This programme of knowledge exchange, dissemination, and the production of an exhibition and teaching resources draws on the findings of the AHRC major research project 'From Victims to Perpetrators? Discourses of German Wartime Suffering' (2005-2008). In that project, the complex interaction of narratives of victimhood and perpetration from the end of WWII into the 21st century was established: tropes associated with the Holocaust were found to have been instrumentalised within German accounts of what they had endured as the victims of Allied bombing, mass rapes, and expulsion, even as German complicity in Jewish suffering and Jewish suffering itself were marginalised. We also discovered, however, that more nuanced narratives have emerged since the mid-1990s. These aim for an inclusive juxtaposition of the complexities, and ambiguities, of the experiences of individual Germans and Jews while remaining mindful of how such a juxtaposition might appear to relativise German responsibility or Jewish suffering. Such narratives raise productive questions within today's globalisation of Holocaust memory as a model for coming-to-terms with injustices far removed from the concentration camps. Specifically, recent German fiction, film and memorials raise questions relating to 1) the possibility of empathy with 'ordinary' Germans; 2) the balance between recognising the ordinary German's 'absolute' victimhood (e.g. that he or she was bombed) and the need to set this suffering in the context of how Germans benefited from the racial state's exploitation and elimination of others; and (3) how opposing perspectives might be sensitively juxtaposed and so be able to generate inclusivity and dialogue without a blurring of historical accountability. These questions resonate in the post-apartheid South African context. Working with The SA Holocaust and Genocide Foundation (SAHGF), we aim to adapt our research findings to intervene productively in SA's efforts to confront the legacy of apartheid and, specifically, to contribute to the SAHGF's educational outreach with SA schools. The primary outcome will be a travelling exhibition for the SAHGF centres in Cape Town, Jo'burg and Durban documenting Germany's coming-to-terms with its past and prompting visiting school groups (and the public) to rethink their SA context, i.e. how can we square historical justice with reconciliation; how are the experiences of all groups to be narrated without relativisation? Our research on Germany suggests that posing these questions within agreed parameters (i.e. accountability remains vital) can in itself open up a difficult past to democratic debate. We will also stage public events in both SA and the UK. In Cape Town, we will organise workshops at the SAHGF for pupils and the general public to mark the launch of the exhibition and to prompt wider discussion of its contemporary relevance. The UK High Commission in SA and the British Council will also be involved. In the UK, we will work with the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre (Notts) to set the exhibition into a new context; we will launch the UK exhibition, with SAHGF and Beth Shalom staff, at events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 and Beth Shalom's 20th anniversary. In addition, we will collaborate with Leeds City Council and a Leeds theatre company on a three-month drama workshop for young people, based on the exhibition. At 3 performances and after-show discussions, we will engage city residents, with SAHGF and Beth Shalom staff, on 'global traumas' and their local significance. Finally, we will work with Beth Shalom to create teaching resources designed to deepen pupils' grasp of traumatic pasts and today's debates on historical accountability, racism and social exclusion. These materials, downloadable from the project website, will benefit pupils across a range of disciplines, in the UK and globally. We will also offer CPD opportunities for a postdoc and staff at our partner institutions.

There is an accepted need to promote step changes towards more sustainable urban environments, notably in transport and travel, which we will focus on. While many model-based desk-studies have aimed to simulate such environments as part of a decision support tool, they adopt many unvalidated, hypothetical assumptions, particularly in the way that major transport focused interventions might impact on both behaviour and the effectiveness of the infrastructure. There is very little real evidence of what works and what can be used to promote such changes, deriving from either the physical nature and make-up of urban environments and in the way that people choose to act and behave. This 5 year proposal will build on the momentum of major EPSRC- and ESRC-supported activity at the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester in order to fill this evidence gap, providing an empirically grounded frame for the modelling of transformational futures.The project seeks to produce a step change in current knowledge and practice using a mix of new data sources, methodological innovation in analysis of this diverse data, development of new planning practices and procedures and supporting modelling tools. To this end it will develop visions of urban futures of 2050 which are both resilient to external change and sustainable. The knowledge and procedures developed as part of this project will provide a foundation upon which planners and others involved in decision-making in relation to urban transport, at both local and national levels, can start to put in place the necessary changes to achieve the resilient and sustainable visions of 2050.The proposed research is ambitious and novel. We will undertake the first largely qualitative longitudinal panel study of households which focuses on their transport activity, in particular delving into questions of why they do certain things and how change might be brought about. This work will be complemented by study of historical information over longer periods of time, making use of available information from a variety of transport and non-transport databases, coupled with testimony from planners and others in two study areas who have experienced changes first hand. The task of bringing these diverse data sources together will be innovative and seek to effectively explore ways of integrating these materials in a number of different ways which recognise the complexity of decisions and practices around transport and allow us to draw some understanding of why step changes occur. We will use the results of these analyses to feed into more theoretical work which will consider firstly the potential for new planning procedures and practice and secondly new modelling tools which provide the means to help achieve the step changes necessary in transport for sustainable and resilient urban futures by 2050.

Private mobility has a high carbon footprint due to the manufacturing, use, storage and disposal of vehicles. Private cars spend 96% of their time idle and were responsible for 60.7% of total CO2 emissions from road transport. To reduce CO2 emissions while mitigating societal loss, linking poorly served geographies and alleviating the challenges of elderly and disabled to afford mobility, this research proposes the development of the mathematical tools needed to deliver sustainable, shared mobility, specifically a Demand Responsive Transport Service (DRTS). We will design novel algorithms that optimise the routing and scheduling integrated with dynamic pricing of DRTS. Solving these large-scale hard combinatorial optimisation problems, in real time, will enable a transformation of DRTS, part of the emerging sector of scaled shared transport solutions, encouraging increased take up of shared mobility. DRTS allows passengers to book a door-to-door service requesting pick up or drop off times, much like a taxi, but sharing a vehicle with other passengers that may be collected or dropped off along the route. Similar services, such as Dial-a-Ride, exist to meet specific needs but they are reduced in scope and heavily subsidized by local councils and the Department for Transport. They lack route planning flexibility and cannot manage high demand. At scale, with optimized dynamic pricing and routing, realistic demand forecasts, informed accurate behavioural models, and incentivised by policies that enhance their acceptance and induce voluntary behaviour changes, DRTS would be financially viable and more sustainable than private car use. The original transformative science in the form of efficient, complex optimization algorithms, and the rich understanding of preferences and attitudes towards shared mobility developed in this project will help enable DRTS to be both efficient and cost-effective; thus, promoting shared mobility and significantly reducing CO2 emission of local travel. This project will integrate three important scientific components to deliver an attractive, flexible, low-carbon DRTS. 1) An effective efficient scheduling and routing optimisation algorithm for a fleet of vehicles of different types that can provide instant accept/reject decisions on journey requests. In order to do this effectively, the algorithm needs to anticipate potential future demand and be continuously globally optimising schedules across the fleet in the background. 2) New revenue management formulations that allow the prices of journeys to be changed dynamically, with prices dependent on journey length and service quality; thus, supporting the financial sustainability of the service. 3) A rich understanding of customer behaviour and preferences, which will be obtained by running surveys and focus groups and using the data collected to build choice models, describing how potential passengers make decisions. These models will support service design and motivate behaviour changes. Combining these three components of work comprehensively addresses the practical challenge and advances an exciting new interdisciplinary research area for shared green transportation. The algorithmic approach also has the potential to be adapted to electric and autonomous vehicles in the future.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 highlighted the need for urgent, transformative change, on an unprecedented scale, if global warming is to be restricted to 1.5C. The challenge of reaching an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 represents a huge technological, engineering, policy and societal challenge for the next 30 years. This is a huge challenge for the transport sector, which accounts for over a quarter of UK domestic greenhouse gas emissions and has a flat emissions profile over recent years. The DecarboN8 project will develop a new network of researchers, working closely with industry and government, capable of designing solutions which can be deployed rapidly and at scale. It will develop answers to questions such as: 1) How can different places be rapidly switched to electromobility for personal travel? How do decisions on the private fleet interact with the quite different decarbonisation strategies for heavy vehicles? This requires integrating understanding of the changing carbon impacts of these options with knowledge on how energy systems work and are regulated with the operational realities of transport systems and their regulatory environment; and 2) What is the right balance between infrastructure expansion, intelligent system management and demand management? Will the embodied carbon emissions of major new infrastructure offset gains from improved flows and could these be delivered in other ways through technology? If so, how quickly could this happen, what are the societal implications and how will this impact on the resilience of our systems? The answer to these questions is unlikely to the same everywhere in the UK but little attention is paid to where the answers might be different and why. Coupled with boundaries between local government areas, transport network providers (road and rail in particular) and service operators there is potential for a lack of joined up approaches and stranded investments in ineffective technologies. The DecarboN8 network is led by the eight most research intensive Universities across the North of England (Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York) who will work with local, regional and national stakeholders to create an integrated test and research environment across the North in which national and international researchers can study the decarbonisation challenge at these different scales. The DecarboN8 network is organised across four integrated research themes (carbon pathways, social acceptance and societal readiness, future transport fuels and fuelling, digitisation, demand and infrastructure). These themes form the structure for a series of twelve research workshops which will bring new research interests together to better understand the specific challenges of the transport sector and then to work together on integrating solutions. The approach will incorporate throughout an emphasis on working with real world problems in 'places' to develop knowledge which is situated in a range of contexts. £400k of research funding will be available for the development of new collaborations, particularly for early career researchers. We will distribute this in a fair, open and transparent manner to promote excellent research. The network will help develop a more integrated environment for the development, testing and rapid deployment of solutions through activities including identifying and classifying data sources, holding innovation translation events, policy discussion forums and major events to highlight the opportunities and innovations. The research will involve industry and government stakeholders and citizens throughout to ensure the research outcomes meet the ambitions of the network of accelerating the rapid decarbonisation of transport.

From earliest times people have used hard skeletal tissues, such as bone, antler, ivory, horn, baleen (whalebone) and tortoiseshell, as raw material to create almost everything from simple tools to subtle and evocative works of art. Working these raw materials can greatly change their appearance and decay processes can render them almost unrecognisable. Today animal hard tissues have almost entirely been replaced as raw material for artefacts by metallic alloys and synthetic plastics, and wildlife conservation concerns have made some unavailable and unacceptable. With the passing of these raw materials, familiarity with their characteristics and properties has been lost, posing a challenge for those who work with historic and prehistoric artefacts, and to the detection of illegally trafficked, CITES protected materials. The correct identification of these materials is, however, fundamental to understanding the cultural significance, preservation needs and authenticity of these objects. Research is already in hand to refine and develop identification protocols through the collation, evaluation and validation of visual criteria and analytical techniques. This work has made great strides in improving our confidence in recognising, for instance, objects made in different species of ivory or in separating real tortoiseshell from fakes in horn or plastic. Using low-power microscopy, this can be done without the need to take disfiguring samples and at no risk to the object, by revealing the materials structure and patterns of degradation. However, like wood, these are complex 3D materials that can look and behave entirely differently depending on how they are worked and which aspects are revealed in the surfaces of an object. To interpret the evidence correctly it is necessary to understand the orientation of the object in terms of the material's natural structure. This is particularly difficult when similarly worked specimens of these materials are not available for comparison with the object being studied. Even if some of these raw materials, such as rhino horn, were available, it would be illegal (and questionable ethically) to prepare worked specimens. Using printed or web resources, illustrated by 2D diagrams and photographs to convey the detail of these complex structures, success largely relies on the ability of the user to think in 3D, and will not always lead to the correct identification. To overcome these problems, this project will develop a web-based resource for the 3D visualisation of the structures of these animal tissues. At its core will be a fully-rotatable 3D photo-realistic image of each raw material, a 3D diagram of its structure and 3D X-rays (CT scans) revealing the internal shape and structure. Zooming-in, the surface of the material can be explored at different scales with 'hot-spots' linking to photographs at a range of magnifications showing the structures revealed when it is cut in different directions, worked in different ways, fractured, aged or degraded. Once the correct material has been identified, it will be possible to orientate images of the object against the framework of the 3D model by matching the features revealed on the surface of an object with those indicated in the model. This will aid understanding of how the raw material was utilised and provide estimates of the size of the original tissue used, such as the minimum dimensions of the elephant tusk required to provide the material for a sculpture. Supported by on-line tutorials, this interactive visualisation resource will not only improve the accuracy of materials identification but will be an invaluable tool for researchers exploring the way that these raw materials have been used in the manufacture of artefacts, whether functional tools, devotional objects or fine art, across all time periods and geographical zones.