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Strong project management is increasingly recognised as essential to achieve impactful outcomes in externally-funded research projects hosted in Higher Education Institutes (HEIs). However, the characteristics of research project management, and how it differs from project management in other environments, have not been sufficiently explored. Key factors in research projects lead us to question the applicability of standard project management methodologies, and to explore optimum organisational approaches to project support. In this paper, from a practitioner perspective we consider the factors that influence forms of research project management and prior literature on the topic. We report on the results of a survey of project management modes and maturity undertaken among research project management professionals in EU, EEA and UK HEIs. Insights derived from the results provide a better understanding of how organisational research project management is currently implemented, and identify avenues for improvement, increasing fundamental understanding of this emerging professional domain.

Russian interference and invasion in Ukraine have transformed that nation's historical practice of mural painting. A traditional art form with deep religious and political resonance in Ukraine, murals have become an instrument for patriotic mass mobilisation against the Russian military threat. From the mid-2000s, spraypaint graffiti underwent a gradual process of professionalisation and reconciliation with mainstream culture as Ukrainian municipalities pursued urban beautification initiatives and city-branding strategies to mitigate the socioeconomic challenges of postsocialism. It was this legacy of apolitical, privately funded street art that provided the foundations for patriotic muralism following the Maidan "Revolution of Dignity" and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Amidst the post-Maidan search for a postcolonial understanding of Ukrainian culture disentangled from Soviet and Russian influences, professionally produced murals in central urban districts proposed new visions of national identity. The war's intensification since 2022 has resulted in a decentralisation of mural production. No longer reliant on international festivals in urban centres, conflict murals are now made by Ukrainian artists in large cities and small towns across the country. The newest murals represent a blending of the physical and digital—with a subject matter often inspired by viral conflict memes; artworks are, in turn, shared with worldwide audiences via social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst a systemic transformation, existing structures of individual and collective identification often become discredited. After the chaotic experience of transition, a period of normalisation generally follows, accompanied by a concerted exercise of identity rebuilding. Processes of identity reconstruction tend to be heavily influenced by national elites and retransmitted via symbolic interventions in the public space. Such a period of post-transition identity-building has been underway in Ukraine and Russia since 2010, gradually replacing the informality of the post-Soviet condition of the 1990s and 2000s. This article investigates the extent to which Russian and Ukrainian narratives of national identity have diverged, and are continuing to diverge, from the common trunk of a constructed (post-)Soviet identity. Should these identity-building processes be considered as decentralised, or as the product of top-down management by public authorities? I use as observations urban murals created in central districts of Kyiv and Moscow after 2010, comparatively evaluating them in terms of symbolic content and institutional context. My data source is an index of murals of my own compilation. I hope to have demonstrated that differences between the two capitals are evident in terms of the symbolic content of murals, their compositional design, and the choice of heroic-inspirational figures depicted. These differences correlate with divergent official discourses of national identity in the two countries. The street art booms in Kyiv and Moscow are considered as parallel campaigns of state-supported neo-muralism, occurring amidst militarised identitarian conflict between Russia and Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]