Leverhulme Grants awarded to academics from all three SSE departments
Many congratulations to Sam Halvorsen from Geography and Environmental Science (GES), Liesbeth Corens from History and Karl Pike from Sociology, Politics and International Relations (SPIR), who have all received funding awards from the Leverhulme Trust. In a double win, Sam has also received a grant from the British Academy.
Liesbeth’s Leverhulme fellowship looks at a previously unknown archiving movement among 1700s Catholics in England and the Dutch Republic, to reveal that the survival of marginalised religious minorities relied less on grand resistance and more on strategic record-keeping to preserve the intricate rituals, property claims, and communal relationships.
Karl’s Leverhulme Research Grant will synthesise the philosophy of Mary Midgley with broader theoretical frameworks, in a project that aims to distinguish the concept of political myth from ideology and apply this new lens to analyse contemporary European political narratives.
Sam’s Leverhulme Fellowship will analyse the participatory upgrading of three diverse informal settlements in Buenos Aires, to better understand the complex democratic dynamics of cooperation and conflict. His British Academy-funded project will look at Climate change-driven housing distress, examining sites across the Global South and North.
Full Project abstracts below:
Counter-Archiving and the Survival of Dutch and English Catholic Minorities, ca. 1660-1720
How do religious minorities survive despite marginalisation and persecution? In answering this question, scholars have focused on grand gestures of resistance or the rise of toleration. These explorations fail to explain how minorities perpetuate their practices and beliefs, amidst repression and assimilation. For survival was not solely numerical: at stake was the intricate network of rituals, charitable obligations, property claims, and other practices that make up the set of relationships constituting a community. This project demonstrates the vital role of record keeping in these relationships. It does so thanks to my discovery of a hitherto unknown archiving movement among Catholics in England and the Dutch Republic around 1700. Archival innovators and communicators created continuity, enabled their communities to persist while belonging to multiple communities, and forged a communal future.
‘Politics and mythmaking: disentangling myth from ideology’
This project will develop the concept of political myth, with a particular emphasis on engaging with the philosophy of Mary Midgley. The project will take Midgley’s work on myth – which featured in much of Midgley’s philosophical work – and put her thinking into dialogue with other philosophers of myth. A key objective will be to examine the relationship between the concepts of myth and ideology. Following this theoretical development, the project will apply the concept of myth to the study of contemporary European politics, seeking to analyse political narratives that could be better understood as political myths.
Climate Stress, Housing Precarity, and Health Inequities: Reterritorialisation Practices and Resistance to Unhoming (British Academy)
As climate change accelerates, housing constitutes a critical arena where its health impacts materialise— through overheating, flooding, damp, structural degradation, and energy insecurity—disproportionately affecting marginalised populations living in dwellings that intensify rather than mitigate climate vulnerability. This climate-related housing distress is largely invisible as it extends beyond immediate hazards to encompass the cumulative burdens of inadequate infrastructure, environmental exposures, and housing precarity. This project situates these dynamics within processes that mirror and deepen structural urban fragmentation and entrenched territorial inequities, advancing a transdisciplinary approach bridging health, urban studies, and co-production with residents. Using social science methods, it examines the policy ecologies through which climate stress translates into health impacts, framing them as slow violence inscribed on bodies and territories. Focusing on three sites across the Global South and North, we document how residents experience and resist unhoming, and how they develop reterritorialisation practices with potential to inform climate and housing justice.
Participatory neighbourhood upgrading in Buenos Aires: a territorial approach (Leverhulme Research Fellowship)
Over one billion people live in informal settlements, making upgrading (of housing, infrastructure and social life) a global imperative. Yet its democratic dimensions remain poorly understood. This fellowship provides the first systematic analysis of Buenos Aires’ ambitious participatory upgrading programme, launched in 2015, across three contrasting informal settlements. It develops an innovative territorial framework to examine how participation is reshaped through cooperation, conflict, and exclusion, moving beyond top-down versus bottom-up accounts. Theorising territory as relational and contested, the project advances new conceptual tools for analysing participatory upgrading, contributing to debates on urban democracy, spatial justice, and just urban transitions.