Projects

Read about some of our current funded research and engagement projects.

Our Projects in the Middle East

Our projects in the Middle East focus on Syria and are led by Professor Jen Baird, who has been working in Syria since 2002. Her work has focussed on the site of Dura-Europos, one of Syria's most important archaeological sites. Her work there has used the archival records of the 1920s and 30s excavations in tandem with new fieldwork and the results have been published extensively, including in her books The Inner Lives of Ancient Houses and the archaeological history Dura-Europos. She has also published on a wide range of specialist topics including everyday life, archaeological photography, ancient graffiti, and archaeological archives, including work produced in collaboration with CISA deputy director Lesley McFadyen. She has also written about archaeological labour, including the contributions of local workers to archaeological knowledge at Palmyra.

During the Syrian conflict, she worked extensively with the Syria Programme Council for At-Risk Academics to support displaced Syrian academics, especially heritage workers. With support of the OSUN Threatened scholars initiative, together with CISA honorary fellow Adnan Almohamad, Jen undertook oral histories in communities adjacent to the archaeological site during the Syrian conflict, to examine better the complex relationships between local communities and major heritage sites. Dura-Europos was subject to intense devastation during the conflict, including that of antiquities looting. When the Assad regime fell in late 2024, Jen founded Durat with a number of Syrian and international colleagues to urgently protect the site from further damage.

Under the aegis of CISA, Jen’s current work includes collaborations with NGOs including Heritage for Peace and Voices of Heritage to support Syrian Heritage workers. Drawing on the long-term legacy data of Dura-Europos, and working with the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive project of which she is a part, she committed to making legacy data more accessible, especially to descendent and local communities. She is using digital frameworks including Linked Open Data as a means of collaborating across borders, including through work funded by OSUN’s support of community engaged work. The scaling up of this work has been recently awarded a grant from the ACLS, for a project entitled Archaeological Archives as Inclusive Learning Laboratories. The Council for British Research in the Levant has also awarded her funding with an international team for a project entitled The Ruins of Local Memory: Archaeological Archives and Post-Conflict Planning, which will use community engagement with archival photographs as the basis for post-conflict rebuilding of community relationships with archaeological sites in Syria.

Ecologies of Violence

Ecologies of Violence: Heritage and Conflict in More-than-Human Worlds (EoV) is a three-year UKRI-funded project (MR/X014991/1) led by Dr Esther Breithoff, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, in collaboration with Co-Investigator Layla Renshaw (Kingston University), Postdoctoral Researcher Matthew Leonard (Birkbeck), and partners and collaborators including Article 22, MAG (Mines Advisory Group), Legacies of War, the Secretaría Nacional de Cultura Paraguay, Para la Tierra, the Durand Group, and Veterans Affairs Canada. The project investigates how the legacies of armed conflict and state violence endure across landscapes, ecologies and communities, creating forms of involuntary heritage that unsettle conventional frameworks of conservation and memory.

Through case studies in Paraguay, Laos and France, the research traces how unexploded ordnance, infrastructural expansion, deforestation, and poisoned soils continue to transform both human and more-than-human worlds. Working with local communities, the project studies how these ecologies of violence are lived, contested and reimagined. Creative practice is central to this work: partnerships with artists and artisans translate research into film-making, craft and public exhibitions, such as Ecologies of Violence at Birkbeck’s Peltz Gallery, which features the film-poem Zone Rouge / Red Zone: Back Forest Reflections by ecological artist Antony Lyons.

By engaging with the slow violence of contamination, exclusion and displacement, the project embodies the Carena Institute’s commitment to approaches that are ecological, equitable and community-centred. EoV highlights how heritage emerges not only through intentional preservation but also through unwanted residues of conflict and seeks new, just ways of engaging with these legacies in the present.

Our Projects in Scotland

Our projects in Scotland focus on the Isle of Arran and the Ardeer Peninsula in North Ayrshire and are led by Dr Lesley McFadyen. On Arran, she works at Drumadoon with archaeologists from Archaeology Scotland and the universities of Glasgow, Bournemouth, Birmingham and Coventry. Her work focusses on everyday material culture and practices, in order to give context to prehistoric monuments, and to materially account for historical presence. She runs a fieldwalking project with islanders to mark the presence and character of prehistoric and historic lives across the island through time. She is also part of an art/archaeology project, and Arran Community Rainforest Nursey project, which are both based at Drumadoon.

At Ardeer, Lesley is working on the archaeology and heritage ecologies of the Alfred Nobel/ICI dynamite factory with CISA honorary research fellow Alex Boyd, a photographer, and Iain Hamlin, an ecologist from the Ardeer Action Group. This work brings to the fore the vibrant and material presence of factory lives (human and more-than-human), through an archaeology of photography and ecological archives. It is work which remarks on the absences of institutional archives, and asks us to hold onto an overlooked west coast of Scotland industrialised landscape that is under threat. Under the aegis of CISA, we are extending the scope of both projects so that local communities become co-producers of knowledge of island and industrialised landscapes, and how we relate to their pasts and their possible futures.