This follow-on funding project is a significant collaboration with the British Council which draws on the work of the AHRC-funded project Fifty Years of British Music Video (2015-2017) in order to enhance its impact and engagement with new international audiences in South Korea and Cuba. The grant will be used to produce four 70-minute music video packages themed around Animation, Experimental Film, Dance/choreography and Fashion. The selection of titles and the composition of these packages will be agreed between the project team and Gary Thomas, the British Council's Programme Manager for Film, ensuring flexibility to tailor programming to local communities, taking into account issues of screen censorship and cultural sensitivities on the ground. The project will use its contacts in the recording industry and pay for the services of a specialist music lawyer to license these packages for UK screening and facilitate the British Council's negotiation of the necessary international rights clearances for the proposed territories. The project will then source and prepare high definition digital masters in Apple ProRes (HQ) files for delivery to the British Council who will arrange authoring of the packages for screening. Where possible, in the services of economy and efficiency, music video masters which have already been sourced for the Blu-ray and BFI 100 collection outputs of the Fifty Years of British Music Video project will be incorporated into the British Council packages, but no attempt will be made to compromise the integrity of these specially curated themed packages aimed at distinct international audiences. The project will also draw on the research generated by Fifty Years of British Music Video in order to provide metadata for programme notes and prepared copy for British Council publicity materials for the screening events in South Korea and Cuba. The licence clearances, masters sourcing and prepared copy production will be completed by a full-time Research Administrator based in London and line-managed by the Co-I. The RA will also organize the two overseas trips to Seoul (South Korea) and Havana (Cuba). The South Korea trip will take place in July 2017 and the Cuba trip will be arranged to coincide with the International Film Festival in December 2017. Working closely with the British Council's representatives, the project will fund the travel costs, accommodation and subsistence of UK creative talent to accompany screening events and lead workshops, cover venue hire and local transportation and event management, and film the events for the British Council's marketing purposes and wider cultural dissemination. The British Council envisage using the packages for up to twenty public screening events involving practitioners and creative talents from the world of music video. Their existing work in South Korea, typified by the tremendous popularity of their Selector radio show there, will be energised in summer 2017 by the Korea UK Season. UK/Korea Season aims to share the UK's innovation and excellence in the arts of creative industries and develop long-term partnerships. This follow-on funding initiative will extend that programme and augment it with dedicated music video events and a special Selector playlist compiled by Emily Caston. The South Korean events will be followed by a tour to Cuba themed around dance culture as part of the annual Cuban international film festival in December 2017 (http://habanafilmfestival.com). The British Council's Selector is the only syndicated music show broadcasting in Cuba from overseas. A live broadcast from Havana this year (2016) attracted 1.2 million listeners out of a country of 11 million, working with the biggest national radio station. The British Council are excited by, and fully committed to supporting, this opportunity to add music video packages to their existing arts portfolio, drawing on the research and expertise developed by Fifty Years of British Music Video.

This project follows on from 'An Investigation of Genres of Assessed Writing in British Higher Education', a three-year study which identified and described the linguistic and organizational features of successful student assignments. The investigation entailed the collection, annotation and analysis of almost 3000 good-quality student texts, fairly evenly distributed across four levels of university study and more than 30 disciplines. These texts form the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, a unique resource which is freely available to researchers via the Oxford Text Archive. The texts in the corpus are categorized not only according to their discipline and level, but also according to thirteen broad 'genre families', ranging from Case Studies and Essays to Proposals and Methodology Recounts. This categorization is new, and draws attention to the existence of many types of student writing that have previously been neglected in textbooks and course materials concerned with the development of academic writing skills. The practical implications of our findings have now been discussed in several doctoral theses and many research publications, including our forthcoming book which describes in detail the characteristics of texts belonging to each of the genre families. One of the main aims of our original study was to inform the development of teaching and learning resources for novice academic writers. We were especially interested in supporting students who had not had sufficient prior opportunity to acquire appropriate writing skills, for example because their earlier education had taken place outside the UK, because their first language was not English, and/or because they were embarking on a completely new field of study. We now propose to draw on the knowledge we have gained from our original study to build a substantial bank of online materials, designed with the discipline-specific learning needs of novice academic writers in mind. In creating these materials we will work closely with experts from the British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP), and with the Global English team at the British Council. The project will allow for extensive consultation and piloting with writing tutors and with learner writers, accessed via BALEAP and British Council networks. Meetings with representatives of these stakeholder groups are built into the project design, and during the development phase we have also planned for iterative usability testing with these groups, both face-to-face and remotely. The British Council will supply us with a customizable and authorable exercise tool and editorial guidance to achieve a consistent house style for the materials, which will be hosted and maintained on the popular British Council 'Learn English' website. We will also draw on the facilities and technical expertise of Coventry University's Serious Games Institute, which is a centre of excellence for games-based learning and can help us to incorporate exciting new modes of human-computer interaction into our materials. We have recently received a small grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to develop a more user-friendly and accessible interface for the BAWE corpus. We hope that this will encourage learner writers to explore the corpus resources, either by themselves or in the writing class. Our materials will contain learning tasks to complement and enrich such explorations, thus establishing connections between research and practice.

This project will explore how approaches from the history of science, and especially of the history of its communication, can benefit and feed into to a freshly enhanced and more inclusive approach to science communication. By drawing upon past lessons concerning effective and ineffective modes of science communication, this project will explore more creative, open-ended ways of engaging with communities beyond those typically reached by such initiatives, with an emphasis on routes to accomplishing effective two-way reciprocal interactions between science and society. It will bring together academics and practitioners from a range of sectors to tackle questions about the cultural, philosophical and historical context of the sciences and science communication both with diverse audiences and communities in the UK and to link this to the broader global cultural context of these communities. This will include those working in history and philosophy of science, science communication, community cohesion, and media professionals. Alongside this professional networking activity, the teams will undertake focus group work with both UK and international groups of young people to gauge perceptions around community identity, including faith identities, in relation to recent scientific controversies, ongoing debates about perceived clashes between science and other cultural perspectives At its core, this project will ask: how can science communication learn from its past in order to be able to engage more sensitively and effectively with diverse communities that have hitherto barely been engaged by it, or indeed who have felt alienated from it? Studying the past development of scientific and science communication discourses, provide us with the opportunity for a combined approach across the humanities and sciences to tackle current and future controversies in public perceptions of such key areas as climate change, epigenetics and genomics, evolutionary theory, neurosciences and Artificial Intelligence, among others. In recent years in the UK, one particularly problematic feature of the relationship between 'science' and the world views of distinct communities, including faith communities, is the growing populist conception that science is inevitably atheistic. Similarly, in the international context, 'Western science' is sometimes categorized by multicultural critics at the extreme end of the spectrum as 'Christian Science' or in the case of the UK as 'imperialistic' in approach, methodology or worldview by those from diasporic heritages. What we can see here is clearly a congruence between the historical communication of science and the geographical routes by which key ideas in science have been disseminated. One key example is 'Darwinism': both historically and in a global context, the promotion and reception of this has been filtered through a range of different cultural, ideological and political lenses. This has had a major, and often not productive effect on the perception of evolutionary science and on related scientific research today. Thus the project looks in detail at how the past of science communication has lessons for enhanced reciprocal dialogue to create a new social contract between scientists and other audiences within UK culture. To address these concerns, the project will develop a network based on public focus group work with relevant 'hard-to-reach' community groups, drawing upon a UK based two-three day open innovation workshop with international and UK partners and participants. The overall result will be a comprehensive resport with recommendations on: 1. Potential future multidisciplinary research themes or draft project proposals 2. Potential future knowledge transfer project recommendations or proposals with academics, policy influencers, media professionals and practitioners 3. Potential pathways to impact for any future project

This challenge-led research project is designed to tackle the effects of COVID-19 crisis on craft communities in Uzbekistan, deeply affected by the lack of the digitalisation of the sector, ensuring the long-term sustainability of the sector which has been systemically compromised by the pandemic, and to create a roadmap for other countries facing similar issues. This project will codesign digital solutions to overcome the impact of the COVID-19 on craft activities and produce a more resilient and inclusive social, cultural and economic community-based ecosystem. In collaboration with local research partners and a specialised IT organisation, we will create an easy-to-use, low cost, digital ecosystem to provide access to markets, socially connect craft communities, share craft masters' knowledge, and value Uzbekistan's diverse cultural heritage which is at risk of being lost. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many governments, including Uzbekistan, to go into lockdown. According to the Uzbek Statistics Office, the pandemic is severely impacting the craft sector, especially in rural areas, where there has been an increase in the number of unemployed and people living in poverty, endangering the future survival of craft enterprises. Lockdowns and travel bans removed craft communities' main sources of income, disrupted the supply chains and challenged the apprentice system. In our "GCRF Urgency fund: COVID-19 focussed research proposals", we conducted a survey among 800 craftmakers in Uzbekistan, as there are no official statistics on the craft sector. Two-thirds of respondents are considering closing production, 80% have seen their income decrease during the pandemic and more than 40% do not believe they can survive more than 12 weeks. Thus, Uzbek craft is on the verge of collapsing, with the threat that an entire generation of craftmakers will stop producing and stop sharing craft knowledge, if urgent action is not taken to support, preserve and value its inestimable intangible heritage. Developing a digital ecosystem has been identified by our pilot project as the most promising solution to support craftmakers during the crisis, and create pathways of recovery for the uncertain post-pandemic scenarios. This is urgently required. The project will produce a networked cultural craft-based infrastructure supporting the integration of stakeholders, who are currently disconnected. The digital intervention will consist of a digital library, training courses, a digital salon, mentoring for female-led craft enterprises, and an e-commerce application. The digital ecosystem will fulfill four specific roles providing: 1) access to local and international markets enabling the craft masters to secure an income stream during the COVID-19 crisis; 2) a resource that will ensure the survival of the knowledge and traditions for heritage preservation and valuation; 3) an inclusive and sustainable platform for craftmakers' digital storytelling, including a digital salon for female masters; and 4) a new network to engage with customers, students and other craftmakers. The project will also produce an innovative business model for the platform to ensure long-term longevity, community involvement, committed management, and a community-based profit-sharing approach after project conclusion. Using digital tools to solve this urgent problem is aligned with the Uzbek Government's priorities on digitalisation of the economy and on the recovery plans for small enterprises. Uzbekistan only began to develop digital solutions and create the necessary infrastructures in 2016, and to signal the importance of digital economy, the Uzbek President declared 2020 the year of digitalisation. This project will support the craft sector in Uzbekistan first, and will be cascaded to other ODA countries through a strategic partnership with the British Council programme "Crafting Futures", through the roadmap that will be produced at the project's conclusion.

The potato is the World's fourth most important food crop, and the UK is the 11th largest producer, with each head of the UK population consuming an average of 94 kg of potatoes each year. The UK industry is worth around £4 billion p/a. Much of the prosperity and success of the industry has been brought about through the introduction of modern farming technologies, including the development of pesticides and other chemical interventions to control various diseases. However, to date, no effective pesticides have been developed to stop tubers from rotting, either in storage or in the ground, and this gap in the agricultural arsenal cumulatively leads to crop losses running to millions of pounds per year. One of the main causative agents of soft rot is the bacterial pathogen known as Erwinia carotovora subsp. atroseptica ('Eca' for short). The aim of the current study is to develop small molecule inhibitors that prevent this organism from causing disease in potato tubers. Eca infections can be spread from field to field through infected seed tubers, and once established, can rapidly decimate a crop. The substantial economic impact caused by Eca infections has been a powerful driver behind the recent successful effort to sequence the genome of this organism. These data have provided us with a wealth of information about the mechanism(s) of pathogenesis in Eca. The current project builds on these findings and also on some earlier observations made in the investigators lab, which showed that production of the enzymes that lead to soft rot by Eca is controlled by the nutritional status of the organism. Briefly, we have shown that if the production of an intracellular 'alarmone' called ppGpp is prevented by mutating the gene (relA) encoding the enzyme which makes this metabolite, the cell no longer produces the secreted enzymes that cause soft rot in the potato tuber. In the current work, we aim to try and mimic the phenotypic effect(s) of the relA mutation by developing low molecular weight compounds that block the synthesis or reception of ppGpp. This so-called 'chemical-genetic' approach could lead to the generation of new anti-rot agents. To begin with, we will make a mutant that is completely incapable of making or degrading ppGpp. This will require us to inactivate not only the relA gene, but also a second gene called spoT, which is responsible for generating small amounts of residual ppGpp in the relA strain. Next, using this 'ppGpp null' strain, we will employ microarray analysis to identify a set of genes that are exclusively/primarily controlled by ppGpp and not by other known regulatory inputs. These genes will be cloned and fused to an easily-assayable 'reporter gene' called GFP, allowing us to generate constructs that fluoresce in response to changes in the concentration of intracellular ppGpp. In parallel, we will identify additional components involved in the ppGpp signaling pathway in Eca, and develop high through-put assays to monitor the activity of these proteins. The combined in vivo (reporter constructs) and in vitro (biochemical assays) will be used to screen a library of structurally-diverse small molecules to see if any of these block any step in ppGpp signaling. This collection of small molecules has been designed to include both drug-like and natural product-like molecules, and samples a very large portion of the total structural diversity of 'chemical space'. Subsequent rounds of chemical modification will be aimed at improving the inhibitory activity of the 'hits' obtained in these assays. Ultimately, we aim to obtain one or a few so-called 'lead compounds' with good inhibitory activity, and these will be tested further for their ability to block virulence in tuber rot models.