The Global Research Network on Parliaments and People (GRNPP) was launched at Westminster’s Mary Sumner House in November 2017. Led by Professor Emma Crewe, and with funding from AHRC GCRF, the Global Research Network supports exciting and innovative interdisciplinary research on the relationship between Parliaments, parliamentarians, civil society and citizens.

The GRNPP is based in SOAS University of London with network members from the University of Leeds and the Hansard Society in the UK, Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, the Enlightened Myanmar Research Foundation in Myanmar, and the Forum for Social Studies in Ethiopia. Encouraging collaboration between academia and the creative and cultural industries, the network enables researchers, artists and activists to discuss and imagine what democratic politics might look like in a more engaged and inclusive political world.

Between 2017 and 2020 the GRNPP will focus on supporting the development of research capacity in Myanmar and Ethiopia – two countries with shared recent experience of highly authoritarian government, complex multi-ethnic societies, and histories of violent internal conflict. From March 2018, the Network will fund up to fifty innovative projects that seek to develop understandings of politics in these countries with reference to three main themes: cultures of representation; histories of exclusion and instability; and imagining deeper democracy through media and the arts.

The project proceeds from the belief that the arts and humanities have a vital role to play in strengthening democratic cultures. Multidisciplinary investigations that combine the social sciences, arts and humanities can reveal new perspectives and amplify the impacts of research findings in ways that are imaginative, creative and inclusive. Importantly, Professor Crewe explains, “in this project we are deliberately giving priority to those who don’t normally get grants; young women, those outside the capital, those who identify as an ethnic minority. We hope to contribute to three research agendas: creating opportunities for researchers who tend to get side-lined, deepening democracy through multidisciplinary arts and scholarship, and decolonizing international research.”

You can find more about GRNPP through their website, which they will be adding to over the next few weeks.