GW4 Crucible 2025 now open for future research leaders with an interest in creative societies and cultures
Our leadership development programme, GW4 Crucible, is now open for applications for 2025, providing the opportunity for researchers from different disciplines to come together to generate innovative, multifaceted responses to key questions and challenges.
The GW4 Crucible programme brings together 30 competitively selected future research leaders to explore how they can enhance their career and increase the impact of their research by working with others across vastly different disciplines.
The theme for GW4 Crucible 2025 is ‘Creative Societies and Cultures, Cultural and Public Good?’. This theme echoes one of our strategic priority research areas looking at capitalising on creative communities to foster sociocultural growth.
Creativity fuels discovery and innovation, and underpins the £108bn annual contribution creative industries make to the UK economy. Creative disciplines bring value to democracy, the places we live and how we live in them, as well as our personal and collective health; yet are often undervalued and underfunded.
GW4 institutions are home to multi-million-pound, multidisciplinary investments, including two Creative Clusters. More widely, Wales and the South West of England is an established powerhouse in cultural, digital and creative industries, employing 110,000 people across almost 14,000 businesses.
The 2025 Crucible programme will leverage the combined expertise of GW4’s future research leaders. From performance studies to politics, from architecture to public health, and from history to computer science, GW4 Crucible will foster conversations and collaborations to generate innovative, multifaceted responses to the question of creativity’s place and shape in our society, culture and economy.
The programme consists of in-person residentials and online masterclasses, during which the researchers explore interdisciplinary and collaborative ways of working and have the chance to connect with expert guest speakers, enhancing their professional networks and visibility.
Dr Tavoulari, a Research Associate at the University of Bath, who attended Crucible 2024 found the programme “a deeply transformative experience”, adding that: “it not only strengthened my leadership skills and refined my approach to grant applications, but also brought deeper meaning to my interdisciplinary academic and professional journey. Most exciting of all, it sparked new research projects shaped by my unique perspective on vision impairment and accessibility. However, what made this journey truly unforgettable were the moments of shared laughter, deep conversations, attentive listening, and the meaningful silences that filled the spaces between.”
GW4 Alliance Director, Dr Joanna Jenkinson MBE, said: “Our GW4 universities have a huge range of expertise and research spanning the breath of creative disciplines, so I’m excited to see the diverse research interests of next year’s successful cohort and the interdisciplinary research projects and ideas that will develop. Crucible is a unique programme which offers researchers an excellent yet often rare opportunity to consider new approaches to their research and its impact, and provides career and leadership development opportunities.
“I’m thrilled we are launching Crucible 2025 and encourage researchers from across the alliance with an interest in or expertise applicable to any aspect of creative societies and cultures, to find out more and apply.”
Following GW4 Crucible researchers have the opportunity to apply for seed funding to support the collaborative research projects that emerge within the programme.
Applications for GW4 Crucible 2025 are now open and information and guidance about how to apply can be found on the GW4 Crucible 2025 webpage.
