This project seeks to understand the value located in a range of arts/cultural activities to refugees, a group new to British cultural life who are often marginalised from 'mainstream' cultural activities, but who are simultaneously expected to adopt a hegemonic national identity of Britishness and henceforward espouse British cultural values. Refugees are a group who typically have experienced forced migration, oftentimes related specifically to their own - often fiercely defended - cultural activities and values in their country of origin. This migratory biography makes for a complex, rich contribution to how we think about the value of arts and culture, and cultural expression, in the UK today. We will investigate the standpoint of refugees on British cultural values, benefitting from their 'outsider within' perspective. British cultural values are not unitary, nor are they precisely definable, they are shaped and refined by participation and engagement. We will seek to identify the components of cultural value embedded in a set of typically British arts and cultural pursuits, based in and around the city of Brighton. We will break down the components to be identified using a range of methods that focus on the discrete senses, and on the particular forms of embodiment that such activities claim. We want to examine carefully what constitutes the experience of involvement in the arts and cultural sphere, so we will also be collecting information on the cognitions and emotions that are attached to such experiences. Refugees constitute a unique case: migrants pay acute attention to the acculturation of British values. This attention can be a protective mechanism, a philosophical choice, an attempt to move away from a traumatized past or culture of origin, an imposed set of norms, or a way of making their enforced dislocation intelligible. Refugees are legally required to learn British cultural values in order to be 'awarded' citizenship, via the Home Office instrument, the 'Life in the UK' Test (which will be interrogated in group discussion). Whatever the reason, refugees have an acute sensitivity and prescient awareness of 'what makes us British'. Yet, often their access to the cultural industries can be severely restricted, due to explicit factors such as economic barriers, and due to implicit factors such as the perceived 'Whiteness' of some art/cultural pursuits (eg. premier league football, and the opera - two performances that will form part of our programme). This project will take the form of a 16 week course, called 'What is British Culture', offered to 12 women refugees. Through a range of arts and cultural activities, we will assess refugee's embodied experience of participation and reflection, gathering sensory information through creative expression. In order to gather robust data, the course is quite long and demanding; however we have found in previous projects that refugee participants appreciate such commitments as they enable a strong group identity to form, which can continue informally after the planned meetings finish, providing a sustainable resource. As researchers we have our own cultural values: our model is taken from feminist praxis. Feminist epistemologies focus on the way "in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification" (Anderson 2004). At the core of feminist epistemology is the concept of the situated knower, who produces situated knowledge. Donna Haraway (1998) famously argued that most knowledge, in particular academic knowledge is always "produced by positioned actors working in/between all kinds of locations". Collaborative learning, respect for social difference, creating an environment of mutual support, listening and consideration for others, these characteristics are all markers of the feminist classroom, cultural values which we hope to emulate in the process of the research.

The proposed knowledge exchange project builds on the applicants' on-going Precarious Lives project, a collaboration between academics at the Universities of Leeds and Salford. This research has filled a significant gap in existing knowledge. Despite longstanding recognition of migrants' susceptibility to serious labour exploitation in the Global North and a growing evidence base for the UK, research into forced labour among refugees and (refused) asylum seekers has so far been limited. In response, Precarious Lives set out to identify and understand experiences of forced labour among this highly vulnerable group, principally in the Yorkshire and Humber region, and to engage participants in a discussion of how to tackle it, primarily through 30 in-depth narrative interviews with refugees and (refused) asylum seekers, as well as 20 interviews with front-line practitioners and public agencies. The research has, for the first time, produced conclusive evidence of forced labour as well as other highly exploitative forms of unfree labour among migrants at different stages of the asylum system. The project has uncovered extremely low pay levels or withheld wages, very long hours, insecure and dangerous work. Work is often extracted through a complex web of power relations underpinned by instances of trafficking for domestic and sexual servitude, confinement, and threats/occurrences of physical violence and denunciation of immigration status to the authorities. The data show that international and national labour and human rights laws are not being upheld by UK employers and suggests that existing policy and legislation are currently unfit to adequately tackle these abuses. To respond to these challenges, we have worked together with nine Partner organisations located in different positions along the asylum-labour interface to develop a project designed to produce the most effective way of influencing policy and practice from the research findings. We will work with our Partners as part of a Knowledge Exchange Platform on Forced Labour and Asylum to oversee a programme of collaborative activities aimed at promoting dialogue between social scientists and research users and generating useful outputs for the latter. The activities consist of an opening and closing Platform Meeting, three Stakeholder Dialogue Forums, five Practitioner Surgeries, three User Workshops, and on-going General Networking and processes of Developing and Disseminating Outputs.

Climate change is an area of environmental science with far reaching social, political and cultural implications. How members of the public think about and engage with the science of climate change - and the consequences for everyone's lives - is a crucial piece of the puzzle for making progress on climate change as a society. Effective adaptation policies, national targets for energy efficiency, and rapid decarbonisation through energy technologies all depend on committed and sustained public engagement. This means that in addition to a solid evidence base on climate science, the science of communicating climate change is critical too The Climate Consortium project aims to provide the 'infrastructure' to ensure that efforts to engage the public on climate change are coordinated, effective and based on the most up-to-date evidence from academic studies and tried-and-tested practitioner expertise. The project team includes internationally recognised specialists on public engagement, high profile science communicators and a blend of climate science, social science and communications expertise. Using our networks and experience, we will ensure that the Climate Consortium is an inclusive one year programme, producing evidence-based but accessible resources to catalyse public engagement with climate change at a national scale. The first stage of the Climate Consortium project involves an 'audit' of the diverse pool of expertise on public engagement with climate change that already exists in the UK. Rather than 'reinvent the wheel', we will identify opportunities for better coordinating and drawing value from existing initiatives, including producing a publicly available register of climate change public engagement expertise. But public engagement experience is only one side of the equation - central to the Climate Consortium project is working closely with diverse representatives of public groups (including Refugee Action and regional Community Centres) to identify and establish possible channels for effectively reaching beyond the 'usual suspects' with climate change communication, and instead creating a dialogue with diverse communities and who bring new and distinct perspectives. A key output for the project will be a website that captures areas of agreement and 'consensus' between experts on public engagement (and areas of disagreement), and presents them in an easy-to-use tool for public engagement practitioners. This is crucial so that the diverse range of individuals and organisations undertaking public engagement on climate change in the UK can access a trusted and reliable source of guidance on strategies and approaches for effective communication and dialogue.