Summary In a time of austerity and low economic growth the challenges faced by low-waged workers in earning enough to support themselves and their families to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living are immense. Identifying effective and sustainable pathways out of in-work poverty for these workers holds significant benefit for the workers, their families and the state. However for employers facing increasing expectations to view their employees' wage through a lens of social responsibility rather than purely productivity or market comparison, this can amount to another significant cost pressure, to be set against a general background of competing wage demands throughout the organisation's workforce. Understanding how effective different anti-poverty measures actually are for workers, and how sustainable they are as long-term measures to be engaged with by employers, is therefore crucial to the in-work poverty policy debate. A debate that is increasingly urgent as recent UK figures show in-work poverty to be currently outstripping that of poverty in workless households. This project provides a unique and valuable opportunity for a team of social scientists from the University of York and three important employers from the York labour market to work together on an applied research project that will help employers identify the likely effectiveness and sustainability of current measures being employed to reduce in-work poverty within their organisations. The project partners are the City of York Council (CYC), Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRF/JRHT) and York St John University (YSJU). The research project and knowledge exchange will focus on one specific geographical labour market, York. However the challenges currently being faced by these three employers are not York specific. Therefore the investigation and development of effective and sustainable strategies to deal with in-work poverty within these three project partner organisations will have much relevance to many more employers (and workers) across the UK. To investigate which are the most effective and sustainable policies to reduce in-work poverty the project will undertake: 1. an employer and worker level analysis of the effects of the adoption of a living wage policy within the organisation and issues relating to the sustainability of the living wage commitment. Research which will not only be supporting CYC, JRF/JRHT and YSJU in their own organisation's adoption and sustainable embedding of the living wage policy but it will also provide an important evaluation of a wage policy considered to be a cornerstone of any anti-poverty employer stance, an evaluation which will have potential value to many more organisations in the UK. 2. an assessment of the constraints and challenges currently being faced by workers from the three project partner workforces will be undertaken through the design and collection of two surveys; the first will be a survey of a sample of workers (about 500 workers) earning below a particular wage rate at the three partner organisations. The second will be a survey that follows-up a sample of workers (about 40 workers) who responded to the first survey and were found to be experiencing or at risk of in-work poverty. Both surveys will allow an assessment of how effective current anti-poverty policies engaged with by the employers actually are for the workers. 3. an analysis using national and regional data on wage distributions, wage growth, and in-work poverty over time to provide a framing or background to the discussion of which are the most effective and sustainable pathways out of in-work poverty. This analysis will help to generalise the project findings beyond the York labour market and set the experiences of the project partners' York based employees into a national context.

This research will explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child protection practice and service users and improve the capacity of social workers and other professionals to keep children safe in a period of institutionalised social distancing. Building on our existing research on the use of digital technology in everyday life (Pink et al, 2015; Pink et al, 2017) and effective child protection, especially the centrality of social workers getting close to children in their homes (Ferguson, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2020), we will identify areas of concern and advise on effective responses. Using digital ethnographic methods at four anonymised sites, the study will generate and rapidly disseminate in-depth knowledge of new challenges and social work practices developed in response to COVID-19, such as the novel use of digital technologies, and their impact on service users, social workers and social work organisations. Qualitative - interview, visual and digital - methods will be used to gather data from social work staff and service users about in-person and 'virtual home visits'. These insights will be used to rapidly inform child protection practice nationally. Engagement with participants and our collaborators the British Association of Social Workers and Research in Practice will shape recommendations for practice and coproduced guidance, and ensure national dissemination and impact. This will enhance the capacity of social workers nationally to keep children safe at a time of new and potentially increased risk, including of dometic abuse, and will also have future research use, such as informing the embedding of digital technologies into social work practice.

Addressing theme 1 and to a lesser extent theme 2. A climate emergency has been declared by 74% of UK local authorities. As they respond to this via increased tree planting targets for carbon sequestration, it is imperative that they also realise the multiple public benefits - health and wellbeing, green infrastructure, social amenity, the green economy - that treescapes can provide. Local authorities need a vision of future societal needs and the forms of future treescapes that might meet them; we will deliver the evidence and decision making processes to realise such a vision. Most studies on the biophysical and amenity aspects of urban treescapes neglect wider social and cultural values that cannot easily be quantified. Consequently, the symbolic, heritage, spiritual and social and cultural (S&C) values of treescapes are not meaningfully accounted for. This problem is becoming increasingly acute, as protests arise around individual trees (Sheffield street trees) or woods (proposed sale of the public forest estate), exacerbated by pressure from business and housing development. 'Branching Out' will evaluate the S&C values of urban trees across three cities, and develop new ways of mapping, predicting and communicating those values to support robust, evidence-based decision making and management. The three selected focus cities purposefully have different planning histories, supporting subsequent widespread adoption of our novel approach. York (historical) and Cardiff (post-industrial) are county towns, while Milton Keynes is a post-1960s new town. Each city has particular, yet not uncommon, challenges relating to their treescapes, has declared a climate emergency, and expects trees to play a role in mitigation and adaptation. Our central tenet comprises three broad approaches: 1) co-production, using deliberative methods with citizens and stakeholders, to develop a holistic value framework; 2) storytelling, creating narrative accounts of meaning and value of the past, present and future; 3) mapping, to link biophysical features and S&C values. Our approach will map both values that are generalisable and those that are particular and highly situated. Our mapping approaches encompass the past, present and future, using historical sources to map the impact of past values on current treescape form and function. We will use our established tree citizen science platform, Treezilla, to collect biophysical data from new Urban Tree Observatories. Remote sensing will characterise tree condition and canopy properties, and scale the biophysical data across the focal cities. This project will address local authorities' need for high-resolution mapping of tree characteristics, resulting in Europe's largest, most robust urban tree dataset, accompanied by descriptors of S&C value that can be used to recreate such datasets across other urban areas using freely available satellite data. The tools we co-create will provide local authorities with useable evidence for decision making to predict the impacts of developments or changes on S&C value, and enable them to calculate more accurately the impacts of changes on ecosystem services. Such multidimensional mapping can reveal inequalities in current and future provision of benefits as treescapes change through time, providing a better understanding of how and where those inequalities can be addressed. A series of design workshops will experiment with ways of mapping S&C values in relation to the remote-sensed biophysical characteristics of our urban treescapes, producing techniques and tools for sensing and mapping values. Using these tools as provocations, we will speculate on possible futures for our urban treescapes, built around an appreciation and understanding of S&C values. Through these methods this project will embed S&C values in planning and decision-making for urban trees at local and national scales, thereby meeting society's and planning needs now and in the future.

This project will create an interdisciplinary network of scholars and heritage professionals who share interests in Britain and Ireland's two greatest Viking towns; York and Dublin. It will foster and enhance interdisciplinary, international collaborative research, heritage management practice, public outreach and creative enterprise. Since the 1970s, a new appreciation of the role of towns, urbanisation and trade has transformed our understanding of the Viking Age from Scandinavia to Russia, as well as in Britain and Ireland. Although international trading and manufacturing sites played crucially important economic, political and social roles, they were also relatively rare - no more than a dozen are known from across the Viking world. In this context, Dublin and York - by far the best documented and best excavated urban centres in the Viking West - are of exceptional international importance. Contemporary sources are relatively well-studied, and half a century of urban excavations has produced exceptional evidence. The towns constitute vital resources for archaeologists and heritage professionals alike, but with some exceptions, communication and collaboration between specialists and practitioners, and between the two modern cities, has been limited. This lack of communication between contemporary professionals is particularly significant because the political relationship between Viking York and Dublin was once very close: they shared a ruling dynasty, the 'grandsons of Ivarr', for a significant period in the 9th and 10th centuries. However, the impact of this political link on the social and economic development of the two towns is under-researched and largely unrecognised by the public. Our understanding of life in Viking-Age York and Dublin has been transformed by archaeological research, but this has developed in subtly different ways in each city, and has not always informed discussions of broader historical narratives. New scientific methods and interpretative models offer huge potential for future research, and new systems of data management and public outreach offer both challenges and opportunities. Our network will bring together academics, field archaeologists, artefact specialists, heritage professionals, and public historians and archaeologists to explore the relationship between the two towns in this seminal period, comparing and contrasting the relationships between the living cities and their Viking heritage. How close - or different - is the evidence they have produced? How can new research techniques inform our understanding of systems of trade, manufacturing and economy? Does this transform long-standing models of the cities' development? Can the research and management experiences of each city inform best practice? Can the cities benefit from shared approaches to new digital technologies? And how can new discoveries best be communicated to the general public? Our workshops will provide a forum to plan future activity, and an authentic platform for meaningful public engagement. Our key aims are to re-examine the evidence in detail, to situate this evidence in its broader context, and to consider the potential for future collaboration. To this end, we will organise three workshops. The first, 'New Evidence' (York Spring 2021) will provide a forum for new research; the second 'New Approaches (Dublin Autumn 2021) will challenge existing models of urban development; and the third, 'New Engagements' (Dublin Spring 2022) will examine the relationship between the modern cities and their Viking past. A strategy document will be produced, and the results will be disseminated in a range of media. By stimulating discussion between key stakeholders and knowledge-makers, this project will reinvigorate the study of both Viking towns, draw fresh attention to the connections between them, reengage with debates on Viking-Age urbanism, and lay the groundwork for future research and outreach.

An unprecedented amount of data exists about our lives, environments and the people we share them with. The devices (e.g. phones, smart thermostats and even cars) and organisations (e.g. councils, supermarkets) we interact with on a daily basis, record and store ever more information about things we do and care about. By empowering large numbers of people to access and interpret this data, we can transform the way we understand and make decisions about key aspects of our lives (e.g. health and energy use) and have a greater say in how we are treated by the government and other groups. We can access an increasing amount of this data by downloading it from our devices or other places like our local council's website. However, being able to get data does not necessarily mean we are able to understand it. Interpreting raw data files requires special software and techniques that most of us are not trained to use. Websites and apps that let us access and browse data in more accessible forms like graphs and infographics can help many people, but still are not right for everyone. Some people do not have the educational background needed to understand these forms of presentation, and others struggle to interpret what the facts and trends they show mean in the context of their lives. Equally importantly, many of us will not find seeking out and browsing data displayed in these ways an enjoyable and enriching way to spend our time - and might miss out on benefits of understanding our data as a result. This project will pioneer a new way for presenting data to the public that a large and diverse section of the population will be able to, and equally crucially, want to use. We propose that this can be achieved by creating personalised video stories that tell us how our data relates to our lives and the people around us. We call this new form Perspective Media. Imagine a documentary about climate change that uses a personalised narrative structure and graphics based on data from your smart meter to show specific and achievable ways to improve your carbon footprint. Building on the skilled craft of video storytelling (e.g. from TV) to present a personalised perspective on data will allow us to provide an easier route for many people to understand how large and complex data sources relate to their lives. Basing our approach on a highly popular media format like video, with a diverse range of genres, will mean that large numbers of people from different backgrounds will enjoy using it to engage with their data. Current ways of making video content assume that stories are fixed and linear, with the same information shown to everyone in the same order. Perspective Media, on the other hand, will show each viewer a personalised story about their data. For this reason, new ways of telling video stories that respond to data will need to be developed. These new approaches will, in turn, require new tools and technologies for creating content and delivering it to viewers. The aim of this research is to lay the foundations for these developments by: 1) investigating a range of techniques for presenting data in personalised video story form; 2) analysing the processes and tools that are currently used to make video stories to see how they need to be changed and extended; and 3) exploring how users experience video stories that are personalised to their data, and whether they truly offer a more inclusive and enjoyable way for people to engage with data. We will achieve this aim by bringing together people with expertise in media production and data analytics with technology designers, to create prototypes of personalised video stories based on data. By analysing these prototypes, and how they are made and received by audiences, we will inform future research into production tools and technologies for Perspective Media and encourage the growth of a community of people in the media industry who create it.