Our 90th anniversary partnership with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) supports research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh for international postdoctoral researchers. These fellowships broaden our research and evidence base, inform our global programmes, and advance knowledge exchange in areas of strategic interest. In this article, one of our inaugural fellows, South African multi-modal artist, educator, and practice researcher Anthea Moys, reflects on her experience and shares insights emerging from her project.

How the Fellowship enabled the work

The artistic force of this research has been sustained by the material and intellectual infrastructure provided by the British Council. Having a dedicated studio and office at IASH – a space for gathering objects, making, and ‘doing messy work’ – offered both physical and imaginative grounding. I had the freedom to develop ideas through drawing, collage, play, and discussion with peers, alongside dedicated writing sessions and opportunities to share work-in-progress with an international community of scholars. This created the conditions for genuine artistic and research growth. The supportive ecosystem strengthened the work itself and demonstrated how institutional care and collaboration can nurture creative inquiry.

Equally important was the critical ecosystem surrounding the fellowship: a framework of mentorship, participation, and expertise that encouraged both risk-taking and reflection. The British Council were not only facilitators but active participants in the research process – offering formal and informal feedback, engaging in generative conversations, and joining the workshops and feedback-loop sessions I ran. In doing so, they became co-inquirers in the exploration of how trust might be built, tested, and embodied through play. This active engagement deepened the inquiry, ensuring that the work was not just protected but continually evolving within a shared space of curiosity and care.

This structure of support also offered something less tangible but profoundly important – confidence. Knowing that the British Council values artistic research as a vital part of international collaboration gave me permission to experiment, fail, and begin again. The fellowship’s expectation of cross-cultural exchange provided both a framework and a political anchor: it placed value on the act of building bridges across contexts and recognised the necessity of institutions in supporting that process. 

Context and positionality

I am a 45-year-old, previously advantaged white South African artist and researcher – a settler descendant now living in Scotland, a bridge between two homes shaped by colonial histories and ongoing inequalities. My own identity, body, and mind form part of the research: the carrier bag through which ideas are filtered and relationships are built.

This year in Edinburgh has allowed me to use that positionality as a conduit – to listen, connect, and prepare the ground for future collaborations between Scotland and South Africa. With IASH and the British Council’s network and encouragement, I’ve been able to engage with partners including Napier University (UK), Edinburgh Futures Institute (UK), Brighton University (UK), the Keiskamma Trust (SA), and Shade (SA), as well as a broad constellation of artists and researchers committed to social practice. The fellowship created a context where these connections could emerge naturally – through conversation, shared play, and mutual curiosity. 

Two companions on the research journey: the carrier bag and the trickster

Walking through Edinburgh, I was constantly aware of its monumental landscape – statues of heroes and conquerors, cannons fired daily from the castle, the pageantry of the Military Tattoo. These symbols of hierarchy and conquest became the backdrop against which my project sought other kinds of stories: stories that hold rather than dominate, gather rather than conquer.

Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction became my first guide, reminding me that humanity’s most transformative invention was not the spear, but the container — a vessel that gathers, holds, and sustains. The second guide was the trickster – that playful, mischievous spirit embodied perfectly by the traffic cone perched on the Duke of Wellington’s head in Glasgow. Together, these figures shaped a research practice rooted in gathering, questioning, and playful disruption. 

Playing to keep on playing

Together with artist and friend Dr Anthony Schrag, I developed The Carrier Bag of Tricks: Unlearning through Unwinnable Games, a workshop held at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) and supported by EFI and the British Council. Eleven artists and researchers came together to explore how play might help us think differently about trust, collaboration, and knowledge-making.

Rather than playing to win, we played to keep on playing – the unwinnable challenged us to stay with doubt, awkwardness, and uncertainty. Through this, participants experienced how trust is not a static quality but a living, embodied process. As one participant put it, ‘to play is to doubt’ – and doubt can open space for curiosity and collective insight. 

Key findings: to play is to doubt, trust as a muscle, and decolonial joy

A follow-up feedback-loop session with participants – including a British Council representative – helped consolidate the main insights of the research so far:

• Trust behaves like a muscle: it requires time, stretching, and care.
• Embodied play accelerates connection faster than logic or ideology.
• Temporary uncertainty can be generative: doubt invites empathy, learning, and critical thinking.
• Decolonial joy and love – the joy of collaboration and difference – is a bridge between people and places (sentiments also recently echoed by Cecilia Milesi, founder of the Global Change Center in her keynote address  to the 2025 International cultural Relations Research Alliance conference.

These findings now form part of the ‘carrier bag’: a growing archive of games, tools, and reflections that will travel with the next phase of the work in South Africa. 

From Edinburgh to elsewhere: building bridges for reworlding

The fellowship has laid the groundwork for Carrier Bags for Reworlding – a collaboration linking Scotland and South Africa through play, trust, and collective imagination. In Hamburg, Eastern Cape – a village named by German settlers in the 1850s – the project reimagines place through art, play, and storytelling led by local communities. Working with the Keiskamma Trust, its new Art Clubs, Shade, and UK partners, participants will co-create new names for the village, as well as maps, and performances that reimagine local identity and instil joy. Whilst the Art Clubs are supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) until end of December 2026, we need your help to keep it going!

To learn more, visit our BackaBuddy page.

And follow project updates on any of these channels: @antheamoys @keiskammaartproject @shadecommunity

In a fractured world marked by the continuing direct and indirect effects of apartheid, growing mistrust, and ‘post-truth’ logics, opportunities and spaces like these – interdisciplinary, polyvocal, messy – made possible by the British Council and IASH are increasingly rare, and yet deeply necessary. In this context, the fellowship has done more than provide research funding – it has embodied the very possibility of international collaboration as a practice of trust. Through material support, mentorship, global networks, and trust in arts research this work has been nurtured into existence, creating the space to imagine new ways of reworlding through play. By offering time, relationships, and care, the fellowship has not just enabled research; it has built a bridge – a bridge on which we can begin to reworld together.