Creative Peninsula is conceived as a new model of cultural partnership across Devon and Cornwall, increasing access and exchange between urban and rural communities, whilst celebrating the region's distinctive landscape and Atlantic coastline, and exploring its complex histories, through site-specific, socially engaged arts programming, connecting people and places across the South West Peninsula. Working closely with local authorities, museums and arts organisations, this collaborative knowledge exchange project builds on the existing AHRC-funded research project, Outside the Box, looking into the practicability of socially distanced 'in-person' assembly for open air arts events, responding to challenges brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, whilst promoting health and wellbeing through increased connection to green spaces and public engagement with the environment. Creative Peninsula also grows out of a strategic partnership between Exeter City Council and University of Exeter entitled Creative Arc, focused on culture-led regeneration and place-making in the city and its rural surroundings, acting as a catalyst for local economic development and social change. By expanding this approach to the region, University of Exeter will aim to build on close working relationships with local authorities and arts agencies developed around it's Devon and Cornwall campuses, as well as activating its network of arts and heritage organisations, including those national and regional partner organisations with which it has Memoranda of Understanding. The theme of place in Devon and Cornwall will be explored further in the light of a series of recent pilot projects, presenting site-specific arts commissioning in Plymouth, Torbay and West Cornwall, and the award of UNESCO City of Literature status to Exeter. As an exemplar of partnership working, Torbay and Exeter have recently submitted a joint bid for UK City of Culture 2025, and a key part of this proposal is the connection between culture, the public realm, outdoors and the natural environment. Taken together, these initiatives signal a unique opportunity to establish closer partnership working in Devon and Cornwall, focused on culture-led regeneration and place-making, with potential legacies such as an on-going collaborative knowledge exchange network, shared programmes of arts commissioning in the public realm and a new international arts festival across the South West Peninsula.

The relationship between town and country has played an important role in shaping British society for much of the past two millennia. Britain's assimilation into the Roman world led to the creation of a network of towns as centres of administration, trade, industry and service provision although the decline of Roman Britain led to the disappearance of urban life in most areas. It was only from around the 10th century that true towns once again re-emerged, and they have been integral to British life ever since. This project will examine the fluctuating fortunes of the most important town in SW England - Exeter - and how it interacted with its local, regional and international hinterland. Exeter began in the Conquest period (c.AD55) as a Roman legionary fortress, and following its abandonment (c.AD75) it was transformed into a town (civitas capital) serving the local region of Dumnonia. Unlike many other lowland areas, Dumnonia was slow to adopt aspects of Roman life, there being very few villas and other forms of Roman influence in the countryside. As such, this project will use Exeter as an example of the development of urbanism at the fringes of Romanised Britain. Although large parts of the town appear to have been abandoned in the early medieval period, a thread of continuity is indicated by radiocarbon-dated burials from the Cathedral Close. Urban life in Exeter resumed around the 10th century, and the town continued to flourish throughout the medieval period when it established extensive trading connections with Atlantic Europe, once again demonstrating a model of urbanism that was different from the centres of power to the east that looked towards NW Europe. Exeter's archaeological importance is two-fold: firstly, it is representative of urbanism in western Britain, well away from the political, social and economic centre of London; and secondly, there have been particularly extensive excavations the results of which have only partly been published. The 'Exeter: A Place in Time' project therefore aims to produce the first ever synthesis of the archaeology of Exeter and undertake a series of themed research strands, based upon scientific analyses of previously excavated assemblages (animal bones, pottery, and metallurgical debris) that shed light on how the city developed and interacted with its hinterland. The project will be strongly collaborative and involve: 1. the Universities of Exeter (already undertaking the post-excavation analysis of the Cathedral Close cemetery) and Reading 2. English Heritage (through their Centre for Archaeology, and funding for Cotswold Archaeology to write up key unpublished excavations) 3. Exeter City Council who run the City's Historic Environment Record and Royal Albert Memorial Museum A partnership with English Heritage and Cotswold Archaeology will enable selected unpublished excavations to be studied, along with a programme of radiocarbon and dendrochronological dating and metallurgical analysis. AHRC funding will use existing excavated material to explore Exeter's relationship to its hinterland through further analysis of animal bones and pottery. In particular scientific analysis will be used to characterise where animals were grazing before they were brought to Exeter, and the extent to which livestock were moved from the fertile lowlands onto the uplands during the summer. A new analysis of the pottery will explore Exeter's trading networks both within the SW of Britain and continental Europe. Key outputs of the project will include two books and an academic conference presenting an analysis of Exeter's development and its relationship with its hinterland from the Roman period through to the 16th century, a conference session aimed at professional archaeologists that highlights this innovative partnership approach, a one-day workshop for the public, and enhancements to the Museum's Making History gallery, online Time Trail, and Historic Environment Record.

This project reframes key challenges that underlie modern policing in a socio-technical world; a world instrumented with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies, in which many citizens and communities live, work and play, but which must also manage threats to their wellbeing and their rights. The project aims to support a new engagement between authorities (such as the police) and communities of citizens in order to better investigate (and in the long term reduce) potential or actual threats to citizen security, safety, and privacy. This includes both empowering the police by opening up new ways of citizens providing data in ways that protect privacy and anonymity, and empowering citizens by using these new technologies to also hold the police to account. We will be harnessing many of the so-called Internet of Things, Smart City and Smart Home technologies to encourage and allow citizens to help the police collect and analyse disparate data to improve public safety at both local and ultimately national levels. The project will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on the disciplines of software engineering for ubiquitous systems, social and cognitive psychology, and digital forensics / policing.

The Field || guides follow-on funding programme of activities will see new learning and ideas about field landscapes, landscapes and agricultural ethics impacting upon a range of users, stakeholders and custodians in SW England. Through a series of landscape interventions with professional artists and educators, it directs our research on temporality and ethics into impactful and participatory activities which invite the public to imagine themselves as current and future landscape custodians. In so doing, our work will also contribute to the wider UKRI Landscape Decisions programme, specifically by bringing the voices and views of a range of people and interest groups to attention. Our impact and engagement activities in Field || Guides build upon the work and findings of our AHRC-funded Field\work Research Network, which both precedes and works in tandem with our impact and engagement plans. In focusing on the iconic landscape of the Devon field, the Field\work network draws into dialogue arts and humanities academics, artists, farmers and key local land managers. The network will generate new learning and perspectives regarding how narratives, experiences and ethics help constitute landscape values. The Field || guides follow-on work takes materials, methods and insights from the network forward, to engage diverse groups of people in questions of landscape value. Firstly we will work with teachers and primary schoolchildren (future landscape custodians) from urban/rural schools in Devon, to engage them in innovative interactive learning about field landscapes, past present and future. We will do this by collaborating with Beaford Arts, an Arts Council England national portfolio organisation, and a professional map artist, to organise and deliver a series of professionally-curated field-based learning opportunities such as field-walks, sound-drawing, and poetic provocation, so the children and teachers can consider past, present and future landscape value. This work will produce a range of outcomes, and leads to an innovative set of National Curriculum primary resources. Secondly, we will collaborate with poet technologist Chris Jelley on an innovative 'field poetry' programme, employing physical 'poetry boxes' and geo-locational digital tagging to key locations in Devon, either in, or with a perspective on fields (including National Trust properties, right-to-roam areas, Exeter city centre). In summer 2021 the physical poetry boxes will be sited in carefully chosen locations across Devon to engage visitors and tourists in questions of landscape value, and will produce a large ensemble of curated public voices and perceptions. Thirdly, we will create a Field || guides website on fields and the cultural value of agricultural landscapes with significant new online resources and engagement opportunities regarding landscape values for public audiences. The website will host findings and resources from the impact and engagement activities discussed, as well as materials from the prior research network. The site will become a long-term resource, supporting the 'Countryside Classroom' resources and visitor experience; the front page will provide entry points for teachers and tourists, as well as other constituencies, including academics and artists. We will launch the website with a physical/digital interactive public exhibition and legacy plenary at the University of Exeter's state-of-the-art Digital Humanities laboratory. As our impact and engagement activities progress through lifespan of the work, we aim to bring the lived complexities of cultural landscape value into discussions and land-use and policy. We will do this through feeding back into the wider work of the landscape decisions programme, and by engaging with key stakeholders and policy-makers in Devon specifically with whom we have established connections and relationships, including the National Trust, Exeter City Council and Devon Country Council.

This Project expands thinking and practice on digitization and open access programs and their implementation by smaller and less well-resourced UK and US cultural institutions and community organizations. It does so by establishing an interdisciplinary cross-border clinic (GLAM-E Lab) that provides cultural institutions and community organizations with support on aspects of law and digitization, and it co-produces tested and scalable best practice resources to support digital heritage initiatives beyond the Project. The heritage sector is increasingly interested in building successful open access programs and exploring the new business models that flow from them. However, participating in open access programs remains too difficult and expensive for smaller and less well-resourced cultural institutions and community organizations. This is because obstacles and risks arise due to legal and cultural challenges, which can revive old disputes around access, restitution, repatriation, sensitivity, and representation. These challenges pose critical questions like: Should we digitize? Who (if anyone) owns rights to the digital reproduction? Is open access appropriate for these digital materials? Similarly, who is liable if the reproduction is used in a way that violates the law or harms others? Existing guidance on these questions is often static, or shaped by the experience of a single program, leaving significant gaps for smaller and less well-resourced cultural institutions and community organizations. Until addressed, these challenges will continue to hinder digitally-enabled participation and lock-in cultural data. GLAM-E Lab creates a new resource to bridge this gap using complementary and reflexive approaches. GLAM-E Lab establishes an interdisciplinary cross-border digitization clinic at the University of Exeter Law School and NYU Law School Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy with institutional and community partners. First, GLAM-E Lab provides pro bono legal and digitization support directly to UK and US lab participants working to implement open access programs and release digital collections online. Second, the Lab will use the lessons learned from that clinical support to co-develop a best practice tool-kit for the wider heritage community. Third, in 2023, the Lab publicly opens and invites new participants to test and expand the GLAM-E Lab methods and resources. GLAM-E Lab brings together UK and US practitioners, academics, and students from Law, Digital Humanities, and Museum Studies to overcome the legal and cultural obstacles to digitization and open access programs. Through this work, the Lab will explore key questions related to the legal status of cultural materials, ethical approaches to digitization, and open access and new business models. GLAM-E Lab will improve global conditions for the sustainability of digitization projects and digitally-enabled participation, leading to the generation of new knowledge in heritage management, humanities, and law. The Project will disseminate the research via GLAM-E's Lab's clinics, website, workshops, and publications. This Project contributes to more than a single discipline, cultural institution, or collection. GLAM-E Lab activities and outputs will enable any cultural institution or community organization to tackle the challenges preventing collections digitization and their participation in the open access movement.