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  

Sense and sensation

See the full list of projects and publications.

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

Ecologies

See the full list of projects and publications.

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

Digital Life

See the full list of projects and publications.

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

Dis/Abilities

See the full list of projects and publications.

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: 

All contributors

See the full list of people that contribute to the Manifold Lab.