Bradford 2025

BBC Young Reporter Festival

5-6 February 2025

Coming live from the University of Bradford in February, the festival is being hosted by BBC presenters Amber Sandhu and Martin Dougan, and give young people the chance to find out more about the creative and digital industry. 

Young Reporters will have the chance to meet and work with those from the industry and hear about their experiences and advice. The line up includes presenters, writers, journalists, influencers and more! Plus we’ll have experts from the BBC Early Careers team and professionals from the local creative scene offering valuable advice and insights into the industry. 

Beyond Memory

Andrea Capstick and Clare Mason

7 February 2025: Bradford Central Library, 7 March 2025: Manningham Library, 4 April 2025: Shipley Library, 2 May 2025: Keighley Library 

A multi-media art installation co-created with members of the Pathways support group for people living with young-onset dementia and their families.

The Poetry of Jacquetta Hawkes

Julie Parry and David Mullin
February 2025

Special Collections will be hosting David Mullin as a Writer in Residence for six months. David will be holding workshops and learning activities looking at ‘The Poetry of Jacquetta Hawkes.’ 

Jacquetta Hawkes was a pioneering female archaeologist, writer and activist, married to J.B. Priestley, who died in 1996, aged 85. The University holds her archive of diaries, letters, photographs, unpublished works and even school reports.

Teaspoon of Shampoo

Theatre in the Mill 
5-8 March 2025

Inspired by true events, Teaspoon of Shampoo is Theatre in the Mill’s latest in-house production, unravelling the fascinating story of a doctor exposed as a fraud after 30 years of practice. With no definitive answers about his motivations, the play invites you to explore a web of questions: Was he a man driven by a desire to do good, or were his actions fuelled by greed? Are the lines between right and wrong ever truly clear?

Set against the backdrop of 30 years of British history, Teaspoon of Shampoo weaves through significant events such as the founding of the NHS, the Partition of India, and the migration that has shaped modern Britain. These cultural and historical milestones enrich this gripping tale, casting light on the interplay between personal ambition and the forces of social change.

Teaspoon of Shampoo examines morality, identity, and belonging with a fresh and thought-provoking lens. This production questions how the echoes of the past continue to shape the present.

Don’t miss the chance to see this unforgettable exploration of truth and deception. Secure your tickets today for an evening of captivating theatre at Theatre in the Mill.

Not My Hero!

Maria Ambrozy
March 2025

‘Not my Hero!’ is a research and education project using photography to re-examine contested monuments in northern England. Led by Sub-Saharan African postgraduate students, it challenges colonial narratives embodied by public statues and memorials, spotlighting often marginalised perspectives. By reshaping how we interpret these sites, the project fosters new dialogues on decolonisation, identity, and public memory. Through creative methods, it aims to broaden understandings of heritage, advance debates on transformative learning, and culminate in both scholarly publications and a public exhibition.

Workshop: How to promote social cohesion and increase the impact and sustainability of your community-focussed service projects by using the 8 Positive Pillars of Peace.

Fiona Macaulay
7 March 2025

The workshop is organised by Rotary Great Britain and Ireland and the Institute of Economics and Peace in conjunction with the Rotary Peace Centre in the Department of Peace Studies and International Development.
 
Rotary International President Stephanie Urchick and Brett Savill, the Chief Operating Officer of the Institute of Economics and Peace will be leading Rotarians and others interested in social transformation in this practical workshop. They will take participants through the 8 Positive Pillars of Peace developed by the IEP and how these can be used to promote social cohesion and increase the impact and sustainability of community-focussed service projects.

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Play for Peace 

Fiona Macaulay
8 March 2025

A collaboration between Rotary, the Khidmat Centre and the Rotary Peace Centre at the University of Bradford, that will bring together older people from different communities. to share their experience of play, and then teach local primary school children those games.

Together Cafe: 'Who are you?' celebration

March/April 2025

The Together Café creates opportunities for University staff and students to meet with local people to discuss, create and deliver activities that will help to solve the issues and topics that are important to them.

Who are you? is a project being delivering in partnership with local community centre WomenZone. The Who Are You? project paired people from the community group with staff and students, and working with a local artist, they have shared parts of their identity, heritage and culture with each other. The final artwork will be unveiled during the this celebration of the Who Are you? project.

Pint of Science

May 2025

Pint of Science is a national festival that provides a space for researchers and members of the public alike to come together, be curious, and chat about research in a relaxed environment outside of mysterious laboratories or daunting dark lecture theatres.

Stories from Valley Parade

June 2025

To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Bradford City Fire, the University will create a body of work in partnership with Bradford City AFC and Bradford 2025. The University will be showcasing two research projects through Stories of Valley Parade.  

An immersive digital copy of the University of Bradford Stadium will bring fans’ stories to life as they are told through different artistic approaches, creating a celebration of the heritage and culture Bradford City AFC brings to the city. The stories will be embedded in the digital copy of the stadium and installed in physical football seats moved to different locations around the city and district, allowing different communities to engage with the project.  

Accompanying the digital stadium, PSBRU will launch a book recognising their contributions to research and healthcare for patients with burns injuries and sharing stories of the community cohesion that was created in response to the fire. The profits from the book will be used to support research at the PSBRU.   

Identifying Bradford Authors

Min Yong
June 2025

To shortlist one fiction and one nonfiction book written by an author born in Bradford or has used Bradford/wider Yorkshire as its setting in the book.

Alternative Bradford: Radical Bradford

Mark Goodall 
June 2025

Bradford Music Scene: exploring and uniting various musical activities across the city that will mix the past and present to offer a clearer perspective on the link between culture and politics (1 in 12 Club, Topic Folk Club, Red Rhino Records, Northern Soul clubs etc.). A mix of academic and independent researchers

Alternative Bradford: exhibition with community workshops based on the pioneering work of Bradford psychedelic artist and designer Dudley Edwards who used the colourful doors of Bradford houses as inspiration for his designs for the 1960s counterculture and pop culture phenomenon such as magazines and groups such as The Beatles.  

Bradford Literature Festival

27 June - 6 July 2025

Bradford Literature Festival (BLF) is an annual festival encompassing the best of literature, music, theatre, discussions, lectures and so much more.  In 2025 the festival will return to Bradford, and the University, from 27 June – 6 July 2025.  

In 2024, the festival attracted a record-breaking 155,934 guests from the UK and around the world, including over 59,000 children and young people. It held 669 events and featured 453 artists, authors, and researchers, including University colleagues: 

• Professor Hassan Ugail: AI Fighting Crime
• Professor Chris Gaffney: The Bradford Exhibition of 1904
• Professor Paul Rogers: The Insecurity Trap
• Professor John Russell: Russia 100: From Stalin to Putin.

Uncovering the 1904 Exhibition

Ben Jennings
July 2025 

Uncovering the 1904 Exhibition will conduct archaeological investigation in Lister Park, Bradford, to identify remains of two key sections of the 1904 Exhibition: the Somali Village and the Concert Hall. 

Excavation activities will be supplemented by an open call to the local Bradford population to uncover any photographs, prints, postcards, or other imagery of the 1904 Exhibition held in the community. These aspects will be digitised, with permission of their owners, to provide a digital dataset which may be used to create virtual reconstructions of aspects of the exhibition.

Bradford African Festival of Art 

Olushola Kolawole (OAK)
8 August 2025

The Bradford African Festival of Art (BAFA) is a vibrant two-day event. This festival aims to foster cultural inclusion and collaboration between the African community, the University of Bradford, and the wider Bradford community, aligning with the city's designation as the City of Culture for 2025.

The University will take ownership of the welcome event and the academic workshop, which will be held on the University campus. This day will feature academic and cultural activities designed to engage students, faculty, and the local community, showcasing the richness of African art and culture, while the 2nd day event will take place at the Bradford city park and will be organised with the wider African community in Bradford.

HDCA Annual Conference on Culture, Peace, and Capabilities

Prathivadi Anand
1-4 September 2025

Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) is a global learned society founded by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen along with Professor Martha Nussbaum and various academics in 2004. 

Human development is about people centred development and shot to prominence with the work of Pakistani economist Mahbub Ul Haq who created the human development index. Capability approach is about freedom, agency and justice.

Culture, peace and freedoms : A musical immersion

Prathivadi Anand

It is aimed to be premiered at the World conference of Human Development and Capability Association which we will be hosting from 1 to 4 September.

Working with a local arts company called Manasamitra, this project aims to have a dialogue between academics and artists to enable to artists to create a music-scape through fusion of classical music of different genres and the sounds of Bradford to give meaning to the idea of culture, peace and freedoms. 

Open Data Crime Analysis for City of Culture Hosts

Pritesh Mistry
September 2025

This research aims to analyse crime data from https://data.police.uk/ for the city of Hull and Coventry, which were City of Culture hosts in 2017 and 2021, respectively. The study will examine crime patterns before, during, and after their City of Culture periods to assess their social impact. 

Festivals of the Dead

October 2025

Building on Professor Karina Croucher’s research, a series of death cafes will be held from May – October, exploring how different cultures mark death, whilst also delivering workshops for people to create an artistic expression. The Festival of the Dead will be delivered in partnership with Cecil Green Arts and will form part of the Lantern Parade at Lister Park. The Lantern Parade typically takes place on a Friday around the same time of year as Halloween.   

In addition to the death cafes, we will hold a Death Symposium bringing together researchers and artists from across the country to share and discuss this prominent subject, culminating in the attendees attending and participating in the Lantern Parade.  

Crowd Engagement Evaluation with Digital Technologies

Christopher Gaffney and Ciprian Daniel Neagu
October 2025

The project involves a number of data gathering and records (pictures from drones and cameras, audio records eventually from field microphones and cameras, open access data e.g. weather, crime, cultural events; specialised inputs as footfall data from BD25 collaborators) to create Machine Learning models for indoor and outdoor activities evaluation outputs for BD25 events. 

We have already run 2 collections events - the Giraffes event with drone and camera image captures, and University Winter Graduation Day on 2nd December in collaboration with BD25 and University teams.

Bradford Science Festival

National Science and Media Museum
Friday 24 October to Sunday 2 November 2025

The 2025 festival theme is Future World, exploring the fascinating possibilities of tomorrow through three key sub-themes: 

• Digital Tech: The future of creativity and virtual worlds;
• Environments: Future fashion, climate change, and environmental technologies;
• Our Bodies: Feel the noise, future of food, sweet dreams, and busy brains. 

UNESCO Film Archives

Mark Goodall
November 2025

UNESCO Film Archives project using the past to create the future, drawing on the status of Bradford as UNESCO City of Film to use archives (local, national and international, including the UNESCO Film Archive in Paris) and funded through a major grant application to generate new co-created projects with community groups focussed on the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (e.g. environment; sustainable cities; gender equality).

This will also incorporate local film-related local community activity such as film societies and film-making groups.

Air pollution & Public Health

Jacobo Elies
December 2025

We are inviting University of Bradford students to participate in a contest to creatively express “What living in good air quality means” for people, the environment, and society. Submissions can include any electronically shareable art form, such as photos, videos, sculptures, or songs. The top 10 finalists will have their work showcased at a public venue, where attendees will vote for the first and second place winners.

Tradttooing: American Traditional Tattoo Style in Bradford

Douglas Schulz
December 2025

This project seeks to explore American traditional tattooing in Bradford and surrounding areas. One of the aims of the project is to explore how the style is received in Bradford, and how tattooees and tattooers add their own, Bradford/English, influences to an established and distinctive style of tattoo art.

The project will include semi-structured interviews with tattooees and tattoo artists, biographical photography of participants’ traditional tattoos – exploring inspiration and meaning their tattoos -, and observations in and around tattoo parlors in the Bradford region. In total, 10-15 participants will be interviewed of which five are tattoo artists to help explore traditional tattooing trends, and the remainder will be people with old school/traditional tattoos.

The Cultural and Creative Sector Wellbeing Study - Cleverest

Lisa Edwards
January 2026

This project aims to create a long-term study (a cohort study) that regularly measures the physical and mental wellbeing of people working in the cultural and creative sectors. Starting in January 2025 and continuing over several years, the study will collect ongoing data to better understand how the creative/cultural/arts sectors health and wellbeing is affected over time.

Assessing the Impact of Bradford 2025 on the city and region’s Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

David Spicer
April 2026

To explore the attitudes and responses of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the city and region to Bradford 2025 and assess the impact and contribution of Bradford 2025 to the SME economy within the region. Focusing on the cultural and leisure and tourism sectors.

Concrete Utopia

Mark Goodall 
September 2026

A symposium/walk exploring the legacy of the University campus in relation to architecture, modernism, post-modernism and future environmental thinking. 

Hidden Stories: short film about Bradford-born musician Barbara Moore developed out of forthcoming research into library/source music to raise awareness of her work.

Social Cohesion and Civic Pride Strand for research evaluation activities

Kath Bridger and Kingsley Utam
December 2026

Evaluation of Bradford2025 in relation to its positive/negative impact on social cohesion and civic pride.  

Methods include (but not exclusively):

• Qualitative data gathered through social media and analysed through a bespoke algorithm.
• Quantitative data analysis of police crime data including general crime, hate crime and stop & search.
• Focus groups and discussion forums with young people in school; people in the community; 2025 participants.
• Establishment of baselines in respect of Bradford's cultural position in 2024; impact of cities of culture on other hosts; attitudes and behaviours of young people and communities in relation to people from protected characteristic groups.