With the growth of digital technology, there is a new expectation among potential users of artist books and those that collect and care for them that the activities of making, cataloguing, storing, displaying, handling and looking at artist books can and should be enhanced by the digital. This proposal begins from recognition that important national collections of artist books are, sadly, largely inaccessible to the majority of their potential users and that this situation can be transformed through digital technology. Rather than viewing the computer screen and electronic text and image as a challenge or threat to the physical printed page, the proposed research network will explore the potential of the digital to transform our understanding, appreciation and care of artist books. The workshops will each address a different theme pertinent to the study of artist books and digital transformations. Workshop One will address two different but related questions. First, it will work with technology specialists to examine the relationship of the physical book with its digital representation and how that might be rendered. Drawing on the expertise of technology specialists at Tate, the British Library and elsewhere, this first session will think through just how those transformations might be achieved. Secondly, it will work with book artists and librarians to interrogate how that transformation might affect users' experience of the book. Touch, scale and the intimate relationship of the book to its reader are important issues to be explored in this session, which will ask what might be lost, gained or elided in creating digital representations of the artist book. In exploring both of these questions, this session will also reference the findings of related projects such as 'Touch and the Value of Object Handling' (2006-7) and 'Creative Digital Media Research Practice: Production through Exhibition' (2008-10), both funded by the AHRC. Workshop Two will work with artists to better understand recent developments in the creation of artist books in digital form. By extending our understanding of the concepts and formats of artist books from the printed page to iPOD publications, free downloadable e-books, hypertext works and phone-based works, for instance, this workshop will ask how we might nurture those practices and facilitate their growth. By engaging directly with contemporary practice in this way, the network will engage with understanding significant shifts in the nature of the artist book. This session will reference the findings of related projects such as 'What Will be the Canon for the Artist Book in the 21st Century?' (AHRC funded 2008-10). It will extend those debates by asking how we might engage with these new modes of production in the art school, the museum and the library. Workshop Three will ask how artist books of all forms can be catalogued to make them more accessible and so transform the way in which people can engage with them. Should they be catalogued as both books and art objects? Should they be more fully catalogued to enable thematic searching? How we might collect new formats of artist books? Should an image be provided to allow visual browsing? And how might questions of copyright be addressed in the context of making collections more accessible?

'Perverse Collections' (PERCOL) asks: how can a critical and nuanced understanding of the evolution of Europe's LGBTQ+ archives be used by scholars, queer and trans community members, and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) sector workers to forge sustainable strategies for protecting LGBTQ+ history, and in what ways might this have transformative potential for cultural heritage politics and policy more broadly? To this end, the project will map the growth of Europe's queer and trans archives, from the 1970s to the present; it will comparatively explore the workings of these collections, including their relations to forms of state support, the understandings of LGBTQ+ history they promote locally, nationally, and internationally, and the alternative models of archiving some embody. PERCOL will identify the implications of queer and trans collections for other subaltern archives, as well as the wider cultural heritage sector, in terms of the challenges they present to dominant historical and political narratives, the complex polyphonic community politics they can reveal, and their creative handling of ephemeral experiences. Working with an array of European cultural heritage institutions, as well as a broad cross-section of invested stakeholders, the project team will draw from the history of Europe's queer and trans archives to model innovative strategies for preserving and sustaining LGBTQ+ cultural heritage. The project is situated in a live political context: as homophobic and transphobic acts of violence and discrimination rise across Europe, fomented in some countries by the prejudicial rhetoric of right-wing political groups, the project will argue for the social, cultural and political value of archiving LGBTQ+ lives and experiences, and for the wider ethical significance of supporting and maintaining a transnational ecology of subaltern collections.

The Collaborative Research & Development (R&D) Partnership project will work with the Fashion Textiles and related Technology (FTT) industry in order develop research-led solutions to business growth, technological and consumer change. This will include working closely with small firms who make up the vast majority (80+%) of the sector, in fashion design, designer-making, manufacturing, retail and in related services that are fed by the fashion & textiles sector, e.g. events, interiors, publishing, performing arts, media and other creative services, as well as a wide range of textiles applications in manufacturing, medical and product design. The research will be delivered by a partnership between several universities led by the University of the Arts London, who together specialise in fashion and textiles design, business, manufacture and marketing, including specialist research centres in sustainable fashion and circular design, sustainable prosperity, materials and textiles manufacturing, in London, Leeds, Loughborough and Cambridge. The R&D project will be based around the East London Fashion & Textiles cluster and the connected production growth corridors of the Thames Gateway and Lea Valley/M11 (London-Cambridge) where opportunities for FTT workspace and manufacturing expansion are evident. The R&D work programme will include short and longer term research projects and enterprise support with small firms/SMEs to identify and develop solutions to the growth of their business, products and markets and related skills needs; work with larger fashion brands to develop more sustainable products through innovative design, manufacture and waste processing; research consumer experience and needs in material/fashion brands and retailing, including the future place of high street retail, store design and online markets; test new and existing synthetic and natural materials for new product development; and explore markets for more sustainable UK fibres/chemical processes and opportunities for regional UK textile production. The R&D programme, which will be co-designed with FTT companies and industry associations, will also identify the related skill and training needs which accompany the economic and technological challenges facing the FTT industry, and design through the university partners and other training providers (e.g. FE Colleges) and enterprise support organisations, new and novel training and Continuing Professional Development programmes.

Since the late eighteenth century, alongside Enlightenment philosophy on human rights, western European scholars have conceptualised human universality in universal histories and universal museums. In its investigation of the evolution of museum collections, the 'Universal Histories and Universal Museums' project strongly connects with the third objective of both the 'The Past in the Present' and the 'Care for the Future' programmes: the mediation, and the cultural and social appropriation of the past, from transnational perspectives. Looking at the history of museum collections is one of the ways in which we can examine how history is made, displayed and disseminated through the uses, legacies and representations of the past. Our research will highlight the constituent features of encyclopaedic knowledge about western universal human histories, from the nineteenth century to the present day. It will also examine the assumptions and limitations of such understanding. In particular, the project seeks to address questions regarding the representation of the diversity of cultures that define human universality, the articulation of historical and anthropological approaches to the description of humanity and the influence of social knowledge practices on the structuring of universal knowledge. The project also considers ways thinking about the past help us to prepare for a global future that incorporates more diverse universalities. The first phase of the project will combine critical investigation through four workshops and two historical case studies, based in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Musée du quai Branly. The project's second phase will consolidate the first phase research in a small exhibition based on the two case studies, and a conference timed to align with the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi - a contemporary universal museum. Publications will include a book, articles in peer-reviewed journals and digitisation of key archival resources.

The United Kingdom is one of Europe's main producers of electronic-waste (e-waste). Despite strict EU regulations and control programmes, a substantial part of British e-waste is exported to developing countries, where it is often recycled through environmentally harmful methods or dumped in unprotected areas, causing severe environmental damage accompanied by a range of socio-cultural problems. Despite this, public debate on digital technologies in Britain and other post-industrial countries has been primarily focused on the economic and social benefits of technological innovation. Digital performance arts practices have largely been complicit in this narrative. On the one hand, their primary interest has been in the exploration and showcasing of state of the art innovations; on the other, critical practices in the field have been restricted to the politics of a western, post-industrial cultural framework. Digital performance arts practitioners have rarely engaged with the material and socio-economic aspects of technology in terms of their production, and their 'afterlife' as electronic waste. Bodies of Planned Obsolescence is a one-year international research networking project in which performance artists, art curators, scientists and cultural theorists will exchange and develop performance-based approaches to digital arts and the cultural and environmental aspects of the global economy of electronic waste. By re-functioning e-waste materials, digital arts practices will make the economic and ecological issues visible. By interaction with colleagues from other disciplines, the artists' impact will be augmented by scientific and socio-economic findings. The network overall will develop innovative international research collaborations with researchers from the UK as a country that exports a substantial part of its e-waste, and two countries that import e-waste: Nigeria and China. This project will include the following key elements: -Launch event at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London -Workshop & symposium in Hong Kong and Guiyu, China, combining paper and performance presentations with participation in labour processes at an e-waste recycling facility. -Workshop & symposium in Lagos Nigeria, including practice-based explorations of e-waste dumping sites. -Public conference/arts event at Watermans Art Centre in London, UK, which combines academic presentations with the creation of new performance work with electronic waste re-imported from Nigeria. The focus on digital performance practices in Bodies of Planned Obsolescence is driven by the notion that critical practices in performance arts can constitute an intervention in broader cultural performative practices around understandings of - and engagement with - technology. An innovative aspect of Bodies of Planned Obsolescence is its methodological approach to practice-based research, which builds on anthropologist Tim Ingold's insight that not only art, but also anthropology, archaeology, and architecture should be practiced as 'thinking through making', instead of a focus on theorizing an externalized world.. Bodies of Planned Obsolescence seeks to extend Ingold's approach into collaborative work in the field of science and arts. Thus, practice-based research in digital performance arts is not only conceived as building on - and responding to - academic and scientific theory, as is often the case in science-arts collaborations, but also constitutes a process of 'blue-sky' experimentation, which may play an initiating role in discourse and research in other disciplines, as well as establish alternate modes of dissemination of scientific and humanities research on e-waste outside academia.