63 Articles
Staying with the Trouble: Rethinking Care, Research and Collaboration in Paediatric HIV
This project with CHIVA Africa in KwaZulu-Natal highlights that access to HIV treatment alone isn’t enough. Survival depends on adherence to treatment — the daily, sustained work of remembering, managing, encouraging, organising, and caring. And that work is often invisible, distributed across families and communities, and carried out in contexts where almost everything is stacked against it. It’s in these networks — not our seminar rooms — that the real work of staying alive happens. This project starts by recognising the often-unseen labour that makes survival possible, and by asking how we can support and strengthen the systems of care that already exist.
Treasuring our Floodplain Meadows
The National Trust’s TREASURE project, funded by the OSC Challenge Us! competition, explores the socio-economic benefits of floodplain meadow restoration. Two summer interns have joined the team — one conducting botanical surveys and another researching cultural links to meadows. With surveys planned at 18 National Trust sites, the project aims to spotlight the intertwined histories of land, nature, and culture while reversing meadow loss.
Bridging Communities: Voices from the Diverse Motherhood Research
Motherhood is shaped by culture, community, and lived experience. This blog spotlights one of five community researchers who played a vital role in the Diverse Motherhood for Work Inclusion project (OSC103), helping connect with ethnic minority mothers.
Relational Research Workshop for Challenge Us! Research Partners
How can academic research catalyse real-world change? This was the central question driving the recent Relational Research Workshop, co-facilitated by Nudrat Hopper and Dr Timothy Hall. The event brought together Open University researchers and partner organisations, including charities awarded Challenge Us funding, under the umbrella of the Open Societal Challenges (OSC) programme. The focus: how to make research not just relevant, but impactful.
A Fair and Equitable Transition? Tenants’ Experiences of Decarbonising Social Housing
A new report explores some of the challenges faced by tenants in social housing in Wales as a result of decarbonisation measures. A Fair and Equitable Transition? is based on focus group interviews with social housing tenants, and aligns their experience with current discussions on environmental policy in Wales. It is a collaboration between Tai Pawb, a Welsh housing justice and equality charity, and The Open University.
How can industrial innovation support better access to cancer care in Africa?
Cancer and other non-communicable diseases pose a growing problem for health systems in Africa. Together with our colleagues in East Africa, at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Nairobi, Kenya) and the Economic and Social Research Foundation (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), as well as India and UK-based partners, we have been researching ways to improve access to cancer care in African countries since 2018, through our ESRC-funded project, Innovation for Cancer Care in Africa (ICCA).
Artivism for climate change: children calling adults to account in Northern Scotland
The artwork of over 600 pupils from across the north of Scotland was showcased at the Botanic Gardens in Inverness in March 2025 as part of the Art for Action programme. Young people’s views, concerns and hopes for the future, when it comes to climate change, were highlighted through what we are terming artivism. With over 500 visitors, the exhibition built on one showcased at the Highland Council Headquarters during the two weeks COP29 took place in Azerbaijan in November 2024.
Curating Our Digital Cultural Heritage: What’s Next?
To close our series of blog posts on our OSC ‘Pelagios: linking online resources through the places they mention’, we reflect on some of the challenges we’ve faced in our work to annotate and visualise cultural heritage data. We consider how these might be addressed through future development efforts and further research, before looking forward to the next project on the horizon.
A Digital Recipe for Annotating and Visualising Museum Collections Data
To continue our voyage through the descriptive information found in museum collections records, this post provides a ‘deep dive’ into our process for extracting object stories and visualising place information on a map. In doing so, we share our related journal article, project dataset and explorable map visualisation.
Telling Object Stories Through Digital Technologies
Cultural heritage data holds a wealth of untold stories, but the way in which it is currently structured in collections management systems does not readily allow these ‘object itineraries’ to be surfaced. Our project used free online tools to annotate and visualise data about museum objects, with the aim of uncovering their ‘hidden histories’. In this post, we go back to the beginning and describe the motivations behind our OSC.