Research and Recovery

The project aims to illuminate the impact of the arts and humanities in addressing the coronavirus pandemic, an ongoing health crisis that has had far reaching social, economic and cultural repercussions. We will create engaging, joined-up narratives that showcases the contribution of Arts and Humanities research to solving the problems created or exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, covering culture and creative industries medical and health research and biosecurity responses. Our target audiences are the wider public, other researchers, policymakers, the government, as well as international stakeholders such as the WHO, who will decide future approaches to tackling similar crises.

Throughout, we are committed to promoting the equity, diversity and inclusivity of the impacts of AHRC-funded pandemic research. One key objective is to also produce a set of recommendations that will enable the AHRC to have a strategy in place for how to mobilise and coordinate Arts and Humanities research in future crisis situations.

We aim to maximise the impact of the AHRC-funded Covid-19 portfolio by:

1. identifying synergies and facilitating collaboration between the individual projects
2. helping Covid PIs access the relevant pathways to impact set up by other projects in the portfolio
3. working with Covid PIs on related projects to avoid duplication of research
4. combining existing stakeholder access across government departments, policy groups, think-tanks, local government, business and the creative industries
5. co-designing a varied range of communications strategies that appeal to diverse and marginalised audiences in collaboration with a Lived Experience (LE) panel consisting of the members of the marginalised communities that have been hardest hit by the pandemic. This will complement our own communications campaign, website and digital materials that we will build to reach audiences through regional, national and international media outlets. The aim is to showcase and amplify this research for different publics, including stakeholders in Government and NGOs, as well as marginalised communities who may be impacted by Covid-19.

We will provide targeted, hands-on support to PIs to connect them to relevant partners and facilitate collaborative working across the AHRC's Covid-19 Portfolio and beyond it to other parts of UKRI's Covid-19 research. We will do so through the facilitation of virtual workshops in which we will bring together clusters of complementary projects that we identify through our scoping and mapping activities. In these workshops, we will facilitate focused exchanges of expertise, impact plans, and communications strategies that add value to all the projects and stakeholders involved and enable a scaling up of impacts from the local through the regional, national and international, as appropriate. In doing so, we will create the knowledge base and amplify understanding of the AHRC's Covid-19 Portfolio and its unique contribution to Covid-19 research. This will enable us to support the AHRC in developing medium- to long-term plans for the Covid-19 response and identify the main research gaps.