This follow on bid will investigate how arts & humanities research and practices of collaborating across sectors or disciplines can significantly contribute to healthcare innovation in the years to come. Building on the learning and insight developed across the four AHRC Creative Economy Hubs (REACT, Design in Action, The Creative Exchange and Creative Works London), this pilot study aims to explore the wider applicability and adaptability of the creative Hubs model to this important sector. For this pilot project, we will focus on challenges around dementia care and ageing populations, but in recognition that this is a test-bed for the broader health and wellbeing sector. The long-term goal of the project is to design a framework for a near-term creative economy Healthcare Hub, laying down recommendations for, and routes towards, its implementation. Dementia represents a major challenge to the healthcare field. One in five people will get dementia, and the condition has been diagnosed in 36 million people worldwide, making it a problem of global significance. The effects of dementia are debilitating not only for the individual - with symptoms such as memory loss and mood changes - but can lead to social disconnection and marginalisation with wider consequences. The effects of dementia on friends and family are often devastating. Currently, there is no cure for dementia. Pharmaceutical interventions are possible yet expensive, and outcomes are modest at best with no reversal of symptoms currently possible. In contrast, there is a growing body of evidence that arts and cultural interventions offer a powerful approach to improving memory, thinking, social interaction, communication and quality of life in dementia sufferers. We believe it is necessary to further explore the role people's artistic, imaginative and emotional capacities have on long-term wellbeing, by developing effective ways for these creative capacities to remain strong years after the onset of dementia. To these ends, our project team (made up of former Hub members in partnership with our creative economy lead, FACT Liverpool) will turn their attention to focus on the role of the arts, humanities, design, and creative technology in healthcare innovation. By working with stakeholders in the field (such as dementia researchers, caregivers and creative technology companies), we will identify the core challenges and opportunities in this field to co-develop a strategy that can take the field forward. By conducting deep sector scoping, enabling cross-sector workshops, delivering a voucher scheme for new collaborative partnerships, and investing in a national network of creative and academic partners, we will produce a body of work that can point the way towards an effective creative economy healthcare Hub.

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.

How might our engagement with climate change differ if we could walk around its data, touch it, carry it with us and experience it unhindered by digital screens, tablets and interfaces? We know about our changing environment through the data that scientists collect. This material is highly significant as it shows how our climate is changing, but tends to be communicated to the public in technical visualisations and numeric diagrams that are highly abstract in form and difficult to understand for non-specialists. Studies have shown that people respond poorly to these information-heavy approaches, and in recent public polls climate change was mentioned by only 20% of respondents as an issue of concern. This has important implications for us all because understanding of climate change is vital to generating both required policy initiatives and personal changes in society at large. Our research proposes that just as we experience our climate physically through immersion in landscapes and weather, our engagement with climate change might change if we similarly encountered its information and data in physical forms. As such, our project seeks to develop entirely new ways to represent climate change by taking its data (geological, atmospheric, biological) off digital screens and translate it into physical objects, artworks and environments. Research in computer science has shown that when we look at physical 3D prints of data, our ability to understand and engage with it increases. This is because when we touch or walk around real objects of dimension and scale, we involve more of our human senses. Physical representations of data not only enable better understanding of information, but also generate new kinds of insights and experiences. We pursue our research through a unique combination of practice-based art and design enquiry in conjunction with science, public workshops and theoretical studies. Our team brings together experienced researchers from Central St. Martins, University of the Arts, the British Antarctic Survey, design studio Proboscis, and computer scientists from Birkbeck, University of London. Using 3D printers, we translate climate data into physical structures, objects and environments, which involves writing software for data analysis, designing objects in 3D programmes, and experimenting with a range of sustainable materials (wood, resin, ceramics). Research develops in three phases exploring differences in scale, material and concept: 1) Small hand-held objects will examine how climate data can be made tactile, intimate and mobile 2) Larger component-based sculptures mirror the way that the Earth's climate is composed of interacting elements 3) Larger environmental installations develop ideas around inhabitation and shared responsibility for our climate We aim to produce new public understandings of climate change by: - Developing new representations and public experiences of our changing environment - Producing new models of enquiry between art and science to communicate shared issues of concern - Developing new physical approaches/techniques for the use of significant climate data We will produce a substantial range of outputs including artworks, software, industry guides and publications. We expect this research to be of interest to the general public, policy groups, the creative industries and digital entrepreneurs pursuing novel applications of data. Key to our approach is that we directly engage the public in ways that enable them to feedback and input into research as it evolves. This activity takes the form of free 'maker' workshops, a festival of art and science and numerous exhibitions across the UK at significant public venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Liverpool) and the Royal Meteorological Society (Reading).

Traditionally, researchers and developers have approached immersion as an activity in which they are moving the audience between experiential states i.e. from reality to virtual reality. However, this consideration can work against immersion as it can induce cognitive dissonance if the audience experiences significant differences between the states. For example, this is particularly noticeable in Virtual Reality whereby the audience's visual perception of the displayed world is not matched across their other senses, often leading to adverse physical reactions, such as, nausea. This is arguably because immersion in Virtual Reality is often approached with a desire to recreate the physical experience portrayed within the content. In this research we propose considering immersion from a perspective through which we create an alternate hybrid reality that dynamically adapts fictional components of a story narrative dependent upon the particular context of the audience, thus approaching immersion through a lens of emotional engagement. In particular, this project will investigate whether media can be dynamically contextualised for a particular audience using objects in three distinct forms: media, data, and physical to produce more immersive experiences.

Gender equality is of central importance to progress within an increasingly global world, but gender roles and attitudes to gender shaped centuries ago continue to influence cultural, social and economic behaviour, and to affect decision making at a local level. This is the case even where equal opportunity policies and rhetoric pertain at a national or corporate level. Too often, policy commitments to equal opportunities for women and rhetorical statements of the importance of women's contribution to society mask real-life behaviours that inhibit women's advancement; indirectly, if not directly reinforce women's subordinate position; and translate multicultural anxieties into conflicts over gender roles and behaviours. This project offers a unique approach. It is not only multi-organisational, multinational, and multi-disciplinary, but also places theoretical concepts of gender, particularly that of intersectionality, in dialogue both with artistic expression and representation and with the experiences of professionals who make on-the-ground interventions (as teachers, volunteer trainers, academic leaders, those in charge of arts organisations). The interchanges between these strands enable theory to inform, but also to be tested against the expressive and experiential. In the process, public awareness of the complexities of gender issues, particularly within complex social and cultural, and sometimes multi-cultural, contexts can raise awareness about the expectations associated with women's place in the community while helping to refine current feminist theories of intersectionality. The project facilitates comparative discussions, exposing individual researchers to the possibilities implicit in alternative disciplinary and theoretical methodologies, different cultural frameworks, and diverse historical periods. The intellectual frameworks developed as part of Second and Third Wave feminism for understanding the dynamics of women's subordination, together with critiques of subaltern status developed as part of postcolonial perspectives have provided women with a set of methodological tools for responding to consciously perpetuated gender discrimination. These movements have also provided the means of exposing both institutionalised sexism and the assumptions and unexamined preconceptions that unconsciously naturalise women's subordinate position, often generating hostility when women assume positions of power. Intersectionality has emerged as a promising paradigm for addressing the complexities of compounded social marginalisation, but it is a concept born within a particular socio-historical context. As a result, it needs to be interrogated, translated, and transformed if its potential utility is to be fully realised. Local factors such as caste, which the current framework struggles to fully articulate and analyse, pose a challenge to this and other universalised models and modes of feminist theorising. Understanding and acknowledging this challenge is an important precursor both to refining the concept and to supporting successful interventions-- be they local, national, or international in origin. The project will strengthen and extend the collaborative activities of four partner institutions dedicated to harnessing research for social change. It will develop support networks among women within academia in both India and the UK, furthering the interests of gender equality within Higher Education and beyond. The project will produce material outputs including documentaries, piloted English Language Teaching resources and volunteer training materials, and the creative reflections of an artist in residence. A volume of selected essays on "Interrogating Intersectionality" is envisaged that would help to clarify the theoretical and methodological issues, possibilities and current limitations of the concept.