Summary Street drinking is a complex problem and impacts negatively on wider communities while street drinking communities themselves are often claimed to provide fellowship and support to their members. Regarded as a public health problem and a public nuisance by wider communities, strategies to address the problems caused by street drinking include enforcement and environmental controls, harm reduction and treatment. However both hedonistic binge drinking and chronic addiction persist in the UK, and there are diverse reactions to it informed by religious and cultural traditions and moral/ethical convictions. Increasingly, excessive alcohol consumption is also presented as a public health issue. This proposal will bring New Media Arts and Humanities perspectives to bear on street drinking, conceived as a health problem and a key issue for connected communities. The research questions posed in relation to the problems caused by street drinking are: What role can New Media Arts play in engaging communities to address the issue? What can an assets based approach offer in addressing the problems caused by street drinking? Can community based strategies be realistically grounded in an ethical/theologial framework? How can the sometimes conflicting socio-cultural interests at stake be accommodated? Research Strategy 1)The academic team will work with FACT in Liverpool to investigate diverse community responses and assets in relation to street drinking, using FACT's established model of community inquiry, based on the methods of a local TV station. Community stakeholders engaged will include: residents, retailers, health and social care professionals, the leisure industry and cultural sector. 2) Information collected will feed into a live web-cast, hosted at FACT, enabling participation remotely or in person. This will be aimed at the whole community including those with experience of street drinking. 3)The film of the event will be a focus for a multi-disciplinary and cross-professional seminar, which will also discuss a dramaturgical enactment of responses to a street drinking problem scenario using the on-line virtual community 'Stilwell'. This interactive resource, will present a virtual case-study situation requiring a response from community members and services. It will engage seminar members cognitively and affectively in decision-making. 4)The seminar will consider the material presented to it via new media through three lenses: a)a socio-cultural lens based on the work of cultural analyst Alfred Lorenzer (Bereswill et al 2010) in which cultural traditions of stakeholder communities are seen to inform perceptions and to influence each other. b)an ethical/theological lens based on Cook (2006) who explores the basis in Christian ethics of 12 steps programmes used by Alcoholics Anonymous c)An assets based social policy lens which seeks to identify community resources in addressing problems (Kretzmann & McNight 1993) 5) The recorded seminar discussion will be subject to in-depth panel analysis by the research team using an interpretive method derived from the socio-cultural lens. This method (Leithaeuser and Volmerg 1988) has been adapted for the analysis of visual data such as the web-cast and the Stilwill scenario (Froggett and Hollway 2010). It enables researchers to analyse decisions, utterances and actions within the context whole 'scenes' rather than as discrete events. 6)The final report directed at academics and communities of professional practice will detail: a) the perspectives on street drinking developed by the seminar and their implications for policy and practice in the areas of public health and community connectedness. (b)the value of New Media in raising community awareness, enhancing community participation, and mobilising community assets to address problems caused by street drinking.

This study will assess the impact on mental health of restricted access to arts and culture in a specific city region, and track, enable and enhance the value of innovation in arts provision in mitigating associated harms. Liverpool has one of the richest concentrations of culture in the UK, boasting the largest clustering of museums and galleries outside London. Cultural capital is critical to the city region's economy, contributing c10% (Culture Liverpool,2019). The city also has a pioneering history of harnessing arts for mental health care through partnerships between culture and health providers. Building on the University of Liverpool's strong alliance with organisations across these sectors, this project brings together an interdisciplinary team of arts and mental health researchers to devise and conduct, in consultation with cultural and health bodies, two surveys. Survey 1 (online interviews) will target 20 arts organisations (10 civic institutions, 10 community arts programmes, representing 'elite' and 'popular' arts) to capture (i)the impact of COVID-19 on public access to arts provision (including those who usually access the arts through formal healthcare routes) and on audience/beneficiary change over time (legacy losses and potential gains) (ii)the success of alternative (e.g. online/digital) modes of provision by arts organisations in reaching and communicating with established and/or new audiences. Survey 2 (online questionnaire and supplementary online/telephone interviews) will target c300 arts' audiences/beneficiaries to capture (i)the impact on mental health of restricted/non-existent access to usual provision (ii)the perceived value and accessibility of alternative arts provision and the latter's impact on mental health/wellbeing.

Over the last decade, the creative industries have been revolutionised by the Internet and the digital economy. The UK, already punching above its weight in the global cultural market, stands at a pivotal moment where it is well placed to build a cultural, business and regulatory infrastructure in which first movers as significant as Google, Facebook, Amazon or iTunes may emerge and flourish, driving new jobs and industry. However, for some creators and rightsholders the transition from analogue to digital has been as problematic as it has been promising. Cultural heritage institutions are also struggling to capitalise upon new revenue streams that digitisation appears to offer, while maintaining their traditional roles. Policymakers are hampered by a lack of consensus across stakeholders and confused by partisan evidence lacking robust foundations. Research in conjunction with industry is needed to address these problems and provide support for legislators. CREATe will tackle this regulatory and business crisis, helping the UK creative industry and arts sectors survive, grow and become global innovation pioneers, with an ambitious programme of research delivered by an interdisciplinary team (law, business, economics, technology, psychology and cultural analysis) across 7 universities. CREATe aims to act as an honest broker, using open and transparent methods throughout to provide robust evidence for policymakers and legislators which can benefit all stakeholders. CREATe will do this by: - focussing on studying and collaborating with SMEs and individual creators as the incubators of innovation; - identifying "good, bad and emergent business models": which business models can survive the transition to the digital?, which cannot?, and which new models can succeed and scale to drive growth and jobs in the creative economy, as well as supporting the public sector in times of recession?; - examining empirically how far copyright in its current form really does incentivise or reward creative work, especially at the SME/micro level, as well as how far innovation may come from "open" business models and the "informal economy"; - monitoring copyright reform initiatives in Europe, at WIPO and other international fora to assess how they impact on the UK and on our work; - using technology as a solution not a problem: by creating pioneering platforms and tools to aid creators and users, using open standards and released under open licences; - examining how to increase and derive revenues from the user contribution to the creative economy in an era of social media, mash-up, data mining and "prosumers"; - assessing the role of online intermediaries such as ISPs, social networks and mobile operators to see if they encourage or discourage the production and distribution of cultural goods, and what role they should play in enforcing copyright. Given the important governing role of these bodies should they be subject to regulation like public bodies, and if so, how?; - consider throughout this work how the public interest and human rights, such as freedom of expression, privacy, and access to knowledge for the socially or physically excluded, may be affected either positively or negatively by new business models and new ways to enforce copyright. To investigate these issues our work will be arranged into seven themes: SMEs and good, bad and emergent business models; Open business models; Regulation and enforcement; Creators and creative practice; Online intermediaries and physical and virtual platforms; User creation, behaviour and norms; and, Human rights and the public interest. Our deliverables across these themes will be drawn together to inform a Research Blueprint for the UK Creative Economy to be launched in October 2016.