Past GW4 Crucible Programmes
Below you can find a list of all GW4 Crucible programmes and link to the participants since its launch in 2017.
2025: Creative Societies and Cultures, Cultural and Public Good?
Creativity is at the heart of our society and culture. Creative disciplines bring value to our democracy, the places we live and how we live in them, as well as our personal and collective health. Creativity fuels scientific discovery, engineering advances, and underpins the £108bn contribution creative industries make to our economy. Creativity has impact, functionality and relevance that reaches beyond the arts and helps us make sense of the rapidly changing world around us – from geopolitics to software design, from climate change to healthcare, from countering misinformation to AI. Yet, we live in an era where creativity, the arts, and humanities are increasingly undervalued and underfunded, and where what even counts as ‘creativity’ is challenged by AI.
2024: Tackling health inequalities and driving social justice through radical interdisciplinarity
Our health is impacted by differences in opportunities including where we are born, grow, live, work and age. These wider determinants of health are in turn shaped by the differences in our lived experience such as racial and ethnic background, disability, sexuality and gender, as well as socio-economic factors including housing quality, geography, experience of social exclusion and access to care. The way these various factors combine and interact with each other influences the differences in care we receive and the opportunities we have to lead healthy lives, which can and does lead to health inequalities. COVID-19 shone a particularly harsh light on the health and wider inequalities that persist in our society. Prior to 2020, in both the South West and Wales, approximately one in three children lived in a low-income household. Poverty, deprivation and hunger have since increased following the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crisis while the effects of climate change on health are already being felt by marginalised urban, rural and coastal communities. GW4 Crucible 2024 offers an opportunity for future research leaders across a broad range of disciplines to come together to foster conversations and initiate new collaborations.
2023: Our Data and Digital World – Opportunities for Transformative Interdisciplinarity
From the abacus to AI, censuses to smartphones, data can transform our lives. It powers innovation at scale and at speed, generating insight, foresight and new utility in areas as varied as climate modelling and disease prediction, social justice and policy, autonomous vehicles and software engineering, immersive technologies, cyber security and more. However, events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal also highlight the potential ethical conflict between data exploitation and fundamental human rights such as privacy and anonymity, prompting significant debate. GW4 Crucible offers an opportunity for future research leaders to come together to generate innovative, multifaceted responses that harness the power of data, AI and digital approaches while challenging its misuse.
2022: Building Back Better: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Mental Health and Wellbeing Research
1 in 4 of the UK population will experience mental ill health at some point each year. The impact of the pandemic and the associated restrictions, the intensifying climate emergency, racial inequalities, and geopolitical conflicts among many other concerns, have exacerbated these problems in ways we have yet to understand. GW4 Crucible offers an opportunity for future research leaders to come together to generate innovative, multifaceted responses to the global challenges of poor mental health and wellbeing enabling individuals and communities to ‘build back better’.
2021: Transitions to Net Zero in the Time of Covid-19
Even before COVID-19 highlighted the need to ‘bring back better’, the climate crisis has been the largest enduring global, anthropogenic threat to humanity. Without successful interventions dedicated to supporting transformations towards net-zero emissions, climate change will have a catastrophic effect on society. The GW4 Crucible offers the opportunity for future research leaders to come together to generate innovative, multifaceted responses to tackle this global challenge.
It is accepted that this will require multidisciplinary investigations – the mapping out systems, behaviours, tipping points and technologies, harnessing the expertise of anthropologists through to zoologists to bring about the transformative change necessary to achieve net zero.
2020: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Tackling AMR
We are facing a rise in the number of bacteria becoming resistant to existing antibiotics without an increase in new antibiotics or new treatments. The GW4 Crucible offers the opportunity for future research leaders to come together to generate innovative, multifaceted responses to address the global challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Tackling this global challenge requires interdisciplinary endeavours which harness the expertise of anthropologists through to zoologists.
Whilst AMR undoubtedly entails biological processes, the context which governs the action of these biological mechanisms is influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic processes. Biomedical and clinical expertise alone cannot tackle AMR and multidimensional approaches are needed to address the challenge.
