Specific crimes that occur in our society are experienced disproportionately by women and girls, including crimes such as rape, domestic violence and homicide. We need effective, specific, and targeted solutions to address this violence against women and girls (VAWG). Solutions should recognise that these crimes are complex and involve intersecting and overlapping issues that cannot be effectively addressed by a single agency e.g., the police. The University of Leicester recognises its responsibility as a civic university to support its local communities to aid in the development of these solutions. The East Midlands Partnership On violence against WomEn and giRls (EMPOWER) will achieve this by drawing together agencies spanning criminal justice, health/forensic, local authorities, third sector/voluntary and survivors of VAWG, to develop a research strategy that will identify and unpick the key pillars of work needed to address VAWG in the East Midlands region. A key ethos to the project is the emphasis on co-design and co-production by all involved partners. What this means in practice, is that partners work together to identify the main challenges, questions and issues that affect their practice, supported by the expertise of academics from the University of Leicester. This engenders a shared vision for the partnership in working together to develop strategies that address these challenges, rather than privileging a view from one source (e.g., academia). Therefore, the outcomes from this project will be grounded in real world issues and relevant to those agencies that work to tackle VAWG, both regionally and more nationally. The work of the partnership will be delivered across a 9-month time period. Through a series of five themed workshops that will bring together key policing and multi-agency partners, core area(s) relevant to a range of topics (e.g., sexual violence, domestic violence, human trafficking) will be identified through discovery and co-creation methods. Following each workshop, a phase of Themed research activity, actioned through embedded researcher placements and postgraduate placements will provide preliminary answers to these core area(s) and unpack any issues that were identified from the workshop. Outputs from these phases will include short evidence briefings of findings drawn from this piloting/scoping work. At the conclusion of the thematic workshops and the subsequent Themed research activity phases, the project will move into a synthesis phase where the objective is to draw together and distil the learnings gained from these activities. A synthesis workshop with the partners will focus this work into developing two key outputs from the project: (i) a co-created research strategy that identifies the key priorities required to address VAWG in the East Midlands and (ii) a sustainability plan that outlines a detailed set of activities and research application plans for achieving future funding to deliver this research strategy. EMPOWER and the outputs it will produce are a critical opportunity to develop a structured and targeted plan for effectively intervening in VAWG in the East Midlands region, with opportunities to inform practice nationally. We know that experiencing violence has devastating impacts on women and girls, with ripple effects across their families, communities, and broader society. Domestic violence alone is estimated to have economic and social costs that exceed £66 billion each year (Oliver at al., 2019). EMPOWER represents a partnership of passionate and committed academics, practitioners, and survivors, who are ultimately dedicated to reducing the occurrence of VAWG in our society, and subsequently improving the lives of women and girls.

This project will explore the largely unknown international history of British healthcare and beauty, using Boots the Chemists, Britain's most recognised chain pharmacist, as the central case study. The project spans the period from 1919, when the company posted its first sales agent overseas, to the streamlining of its divisions in 1980. It examines how Boots established itself as a prospector, retailer and manufacturer overseas, but also how it continually absorbed international influences as part of its home marketing strategies. Drawing on Boots' vast, underexplored archive (c.5,000 boxes of approximately 500,000 items), this project bridges medical, social, cultural, business, colonial and transnational history. The project team are not interested in writing a classic business biography of Boots' success and growth, rather they are interested in exploring what the Boots story reveals about the international dynamics of the British health and beauty industries. The central research question asks: How does Boots' international archive allow us to map the global networks that moulded and sustained British experiences of healthcare and beauty both at home and abroad? To answer this, thematically focused work packages will recreate the life-cycles of key products within six product domains (pain management, personal hygiene, surgical supplies, vitamins, perfumes, and skincare) across local, national and international spaces. These six focal areas have been selected because of their ample archival resources and their potential to illustrate how complex imperial and other global networks of materials, knowledge and people underpinned the development of British healthcare and beauty, both at home and overseas. This pioneering research will appear in leading academic journals across the historical humanities and in a co-authored book. It will advance early career capacity by employing a full-time postdoctoral researcher, and provide additional opportunities for an already funded M4C doctoral student. Three interdisciplinary academic workshops will explore new perspectives on the internationalisation of the UK beauty and healthcare industries and will open the project to colleagues in geography, pharmacy, medicine, literature and linguistics. The project team will showcase findings via an easily navigable website featuring information about the project, links to relevant resources and quarterly updated project stories, attractively illustrated with archival images. Some of these stories will be authored by the project team and some by 'citizen researchers'. These contributors will be identified through call outs via social media, Boots newsletters, and the local press, and might be local history enthusiasts, former Boots employees or business people reflecting on historical context. Additional outreach will include two pieces of popular history, a high-profile public exhibition, with a touring component and accompanying public talks, timed to coincide with Boots' 175th anniversary in 2024. A further outreach strategy targets professional archivists via three initiatives i) working with Boots Archive staff to help inform their cataloguing and digitisation strategies; ii) holding three innovative 'Archive Roadshows' where team members visit other significant business archives (Unilever, Marks and Spencer, John Lewis) to reflect on the usefulness and accessibility of their resources; iii) hosting an Archive Study Day to bring together company archivists throughout the UK. Finally, team members will work with Nottinghamshire County Council to run two 'Knowledge Labs' to consider how this research might stimulate creative thinking about current issues facing the UK high street. Sessions will discuss not only how local growth is internationally informed, but also how international markets are heavily influenced by smaller local developments.

The UK's road network totals around 250,000 miles of paved roads providing a means for efficient distribution of goods and services, supporting UK economic security and social prosperity, and this support will continue to be needed whatever the future of automated vehicle technology. The entire road network has been valued at £750 billion and as the UK's main transport infrastructure provides a vital service to road users, commerce and industry. However, road surface damage, particularly potholes, has become a serious safety and performance concern for all network users. The need to improve the quality, longevity and accessibility of the highway network is a vital concern of government, industry and the travelling public. It is highlighted by the recent dramatic increase in the number of cars taken in for repair of pothole-induced damage (up from 6.3M to 8.2M in two years according to a Kwik Fit survey, at an estimated annual cost to motorists of about £900M) and the maintenance backlog for local highway authorities, costed at £9.8B by the Asphalt Industry Alliance earlier this year. Episodes of severe weather in recent years (record-breaking rainfall, extreme cold-weather events), combined with tight financial constraints on highway authorities, have also led to a much publicised 'pothole epidemic', and the situation is made worse by the lack of longevity sometimes achieved in defect repairs. Against this background, this proposal has twin interrelated ambitions to (1) enable the design/construction of roads so as to minimise surface damage (i.e. prevention); and (2) induce a step change in the science of road repair (i.e. management). These ambitions can only be realised by establishing a level of understanding that does not currently exist within the pavement engineering community. This involves isolating, by both experimental studies and theoretical modelling, the real root causes of road surface damage - although it is well known that water and ice play vital roles. This knowledge has then to be combined with evaluation of actual road data in order to produce a robust and validated design and analysis tool and to generate appropriate construction and maintenance guidance. The research needed to successfully deliver these twin ambitions will require the combined effort and expertise of pavement engineers, materials scientists and computational fluid dynamics experts, expertise found at the University of Nottingham and Brunel University. In addition, the project will only be possible through the assistance of industrial partners with specific capabilities that will complement the academic input from Nottingham and Brunel. These comprise: three highway authorities (Highways England, Transport for London and Nottinghamshire County Council), giving access to data resources as well as direct field investigation opportunities; two umbrella organisations (ADEPT - representing local authority highways departments, RSTA - representing suppliers and contractors concerned with road surface treatments); and, finally, one producer of highway material test equipment (Cooper Technology), giving specialist input into test development.

This programme aims to sustain longer-standing collaborations between UoN researchers with non-academic historians and archaeologists, build on recently-launched projects, and foster the emergence of new community groups researching their own heritage. The All Our Stories projects that we will be working with focus on oral histories, archive-based research and understanding the built, buried and natural environment. In response, we have put together a project team that can support the needs of the groups with a mix of historians, archaeologists and cultural geographers. With a combination of expertise in political, social and economic history as well as a thorough knowledge of the history and geography of the East Midlands, the research team bring a diverse range of intellectual perspectives which will enhance the capacity of the community partners to understand, interpret and assess their projects in a range of related contexts. In support of the project team, a larger academic body can be called upon to respond to community group needs, with dedicated research time and access to specialist facilities enabled through a Challenge Fund targeted to cover any core costs incurred which cannot be met by the community groups' AOS funding. Our programme of engagement will include three milestone events (launch, mid-term showcase and final showcase) and a programme of enabling workshops focused on the key requirements of the groups as articulated through a consultation process which enabled the Phase 1 project team to identify the key training and skills development needs. This programme will deliver networking and knowledge exchange opportunities between the community groups and between the community groups and non-academic partners and the academic team. Key to the success of the project are the three Early Career Researchers (Johnson, Mills and Veale) - they will act as direct support for the core projects and the point-of-contact (through a dedicated hotline) for general enquiries from other groups. Working with the NCCPE and other sections of the University (Centre for Advanced Studies, Community Partnerships and Information Services) they will facilitate access to relevant, specialist academic support and University facilities for All Our Stories community groups. The programme will benefit from strong institutional support from the UoN including the Centre for Advanced Studies, Community Partnerships, Information Services and the University Museum. It will also draw on the UoN's non-HEI partners including Nottingham City Museums and Galleries, Derbyshire County Record Office and Trent & Peak Archaeology (part of York Archaeological Trust). Our programme will be taking place between February and December 2013 to time with the life-cycle of the All Our Stories projects. The benefits of the programme will be the enhancement of existing community-based research, the fostering of new community groups and the co-design of research bids for HLF funding. In the longer term, the programme will build new capacity for academic engagement with volunteer researchers.

In a British context, and with significant exceptions, WWI still focuses largely on the white British armed forces active on the Western Front. While it is possible to subject the events of 1914-18 to disinterested and objective historical inquiry, the commemorative landscapes and rituals created after 1918, and reaffirmed each year in the UK and on the Western Front, tend to prevent a broader understanding of WWI as a global conflict that has continuing relevance for all communities in an increasingly cosmopolitan British society. This includes those for whom the Western Front, and the conventional British narratives associated with it, have limited significance. Many Indians fought on the Western Front, but people from different parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Ukraine, Russia, and Poland are likely to focus more strongly on the fallout from the collapse of the Russian Empire 1917-22, and the subsequent emergence of new nations in central and eastern Europe after 1918. People of the Balkan states may be more interested in the post-1912 wars which essentially led to Yugoslavia, the fall of the Habsburg monarchy and the emergence of a stronger Greece. Turkey's participation in WWI led to the destruction of the Ottoman Sultanate and the creation of the modern Republic of Turkey. The Irish have yet a further perspective on these years. The centrality of WWI to British identity has been reaffirmed by the UK government's ambitious £60 million programme to mark the centenary in 2014-18. The explicit objective is to remind the next generation 'that the First World War is not ancient history but a shared history that unites our country'. What of the many communities which have settled in Britain during the 20th century? Are they (intentionally or unintentionally) excluded? Some families have lived in Britain for several generations but do not necessarily feel any sense of engagement with previous commemorative events. The proposed Centre aims to identify and facilitate imaginative democratic community action and engagement around the memories and narratives of the period 1914-18 within the diverse communities which make up contemporary British Society. Initially the Centre will take advantage of its location and work with three, large cosmopolitan cities in the English East Midlands region: Nottingham, Leicester and Derby. These three cities have distinctive but comparable industrial heritages, and through the 20th Century experienced sustained immigration from all parts of Europe, the Commonwealth and elsewhere. From this foundation, and utilizing community networks, we aim to expand our community partnerships to achieve a national reach. The Centre will be led by a cross-disciplinary network of academics from across the Arts and Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Information Technologies. The University of Nottingham and its partners in the Centre have a strong track record of working with community groups and our key mechanisms of engagement will include a comprehensive programme of community-focused events (themed roadshows, research surgeries, talks and training) co-ordinated by an experienced Community Liaison officer. Access to research expertise will be facilitated by two funding schemes: (i) a Community Challenge Fund to support community groups to gain access to training, facilities and expertise to assist the development of community-led programmes and support the development of bids to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) schemes; and (ii) a Research Development Fund, aimed at extending the potential of a community-led HLF project or funding follow-up activities to further develop a completed HLF project. Mechanisms of engagement through events, and the funding schemes, will encourage fresh approaches to collaborations through the involvement of community theatre practitioners, community film makers and the novel use of technology through the UoN's digital research centres (e.g. Horizon).