ACRE (Academic and Creative Research) residents are community members who come to live at Braziers as lodgers, usually on a short-term basis (from one month to one year) and contribute to the community through a wide range of research and creative projects.
We invite applications from artists and researchers who are interested in coming to live at Braziers and want to spend some of their time here, starting or expanding existing enquiries in the context of Braziers’ community life and land. The Braziers resident community, and the wider community (our management committee, membership and network of volunteers and visitors) also offer a built-in peer network and enthusiastic audience for the development and presentation of new ideas and new work.
We invite applications that support one or more of our long-term research processes (see below), as well as applications based around stand-alone research and artistic projects. We see our long-term research as a transdisciplinary process that does not start or end with an individual research project, but rather forms an ongoing process that supports Braziers to understand its inter-community dynamics and how communities can support more socially and ecological ways of living.
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Braziers Park Research Processes
Intersectionality within and around communities
- How do access, extra/inter community power, and economic-systems structures influence who lives in communities, and how communities live?
The role of communities in supporting human wellbeing and health
- How can communities support place-based care that enables preventative human healthcare systems while there are ongoing norms, organisational systems regulatory structures that focus on point of access care?
- What are the roles of communities in reducing non-communicable diseases?
Communities and socio-ecological resilience
- How can communities better support socio-ecological transformations towards ecologically sustaining ways of living?
- How can communities better support localised farming systems that reduce carbon intensive nutrient transport systems?
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ACRE residents’ activities include research update sessions, workshops and talks as part of our Wider Community Weekends, special topic sessions that report on projects or develop particular themes of mutual interest to the group, or contributing to events including the annual UK Communities Conference (varying locations).
Braziers Park School was founded with the goal of offering a living laboratory for the exploration of relationships, both interpersonal and ecological. Many researchers who come to visit the community are interested in what can be learned from (usually participants) observing community life to see how it offers alternatives to more familiar ways of living. However, ACRE is intended to invite researchers to consider how they might understand and create knowledge through an integrative lens and respond to the needs, opportunities and challenges offered by the specific context of Braziers Park as a community. Topics explored so far include post-consumerism, inter-community collaboration, sharing, and change in intentional community.
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For related questions, please email Tim Fry at t.j.fry@pgr.reading.ac.uk or admin@braziers.org.uk.
Click here to apply