The REVAMP project will develop, test and implement an innovative and sustainable transnational freely accessible online training package to enhance medical and healthcare practitioners knowledge and skills, to recognise and understand the health needs and impact of violence, abuse and neglect on victims, thereby improving their health outcomes. The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse (IPVA) as a pandemic, with a 1:3 global prevalence rate in most countries (WHO, 2013). IPVA includes physical, sexual, emotional abuse and controlling behaviours by an intimate partner (WHO, 2012). The WHO (2017) estimates that globally almost 1/4 of adults suffered physical abuse and/or neglect as a child and about 1/3 of women experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or nonpartner sexual violence at some point in their life. Tackling and ending gender-based violence is recognised by the European Commission, and further supported by combating gender-based violence and protecting and supporting victims (European Union, 2017). The Council of Europe indicates that about 1 in 5 children has suffered this type of abuse and that, in 70-85% of cases, the perpetrator was known to the victim. ‘Violence against women and domestic violence continue to be one of the most pervasive human rights violations, both in Europe and beyond’ (Council of Europe, 2014, page 1). The need for effective transnational education of medical practitioners to recognise victims of IPVA is clear due to the plethora of evidence that IPVA is a common problem that has a significant negative impact on individuals and families. Medical and healthcare practitioners will see victims of IPVA on a daily basis given the high number of victims. There has been little attention to producing a robust and freely accessible training. This project will be carried out transnationally as IPVA is prevalent across all countries, and migration might result in a victim trying to access support in several countries. The REVAMP project represents an original approach of joining forces across Europe to deliver this training to all medical and healthcare providers. REVAMP's target group are medical and healthcare practitioners as defined by Eurostat Statistics Explained (2017), where 'practitioner' means a person who delivers healthcare to a person such as: medical doctor, nurse, midwife, dentist, pharmacy, physiotherapist, social worker etc. REVAMP partners are embedded in the delivery of training medical and healthcare professionals, ideally placed to co develop and disseminate the training. REVAMP has the following objectives: 1-To develop a freely available and easily accessed online training package consisting of five modules for medical and healthcare practitioners to enhance their recognition of an understanding of IPVA, thereby improving the health outcome of victims.2- To use innovative teaching methods3- To involve a multi-lateral partnership of institutions4- To contribute to the public health strategy for recognition of victims of IPVA5-To ensure a broad dissemination of findings to relevant stakeholders6-To recognise the new acquisition of skills and knowledge by 5 ECTS for successful participationThe methodology that will apply to the REVAMP project is designed to support the development of an effective and transnationally relevant training programme for medical and healthcare practitioners to enhance the recognition of and understanding of the impact of violence on victims and are able to then refer these victims for ongoing support. REVAMP will be freely accessible from an outward facing website. Using a variety of pedagogical methods to engage medical and healthcare practitioners in the training programme, each of the five modules of the REVAMP training package will present a different aspect of IPVA. REVAMP will be developed into five modules (OCAPA): Orientation to the training package, IPVA and the child, IPVA and the adult, IPVA and the older person, Analysis and Evaluation. The effective open access REVAMP Platform from which the training is accessed is a significant step towards transnational recognition and training of IPVA giving wider exposure and access to medical and healthcare practitioners across Europe. Medical and health care practitioners across Europe will have the opportunity to engage in free and consistent training to support an effective response to victims of IPVA. Training participants will have improved skills competencies resulting in positive impact on the health and wellbeing of the victim. There is currently no standard training focussing on the training of medical and health care practitioners transnationally and REVAMP fills this gap. After completion, this project may be used to develop further trans European training.

The proposed new network will generate interdisciplinary research collaboration and bring together mechatronics/robotics researches from the UK and Japan, to share experiences and formalise discussions for defining a common strategy for future R&D and collaborations at all level of research, teaching and technology transfer. Such a network is vital if the different communities in Japan and UK are to work together for mutual benefit. The network will also act as a knowledge base from the existing mechatronics/robotics community to create a new research community in human adaptive mechatronics able to address the many common challenges (e.g. Pollution / CO2 issue, Aging population issue, etc) in UK and Japan. In particular, the network will explore a number of key challenges: such as a) Investigating the modelling of a man-machine system that explicitly includes all necessary functions of humans as machine operators with sufficient accuracy; b) Implementation of human adaptive behaviour in autonomous systems; c) Application of human adaptive mechatronics to upgrade UK high-tech products; d) Development of human adaptive mechatronics into biomedical applications; e) Development of mathematics to model and analysis human adaptive mechatronic processes in productions.

More than half of the total turnover of a modern industrial firm in Europe is directly transferred to suppliers and it is the responsibility of the purchasing & supply management (PSM) function of a firm to manage these external relationships. In addition, many suppliers are no longer of domestic, but of European and global origin. Firms struggle to find effective and efficient ways to cope with the emergent challenges of network economies with a low depth of production and high reliance on international suppliers. At the same time, an increased expectation of the professionalism and wider skill and competence set of PSM staff were put forward as important performance drivers. Despite this importance, unlike other disciplines, PSM does not have a harmonised higher education curriculum. Contemplating existing programmes shows that there is a mismatch between supply and demand for PSM education and that there is no equality of opportunity to study across Europe. For students, a significant challenge lies in finding appropriate university courses, a problem heightened when trying to match them to their course portfolio during international exchanges. For companies the circumstances in PSM education make it necessary to hire university graduates with other specializations and spend time bringing them up to the required skills level. Consequently, higher education institutions face challenges in the developing of new study programmes to cover future skills requirements for PSM.Recognizing this gap and opportunity, the overall objective of project PERFECT (Purchasing Education and Research for European Competence Transfer) was to develop an empirically validated harmonised European curriculum at Bachelor’s and Master’s levels in PSM and lay the foundations for establishing international study programmes for higher education in PSM at participating universities and beyond.In order to achieve these objectives, a consortium with five project partners and an advisory board was formed bringing together leading universities: TU Dortmund University (Chair of Enterprise Logistics) and Hochschule Mainz (School of Business), Germany, University of Twente (Department Technology Management and Supply), Netherlands, Staffordshire University (Business School), United Kingdom, and Lappeenranta University of Technology (Supply Management at School of Business and Management), Finland. The evaluation and dissemination of project results was conducted with national and international PSM associations, such as IPSERA (International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association) and IFPSM (International Federation of Purchasing and Supply Management), as well as regional representatives and associations.To find out which skills and competences to incorporate in a PSM curriculum, project PERFECT followed an integrated approach. Firstly, the project mapped the PSM skills landscape by performing a literature review, an analysis of courses in universities and of 300 European PSM job advertisements. Based on a conceptual skills model developed by research in various sources, the project conducted 46 expert interviews with representatives of various purchasing functions and job roles from 16 companies analysing best practice examples from corporations in various industries and of various sizes and types of companies. The insights gained from this output were validated by a survey with European firms with more than 500 completed questionnaires, in order to identify those skills and competencies that account for successful PSM activities.As the central project output, based on this comprehensive competence assessment, project PERFECT designed an empirically validated, harmonised European PSM curriculum, which draws on the skills and competencies required by PSM practitioners and maps them to a range of relevant modules. It provides opportunities for students to gain international experience and increased employability in PSM related jobs. For the academic organisations, the project results provide an opportunity to strengthen their PSM curricula and reflect the requirements of industry.In order to promote fast and broad dissemination as well providing useful tools for a broad target group, PERFECT developed a PSM skills self-assessment tool and installed an introductory Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for PSM fundamentals, which can be used by students and organisations to gauge and raise their PSM skills. The tools support a long-term exploitation of the project outcomes resulting in sustainable benefits for users and providers.All the outputs are useful standalone and the results are published as in-depth white papers, which provide additional and more detailed insights. Detailed descriptions of the project, partners and results can be found on the project website www.project-perfect.eu.

My research to date has dealt with interdisciplinary examinations of African American literature and culture, including work on the connections between Pentecostalism and jazz and research into cold war anxieties about miscegenation and homosexuality during the late 1940s and early 1950s in the U.S. My recent work on James Baldwin has focussed on the writer's Pentecostal background in order to illuminate the connections in his work between music and sexuality. I have also published on Baldwin's role as a writer and celebrity during the era of black nationalism, exploring the tensions in his work between masculinity and homosexuality.\n\nI am eager to incorporate this material into a larger and more theoretically coherent study, ensuring that the project makes an original contribution to existing studies of Baldwin's work. My project situates Baldwin's fiction and non-fiction in the four decades out of which his writing emerged, illuminating not only Baldwin's work but showing how it responded to and anticipated contemporary interest in areas such as the transatlantic and black queer writing. My research examines Baldwin's writing in the context of the post-war liberal publications which show-cased his work, including his early US reviews and articles in New Leader and The Nation but also looks closely at Baldwin's connections to Zero, the first post-war English language literary journal in France. I will look at how Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) responds to and anticipates cold war concerns about homosexuality and miscegenation and my research on Baldwin and religion will be distinguished by a close examination of Baldwin's Pentecostal past. Finally, my work on Baldwin and the transatlantic will extend recent work on Baldwin and France/ Turkey by inaugurating an examination of the author's connections to, and reception in, the United Kingdom and his writings on Africa. My analysis of Baldwin and Africa will draw on uncollected interviews in African publications and will consider his shifting relationship to the African diaspora from the 1950s to the 1970s. \n\nIn the last seven years there have been two exciting collections of essays on Baldwin (James Baldwin Now [1999] and Reviewing James Baldwin [2000]) but there is little work that contextualises Baldwin's work and no recent monograph. Lynn Orilla Scott's, James Baldwin's Later Fiction (2004) focuses on Baldwin's last three novels and Clarence Hardy's James Baldwin's God (2003) touches on Baldwin's fiction but is written from a theological perspective. The most recent single-authored work to examine all of Baldwin's fiction is Trudier Harris's Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985). Building on my forthcoming edited collection (The Historical Guide to James Baldwin [Oxford UP, 2008]), my project will make an original contribution to work on Baldwin and post-war writing. The work will be distinguished by its original research but it will also contribute to discussions of Pentecostalism, music, the cold war and black gay writing.\n\nIn the course of my research on Baldwin I have established contacts with numerous Baldwin scholars (I have given papers at the last two international conferences on Baldwin at Howard University, Washington D.C. and Queen Mary, University of London in 2002 and 2007 respectively and will be giving a paper at the American Studies Association on Baldwin in October 2008). I have read the Baldwin papers at the Schomburg Center and I have been awarded a fellowship to the University of Indiana to view Baldwin's letters in June 2008. I have established contacts with two Baldwin biographers (David Leeming and James Campbell) who have given me access to unpublished letters and manuscripts. I have also interviewed friends of Baldwin, including Caryl Phillips, Harold Norse and Themistocles Hoetis (editor of Zero). Thus, this projecttakes Baldwin scholarship forward through the consideration of new material and approaches.