In January 2025, Sarah Parry, Sustainable Households Co-Lead, and the team behind the Building Sustainability on a Foundation of Care project, held a two-day residential workshop to share and discuss social science scholarship on ethics of care. The group explored how they could apply this to their project, and were joined by illustrator, Dennis Sisterson, to capture the conversations. 

From January to May was an intense and inspiring period of fieldwork. The team completed 30 in-depth interviews, two focus groups, nine field visits, a series of mapping and autoethnographic exercises, and 20+ hours of participant observation. This culminated in a second workshop held in May 2025, Researching Care for People, Nature and Place, where preliminary findings from each case study were shared with the wider team.  

In parallel with fieldwork, Mhairi Hall has spent the last 6 months immersing herself in the complex detail of the research findings concerning the ideas and practices of care for people, nature and place in the Highlands of Scotland. Mhairi participated in both the January and May workshops and conducted field visits to each of the three case study locations to learn about the place and its inhabitants (human and nonhuman). 

Mhairi has now composed and scored seven new tunes, inspired by Scottish traditional music, to be learned and performed by an ensemble of musicians from Fèis Spè (a Gaelic arts organisation) and the Sgoil Chiùil na Gàidhealtachd (National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music).  

Together, the team are learning about the exhilarating impacts of their novel collaboration between social science and music and its role in engaged research that is with, in and for communities. Stay tuned for further details about where the music will be performed!