BME Small Grants: 2026 Recipients

We are delighted to announce the results of the latest round of the BME small grants funding scheme. This scheme is administered by SHS in partnership with the Economic History Society, History UK, History of Education Society (UK), History Workshop Journal, Royal Historical Society, Society for the Study of Labour History and Women’s History Network. It was set up in 2019 in recognition of the under-representation, structural inequalities and racism afflicting UK Higher Education Institutions.

Applications for funding are judged by an independent panel. This year’s panel comprised Arike Oke (British Film Institute), Rochelle Rowe (University of Edinburgh) and Liam Liburd (Durham University).

Projects and Researchers Supported:

Mr Shagnick Bhattacharya, Not ‘Built of Better Stuff’? Maritime Accidents in the British Empire and Racialised Popular Discourses on the Employment of Lascar Labour

This project examines how colonial seamen were represented in British public discourse following major maritime accidents during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. It explores how newspapers, official inquiries, and company records framed colonial crews as cowardly, expendable, or, more rarely, heroic, and how moments of crisis were used to racialise blame and responsibility as well as employability at sea. By linking social attitudes and cultural narratives to the material realities of labour markets, the project shows how race, class, and imperial power shaped colonial seafarers’ access to work, safety, and recognition within Britain’s maritime economy.

Ms. Roz Kaylor-Yarde Etwaria, Afriphobia, Black Women and the Grammar of Social Death: A Community Workshop on Erasure, History and Resistance

This funded project brings Etwaria’s research on Afriphobia into the community through an interactive workshop and school session exploring how Britain’s colonial past continues to shape racial inequality today. By centring Black women’s histories and introducing practical tools for recognising systemic erasure, it aims to deepen public understanding and inspire informed dialogue and action.

Miss Jonn Gale, Ecotonal Memories: Speculative Ethnobotany and the Hidden Black and Indigenous Naturalists of the Linnean Material Archive

This grant supports Jonn Gale’s doctoral research developing Speculative Ethnobotany, a decolonial methodology for researching early botanical histories and the obscured contributions of Black and Indigenous naturalists. Focusing on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Sierra Leone, the research reinterprets botanical archives as dynamic, multispecies spaces shaped by complex networks of knowledge exchange. The funding provides essential support for completing multimodal research outputs, and wider impact of this historically significant project. Gale is a London-based ethnobotanist and practice-led PhD researcher whose work combines historical and archival research with ethnobotany and sensory visual methods to rethink colonial botanical collections and narratives.

Dr. Leighan Renaud, Telling Tales: Grenada’s Jab Tradition

Jab is a longstanding element of Grenada’s heritage and is a carnival tradition that functions as a continued expression of resistance and resilience, a means of defying social expectations, and a powerful example of embodied storytelling. This project is interested in how people in Grenada understand Jab as a central element of the island’s social history. The SHS BME Small Grant will enable travel to Grenada to interview Jab practitioners and document its traditions for the purposes of building a digital archive.

Ms. Jameelah Almulad, Mediating Contested Cultural Knowledge: English, Moroccan, and Ottoman Encounters, c.1600–1700

Mrs Judith Jones, Family legacies of colonial migration: the intergenerational impact of sibling separation in Caribbean families, 1945 to the present

Using oral histories and insights from postcolonial studies, this research will explore how separation reshaped family dynamics, parenting practices, and emotional well-being. A nuanced understanding of these dynamics offers deeper insight into how Caribbean families have negotiated the complex challenges of migration and family separation from the post-war period to the present day. The historical and socio-political experiences of the Caribbean diaspora are inextricably linked to the legacy of colonialism and the migration policies that governed mobility across the British Empire. Between 1945 and the 1980s, these policies significantly shaped the trajectories of Caribbean families, often resulting in both physical and emotional fragmentation. Family separations were not merely incidental outcomes of migration but were structurally produced and intensified by state policies and economic imperatives that prioritised labour demands over familial unity. The long-term consequences of these enforced separations continue to reverberate through the lived experiences and emotional landscapes of Caribbean transnational families.