Dr Michael Howcroft
- Future Leaders Fellow (Urban Studies & Social Policy)
email:
Michael.Howcroft@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns:
He/him/his
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1171-6122Biography
I am a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Division of Urban Studies and Social Policy. The four-year Civic Imaginary Partnerships project works closely with local and national policy partners, community organisations and creative practitioners to develop long-term ethnographic understandings of how communities collectively reimagine and reinvent their places. It explores the concept and method of the civic imaginary, its international reach and applications, and its potential as a broker between local authorities and communities. The project builds on my earlier projects, especially my PhD (Human Geography at the University of Hull, 2021), which, through the framework of the civic imaginary, explored some of the political and cultural behaviours of Hull.
I was Research Associate with the AHRC Place Programme (2023-2024) and held an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship exploring pride in place at the University of Southampton (2022-2023). I was Research Fellow at the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities, working on the AHRC funded Feeling Towns project. I was also Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, on the Spaces of Hope project and a member of the team exploring the soft-power impacts of Eurovision 2023 in Liverpool, funded by the British Council.
Before the PhD, I was an actor and director, working on theatre productions in the UK and internationally. I am an experienced facilitator of focus groups and creative workshops, regularly collaborating with poets, youth theatres, visual artists, playwrights, musicians, community-based artists and film makers. I co-created the short, animated film titled ‘How Proud?’, funded by the AHRC Place Programme.
Research interests
- Civic imaginary theory and praxis
- Emotional geographies, particularly the spatial, political and cultural geographies of pride and shame
- Cultural mega-events
- Community-led planning
- Creative ethnographic methods
Research groups
Grants
2024-2028: Civic imaginary partnerships: cultures of participation and local decision making UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Grant number: MR/Y017404/1
2022-2023: Pride, shame and the civic imaginary: UK cultural festivals and the levelling up agenda ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship Grant number: ES/X004139/1
2022-2023: Feeling Towns: the role of place and identity in governance and local policy AHRC AH/W008696/1, (Co-Investigator. P-I Nicky Marsh)
Supervision
Professional activities & recognition
Research fellowships
- 2024 - 2028: UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship
- 2022 - 2023: ESRC Post-doctoral Fellowship
Selected international presentations
- 2025: Regional Studies Association (Porto, Portugal)
- 2025: American Association of Geographers (Detroit, USA)
- 2024: Regional Studies Association (Florence, Italy)
- 2023: University of Iceland (Reykjavik, Iceland)
- 2023: Royal Geographical Society (London, UK)
- 2023: Regional Studies Association (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
- 2023: American Association of Geographers (Denver, USA)
- 2023: Political Studies Association (Liverpool, UK)
Additional information
Michael is a visiting researcher at the University of Bologna and a member of the Community Ownership Fund evaluation steering committee (Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government).
