The Manifold Lab
Biosocial, eco-sensory and digital studies of learning and behaviour.
About the lab
The Manifold Lab works across the boundaries of science and art to generate multi-sensory engagements with learning and behaviour. Founded in 2016, the Lab provides an open space for transdisciplinary collaboration and innovation in response to social and environmental change.
The Manifold Lab’s work is organised into four key research areas:
- Sense and sensation
- Ecologies
- Digital life
- Dis/Abilities
Our innovative research draws from the social sciences, philosophy, computing, science and technology studies, media studies, arts and humanities.
Manifold Lab website
Research areas
Sense and Sensation
This strand of research focuses on learning as an embodied, sensory and relational process. We are currently investigating the use of wearable biosensors, body cameras, and environmental sensors coupled with sensory approaches to ethnography, design-based research, and socially-engaged arts practice.
Featured projects
Ecologies
How can research respond to the rapidly changing environmental conditions of contemporary life on Earth? Current projects are addressing the biosocial implications for studies of childhood, youth, community, and education. We combine participatory, arts-based, philosophical, geographical, and anthropological approaches to study ecologies of learning – the assemblages of affects, contexts, bodies, places, interactions and materialities out of which learning emerges.
Featured projects
Digital Life
The Lab is invested in projects that address the ubiquitous nature of 21st century media networks, and the new ways of living and learning that such networks make possible. With a focus on the biocultural and social policy implications of digital media technologies, this research area includes projects and publications that address contemporary learning environments, computational cultures, and calculated publics.
Featured projects
Dis/Abilities
Our Lab researches the ways that dis/abilities are negotiated, engaged, and produced in both formal and informal learning environments. With a focus on the implications of neurodiversity and embodied dis/ability for learning, the research aims to foster inclusion and belonging through difference. Rather than reading ability and disability ‘against’ each other, we are interested in a more expansive notion of abilities, qualities, and capacities, and the ways in which these are expressed and received.
Featured projects
Events and activities
Events and activities
The Lab holds a regular series of biosocial research seminars, reading groups, and collaboratories that address the emerging intersections between the life sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Our emphasis on transdisciplinary collaboration is driven by the changing nature of life in the 21st century, and the need to develop new understandings of learning and behaviour that are responsive to these changing conditions.
Contributors
Contributors
The Lab is co-directed by:
They work with a core team of interdisciplinary researchers specialising in critical and creative approaches to the study of learning and behaviour, and a group of PhD students currently pursing innovative research directions within the Lab’s key research areas. Affiliated members of the Lab include leading educational researchers, scientists, designers, artists and architects located both in the UK and internationally. The Lab has worked in partnership with museums and galleries including Whitworth, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester Museum and Z-Arts.
The lab’s work is supported by an international Advisory Group consisting of:
Contact
Contact us
If you are interested in becoming an affiliate member of the Lab, or would like to know more about our work, please email:
Lab address
Room 2.52
Education and Social Research Institute
Manchester Metropolitan University
Brooks Building
53 Bonsall Street
Manchester
M15 6GX