Making Liveable Lives: Rethinking Social Exclusion

The main research objective is to move beyond exclusion/inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) communities in UK and India creating a liveability model that can be adapted globally. Whilst work has been done to explore the implications of Equalities legislation, including contesting the normalisations of neo-liberalisms, there has yet to be an investigation into what might make every day spaces liveable for LGBTQ people. This project addresses social exclusion, not only through identifying exclusions, but also by exploring how life might become liveable in everyday places in two very different contexts.
In 2013 the Marriage (Same Sex) Act passed in the UK, and in India the Delhi High Court's reading down Indian Penal Code 377 in 2009 to decriminalize sexual acts between consenting same-sex people was overturned by the Supreme Court. Yet bullying, mental health and safety continue to be crucial to understanding British LGBTQ lives, in contrast the overturned the revoke of Penal Code 377 2013, this has resulted in increased visibilities of LGBTQ people. These different contexts are used to explore liveable lives as more than lives that are just 'bearable' and moves beyond norms of happiness and wellbeing.
This research refuses to be fixed to understanding social liberations through the exclusion/inclusion, in place/out of place dichotomies. Using commonplace to move beyond 'in place' towards being common to the place itself. Place can then be shared in common as well as collectively made in ways that do not necessarily impose normative agendas/regulatory conditionalities. Social liberations are examined in the transformation of everyday encounters without conforming to hegemonies or making 'normal' our own.
Whilst the focus is sexual and gender liberations, the project will enable considerations of others social differences. It will show how places produce differential liveabilities both where legislative change has been achieved and where it has just been repealed. Thus, the project offers academic and policy insights into safety, difference and vibrant and fair societies.
The study will use a 7 phase mixed methods design:
1. Project planning and research design, including formally establishing the advisory group and meeting 1, setting milestones and setting in place all agreements/ethical approvals
2. Literature review exploring key measures used to rate and assess LGBTQ 'friendliness'/inclusion nationally, supra-nationally and internationally
3. A spatial assessment of LGBTQ liveabilities that includes, but moves beyond, the measures identified in phase 2, applying these at a local scale e.g. policy indicators and place based cultural indicators
4. Twenty focus groups (80 participants, sample targeting marginalised LGBTQ people), coupled with online qualitative questionnaires (150), and shorter SMS text questionnaires (200)/App responses (200) to identify add to the liveability index created in phase 3 and what makes life un/liveable for a range of LGBTQ people and how this varies spatially
5. Participants in the data collection will be invited to reconfigure place through UK/India street theatre performances. These will be video recorded, edited into one short video and widely distributed. Data will be collected by observing interactions; on the spot audience surveys; reflections on the event
6. The research will analyse the data sets as they are collected. At the end of the data collection phase time will be taken to look across all 4 data sets to create a liveability index
7. Research dissemination will be targeted at community and academic audiences, including end of project conferences in India/UK, collating policy/community reports, academic outputs.
The impact plan details the short (transnational support systems; empowerment of participants), medium (policy changes, inform practice) and long-term (changing perceptions of LGBTQ people) social impacts and how these will be achieved.

The most important beneficiaries of this research will be LGBTQ communities in India and the UK. The impacts of this research will also be felt by policy makers, community groups/NGOs, police and safety services and non-LGBTQ people and the liveability model in the longer-term could change the ways in which equalities/inclusion are assessed. These beneficiaries and a summary of the impacts will be addressed in turn.
Collaborators from LGBTQ communities will be involved from the outset on the advisory group for this research and will be tasked with ensuring that the research actions reflect the ethos of co-working and empowerment of marginalised groups. Activists on the advisory group through transnational dialogue will create shared knowledges, engage in mutual learning and develop new transnational support systems, such as networking, sharing painful experiences and receiving support/advice from those in very different contexts. The liveability measure will be created with LGBTQ people to establish what makes life liveable and this will be used to inform street theatre which aims to change the perceptions of unsafe/uncomfortable places. Throughout the research and impact activities, the focus will be on how to make LGBTQ lives more liveable.
The creation of a liveability measure has the potential to make a significant contribution to how 'equalities' and 'inclusions' are measured, moving beyond tick boxes towards meaningful measures that account for multiple differences and spatial variations nationally as well as cross-nationally. This aims to broaden understanding of social exclusions and how these might be tackled. Broad use of the liveability measure has the potential to address issues of social difference, fairness and social cohesion. This has significant policy implications in terms of how legislation is implemented and equality and diversity practically manifest, improving policy and practices to address social exclusion and create just societies.
Policy reports and community summaries will use the liveability measure to rethink how social justice agendas are defined. The liveability measure and the outcomes of street theatre will provide evidence and new thinking to NGOs and community groups regarding the inclusion of diverse LGBTQ people in their work and how this may relate to social justice goals.
For the police and safety services in India and the UK the liveability measure will provide new information as well as build and extend on other research that explores bullying, harassment, violence, suicidal harm and safety. It enables a reconsideration of safety initiatives that seek to address homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime, looking to prevent hate crime alongside reporting agendas. For example, it will seek to directly address sexual harassment in public spaces and thus looking to prevent such harassment beyond reporting to law enforcement agencies.
Further beneficiaries will be non-LGBTQ people who will be given means of encountering LGBTQ people as commonplace. The project aims to initially momentarily change the perceptions of LGBTQ people. This will be achieved in part through street theatre. It seeks to develop greater appreciation of the challenges and possibilities of social difference and how to encounter difference differently, through the video of the street theatre performances on social media outlets- with the aim of eliciting further responses and engagements. In addition it is hoped that spin off events will be encouraged through the coverage of the street theatre and distribution of the final video. Harnessing social media will be done with an explicit attempt to engage people in making public spaces open to difference beyond law enforcement/criminalisation.

The 'during' the project impacts, as well as the short, medium and long-term aims, and how these will be achieved, are outlined in the Pathways to Impact Plan.