Inquisitions post mortem (IPMs) are records of the lands held at their deaths by tenants of the crown. They are the single most important source for the study of landed society in later medieval England and, to a lesser extent, of Tudor and Stuart England. Thousands survive in The National Archives at Kew. Those for the years 1236-1447 and 1485-1509 have been calendared in 29 large volumes (CIPMs). These volumes are highly expensive and difficult to manipulate in the ways required by modern scholarship and now feasible using computer technology.\n\nThis project is a collaborative venture by Prof Michael Hicks of the University of Winchester and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. Priority is being given to the electronic publication, wider dissemination, and enhancement to the best modern standards of CIPMs already published. There have been three smaller projects funded by the Marc Fitch Fund, the University of Winchester, and the British Academy that have established the feasability of what is proposed. The project builds on CCH's vast experience and expertise arising from the Fine Rolls and Gascon Rolls projects.\nThis project will digitise all the CIPMs (1236-1447, 1485-1509) and publish them on open access on British History Online to make them much more widely accessible to any researcher anywhere in the world.\n\nFor no period are IPMs more important than the fifteenth century, which has been described as 'one of the most formative but least researched periods in English agrarian history' (Campbell, 1993). Fortunately the most recent volumes spanning 1399-1447 have been calendared to the highest standards to meet the most demanding requirements of modern historians . This project will enhance these volumes as necessary with sophisticated structural and semantic markup that will enable analysis and mapping of their content and thus convert them into a digital interface that operates as a web-mounted interactive database linked to a mapping system. This will permit sophisticated searching, analysis, and visualisation through maps of all the data that currently is almost unusable. This will place this material and the study of the medieval countryside on a radically improved footing.\n\nThe project will include a full source study that will test the reliability of the data and establish where it is to be trusted and where discounted. IPMs copied from earlier documents will be identified, thus enabling them to be excluded from calculations. Two in-depth case studies will demonstrate the value and potential fof the IPM data and will provide guidance on how such material can be most effectively used. There will be a conference of invited experts that will generate a guide to future users for publication both online and as hard copy.\n\nThe project will make a major contribution to understanding of English rural society in the first half of the fifteenth century. It will enable well-known developments in agrarian history, such as the shift from arable to pasture, to be traced in much greater detail. It will enable historians to trace in detail the changing value of land and the changing shape of aristocratic incomes, It will provide vital insight into the strategies used by families to preserve and parcel out their inheritances in a period when demographic decline led to a considerable increase in female and collateral heirs. It will promote more detailed and extensive research on the identities and activities of the jurors whose verdicts formed the basis of IPMs, and thus on the rural 'middling sort' in the fifteenth century.\n\nFollowing the completion of this project, it is intended to enhance the electronic text of the other published volumes to the same standard so that they too can be fully exploited.\n

The purpose of the period of research leave requested from AHRC is to prepare for publication the findings of research on the uses of music in the early twenty-first century, which develops earlier work (see Blake and Jeffery 2001; and Blake 2004b; 2005a; and 2005b, in attached CV). The writing project will report on research carried out in and before the autumn of 2005. At least two conference papers, a chapter in a commissioned and contracted edited book (which will be delivered in December 2005), and a commissioned and contracted single-author monograph (due for delivery in September 2006) will disseminate the research findings. The project will open with a literature review. Recent books, journals, websites, and company information will be consulted. This will establish the ways in which policy makers such as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), companies such as EMI, Sony and Motorola and their advertisers, and the online members of user communities, have imagined shifts in the availability uses of music, and have, and/or are, actively providing for such shifts- for example through: The formation of cultural policy and revisions to copyright and intellectual property law (e.g. the Creative Industries Intellectual Property Forum which was launched by DCMS in 2004); MP3 download provision on laptop computers, MP3 players and mobile phones; The iTunes personal computer programme and online music sales facility, and its recently introduced Virgin and HMV rivals; The Garage band music composition programme which is currently delivered with new Apple computers*; Non-proprietary web forums which discuss the best use of these devices. The literature review will aid in the preparation of documentation for semi-structured interviews which will aim to test policy makers', producers' and users' attitudes to legal, ethical and personal issues arising from the uses of music through new portable technologies. Interviews will be held with representatives from government; from record and mobile phone companies and the advertisers who work for them; journalists who regularly evaluate these businesses' products; with the operators of non-proprietary websites dedicated to the users of mobile technologies such as the iPod; and at least four groups of 8-10 consumers from London and the South-East of England, selected by age (plus or minus 25), and gender-balanced. A schedule has been drawn up for these interviews, which will be held during the autumn of 2005. If necessary further Interviews with groups of users of mobile technologies will be scheduled for January 2006. There will be catch-up literature reviews in January, March and May 2006, and this may lead to further email correspondence or face-to-face contact with interviewees, if it is necessary either to clarify issues or there has been a significant change in, for example, product availability, or the legal position on the ownership and use of music. The Garage band programme is of particular interest because of the assumptions it makes about the ordinary computer user's attitude to composition through the provision of ready-made music. In composing a 'new' piece of music, the user is encouraged to use existing factory-made samples. This apparently conceptualises the composition of music as the juxtaposition of available material, which may in turn reinforce users' willingness to pay, or not to pay, for copyrighted music. The project will test such assumptions and the ways in which technologies confirm or deny users' beliefs and desires.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

The aim of this project is to investigate how the Church of England has engaged with selected public policy debates in relation to biomedical ethics since the 1960s. What has it been aiming to achieve, and why? What strategies has it adopted, and why? What effect has its public engagement had on policy outcomes and public perceptions? How has that public engagement been reflected in the media? By concentrating on one Christian denomination and a narrow range of ethical and policy issues, it will be possible to produce a focused case study of the involvement of faith communities in public ethical and policy debates in contemporary Britain.\n\nThe interest of this research lies in the fact that the role of religious groups in the policy process in contemporary Britain is highly contested. This is illustrated by the debates leading up to the passing of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (2008): the Select Committee examining the legislation made particular efforts to engage representatives of faith groups in the debate; yet at the same time, some contributions to the debate and some media comment expressed considerable suspicion of religious involvement and influence.\n\nThe involvement of religious traditions in policymaking in liberal societies has been much discussed in the academic literature in both political theory and public theology. Less attention, though, has been paid to the ways in which religious groups have actually engaged with public debates, how their modes of engagement compare with the various possibilities set out in the academic literature and what effects their involvement has had.\n\nThis research will begin to fill that gap, by focusing on three controversial areas in biomedical ethics that have been the subject of policymaking and legislation between the 1960s and the present: abortion, human fertilisation and embryology, and assisted dying. Over that period, the Church of England has had a high level of engagement with these issues. The aims and strategies it has adopted, and the rationales for those aims and strategies, will be investigated through a study of archival sources documenting that engagement and interviews with key personnel. The effects of its public engagement on these issues will be assessed by analysing Parliamentary records (including Hansard and committee reports), selected media coverage, and empirical survey data on public perceptions of the bioethical issues being studied and of the churches' involvement in public life. In the light of these analyses, further empirical survey research will be conducted to investigate more specifically the public impact of the Church's public engagement with the issues being studied.\n\nThe findings of this project are expected to offer new insights into the engagement of faith groups in public debate and the political process. As such, they will be of use to academics working in public theology, bioethics and politics, to those responsible for faith communities' engagement with public issues, and to policymakers interested in the role of religious traditions in the policy process.\n

This is an exploratory study of a highly contentious and controversial area. The aim of the study is both to produce theory on how paedophiles construct their identities and also to contribute to a more effective policy response to the public health crisis of child sexual abuse. The study starts from the premise that current cultural understandings of 'paedophilia' and 'paedophiles' are mediated primarily, not through dry professional medico-legal discourse, but through popular media including websites, blogs, news items and films. These media provide the framework by which individuals communicate with one another about what sexual attraction to children means, what is and what should be done about it. In contemporary society, the first move most people will make if they want to find out about something is to google it. Typing in 'paedophile' (or 'pedophile') into any search engine shows Wikipedia as one of the most popular search-results. The articles in Wikipedia are linked to external websites: browsing these links will take the searcher, usually directly, to popular pro-paedophile websites such as www.puellula.com. Such websites are the primary means by which adults sexually attracted to children - self-styled 'paedophiles', 'child-lovers' or 'minor-attracted adults' (MAA) - communicate with each another and their online community their individual experiences, desires, views and beliefs. Textual analysis of the material on these sites allows clearer understanding of pro-paedophile discourses. \nTo enhance understanding of the relationship between discourse, experience, identity and community, this study also makes use of anonymous, confidential qualitative data obtained from online questionnaires (together with the Project Information Sheet to read prior to completion), advertised among the 'paedophile community' and posted online at a secure website. This study would not succeed without the active support of members of the 'paedophile community'; implications of this are discussed in the Case for Support. Questionnaires are completed and emailed to the researcher. Data from 17 respondents has already been received and it is expected to complete data-collection (up to 50 respnses) by the end of this year. Analysis (and follow-up of specific issues if required) will be completed by Spring 2008, while individual chapters on methodology and findings are being prepared and written up. \nAnalysis of the online and questionnaire material situates the micro-level psychosocial aspects of individual accounts within the macro-level structural context of political, legislative and policy-based frameworks (such as the turn to child protection and human rights discourses and the topical debate on 'lost childhood') as well as broader cultural discourses, for example on child sexuality. Psychoanalytic processes (denial, splitting, projection) are also seen as relevant, both in understanding community responses and in making sense of the ways in which a person is able to hold the discredited and stigmatised identity of 'paedophile'. The study suggests that adults sexually attracted to children may struggle with depression and actively seek to make sense of their experiences within the supportive environment of the online 'paedophile community', which provides both information and, significantly, advice. Within this community are those who argue for and those who argue strongly against any form of sexual contact with children. This study highlights these conflicting ways of 'being a paedophile' (eg 'contact' versus 'non-contact'). \nIn brief, this study uses analysis of popular culture and pro-paedophile websites alongside qualitative data from self-identified paedophiles to explore the inter-relationship between discourses, community and identity. It is intended to contribute to policy by suggesting more culturally-aware child protection messages which are sensitive to discourses and debates within the online paedophile community.