Suburban Birmingham: spaces and places: 1880-1960' is a research project led by University of Birmingham academics working in partnership with curators from Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries, and archivists and librarians from Birmingham Libraries and Archives, and University of Birmingham Special Collections. Together, the team will use the partner institutions' extensive collections of documents, images, and artefacts to research and recount the history of Birmingham's suburbs. As its title suggests, the project will focus on the suburban spaces in which increasingly large numbers of Birmingham's inhabitants worked, rested, and played from the late-nineteenth century onwards. The researchers will explore how public spaces (e.g. streets, squares, lidos, parks, meeting halls), semi-public spaces (e.g. pubs, clubs, music halls, shops, cafés, allotments, places of worship), and private spaces (homes and gardens) were built, used, thought about, and represented over an 80 year period of great social, economic, political and cultural change. At the end of the two and a half year project, the team will make available to the public a new interactive website that will include a VODcast documentary film, articles about the history of Birmingham's suburbs, and 300 images of historical documents, paintings, photographs, maps, and artefacts. This innovative website will also be accessible in the new displays about the history of suburban Birmingham that will be opened to the public at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and at the University of Birmingham Special Collection's exhibition space. Birmingham Central Library will also host a new display that will, in due course, tour the city's Community Libraries. To mark the launch of the website and displays, University of Birmingham will hold a Day School for members of the public interested in learning more about the history of Birmingham's suburban spaces and places. It is hoped that the new website, displays, and the Day School will provoke public interest in, and further scholarly research on, the historical significance of the extensive, and previously under-studied, suburbs of Britain's second city.\n\nThe project's research will be conducted by two teams. Each team will have one member from Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries, one from Birmingham Libraries and Archives, and one from University of Birmingham Special Collections - all working closely with University of Birmingham historians. The partner institutions have extensive experience of working on AHRC-funded collaborative research together: University of Birmingham and Birmingham Libraries and Archives ran the 'Connecting Histories' project and continue to work on 'Birmingham Stories' (www.connectinghistories.org.uk); University of Birmingham and Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries run 3 collaborative PhDs together, and University of Birmingham and Birmingham Libraries and Archives have applied for 6 more; all three institutions have been partners in a series of workshops held as part of their collective preparations to mark together the bicentenary of 'The Father of Birmingham', Matthew Boulton, in 2009. However, 'Suburban Birmingham: spaces and places' will be the first time that AHRC funding has afforded curators, archivists and librarians much more time to focus on research than their work schedules usually allow. This is important because such staff are enormously knowledgeable about Birmingham's history and the city's collections in which that history is recorded. The project will enable curators, archivists, and librarians to share their knowledge with one another, to develop it through research, and to communicate the results in innovative ways to the public of Birmingham and beyond. In the process, the partners' ability to produce outstanding research by working together will be further improved, boding well for the future of history in Birmingham.

Several hundred poetic riddles -- composed and written down from the seventh- through tenth-centuries -- record the minutiae of daily life and worldly wisdom in early medieval England. They tell us that onions could be the butt of a rude joke, cats were then (as now) fiercely independent, and violence did not go unquestioned when swords were given the chance to speak. Because they exist in two languages, Old English and Latin, these riddles are rarely brought into conversation with each other and some are little known to any but specialists. This project will bring the entire early medieval riddle tradition to light, through a website that provides open-access texts and translations, alongside commentaries that unpack literary and cultural information, a discussion forum and competitions that invite members of the public to engage with the riddles in creative ways. If the early medieval riddles are a window onto life many centuries ago, this project seeks to throw it wide open. In exploring the riddles, the project team also aims to gather information about their composers' group identity. The competitive nature of riddling and the use of these poems in the medieval classroom, along with what we know from the biographies of identified authors suggests a shared group identity of high-status men working in England and insular networks with strong links to England. Even so, the very tradition itself was founded on international collaboration, with North African and pan-European poetic material widely circulated, imitated and adapted. The popularity of the riddle tradition both within England and abroad emphasizes that the shared group identity of early medieval riddlers had a global outlook. The riddles themselves could also be deeply subversive, and provide empathic visions of what it meant to live a very different life to that experienced by the high-status, male riddlers whose names and works survive. With all this in mind, the members of the project team seek to examine group identity in four ways: - First, they will examine the networks of riddlers working in England and on the continent -- how did different riddle collections reference each other? Which ones were circulated together, and how can we map their relationships? - Second, they will examine performances of identity within the riddles themselves -- how are high-status/masculine identities explored and reinforced through the subject matter of the riddles? Which riddles subvert these 'norms', and what cultural insights might we glean from them? - Third, they will turn the lens on themselves, to ask how scholars working on the riddles replicate the tradition's policing of group identity -- how does verbal sparring in publications and an emphasis on finding the 'right' solutions mimic the competitiveness of the environment in which they were composed? - Fourth, they will explore contemporary engagements with the riddles -- how might translations and commentaries open up opportunities for learning history through the riddles? How might they be channelled into museum/heritage activities and educational resources? In short, the project seeks to investigate group identity in relation to the production of the riddles, the content of the texts, critical engagement with the riddles, and the reception of the riddles by various user communities outside academia. The riddles have a great deal to say about all aspects of life in the early medieval period. Ultimately, they tell us that this world was much more nuanced than we imagine it when we think of weapons, heroes and battles. Alongside this warrior culture was a complex tradition of literary production, including bilingual riddling and reading communities, which spanned the entire early medieval period and produced hundreds of poems that continue to delight readers today.

This Network brings social and health science scholars into dialogue with museum scholars, leaders and policy makers to create a sustainable research agenda focused on the museum attendance and benefit gap. The network will draw in scholars with expertise in inequality, poverty and low educational attainment, experts in culture and health, public health, health and cultural attendance, and scholars of implementation science with expertise in rigorous approaches to intervention development and harnessing research for large-scale change. The Network explores the hypothesis that a deeper understanding within museums and museology of (1) the nature and experience of inequality and (2) how large-scale social and behaviour change is approached in fields such as health, will open up the capacity to understand, theorise, design, implement, evaluate and sustain practices which may address the museum attendance and benefit gap. Data from the official Taking Part Survey, which includes the attendance gap between Upper and Lower Socio-economic Groups in England, show that it has increased from 22.7 percentage points (pp) to 24.7pp over the past 15 years. The same pattern is evident in the rest of the UK. Sociologically, museum visiting reflects the socio-economic gradient, closely tracking inequalities in education, income, employment, mental health and other indicators of social wellbeing. This analysis is supported by decades of research in cultural sociology internationally which, regardless of methodological or theoretical approach, confirms that people who participate in and benefit from state-sponsored cultural forms including museums, are, in the main, from upper socio-economic groups and that the single most important predictor of museum visiting is not class, ethnicity or income but level of prior educational achievement. Population-level studies in the epidemiology of culture, which tell us that simply visiting a museum may have positive health benefits, emphasises the lack of fairness in the current distribution of cultural resources and the way museums reflect and contribute to established inequalities in health and wellbeing. Despite 40 years of concerted efforts by museums of all genres and scales, supported by national and local government policy and targeted investment, including more than £5 billion of Lottery Funding, the strategies used by museums in the UK to reduce inequalities in museum visiting are not working. Whilst pockets of positive transformation have been achieved, museums have failed to find ways to understand, consolidate, share and sustain progress. Focused on measuring small-scale impact and without an evaluation framework linking the activities of individual museums and the ways in which they utilise visitor research with the macro data from surveys like the Taking Part Survey or with the sociological literature on inequality, museums' current uses of research cannot offer insights into the larger question of representative participation. To begin to positively impact deeply entrenched and unequal patterns of attendance and benefit and make credible claims about their contribution to society, museums need to understand the extent to which the attendance and benefit gap is driven by societal factors, which museum interventions are most likely to have an impact, and how they can harness and grow their research capacity to move beyond 'intuitive' approaches to inequality and social change. The new partnerships and synergies the Network will generate are urgent: increasing inequality, the long-term impact of post-2011 austerity, and the dramatic impacts of COVID and new technologies are changing patterns of visiting, often in ways that increase inequalities. As the cultural sector seems likely to face a new round of austerity, having a clearer, more realistic, understanding of how museums might make a greater and more transparent contribution to society will be invaluable.

The COVID pandemic has popularised many concepts from computer science and mathematics. Phrases such as computer models and uncertainty are increasingly in the public eye. It is therefore timely to pursue a programme of activities designed to increase confidence in the use of computer models, using challenges from healthcare as a motivator. Centred in Birmingham, the UKs youngest and most diverse city, our programme of activities will inspire and capacity build digital skills confidence in a civic region where 28% of children live in income deprived households. At a time when there is increasing demand for digital skills, it is vital that we inspire and provide meaningful opportunities for diverse young people to develop an interest in ICT careers early on. If this foundation is not nurtured to begin with, the digital skills gap widens and so too does youth unemployment, social immobility and inflexibility of the future workforce. This grant will bring together people with backgrounds in research, performance and visual arts, engagement professionals and people with lived experience of disease. These individuals will create hands-on skills development activities for young people aged 11-16. They will work in teams in the inspirational Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum setting to 'solve' these challenges through a series of workshops, hackathons and a public showcase. Paid SMQB work experience placements will also be offered to students, enabling them to shadow university researchers and professional services staff. Participation will be incentivised through reducing access barriers and rewarding involvement. This will access to inspirational follow-on STEM activities for young people and their families to enjoy together. Our vision is to ensure that young people view computer science careers as diverse, valuable, attainable and fulfilling. A secondary objective to increase public engagement skills in ICT researchers. Researchers involved in our activities will grown confidence and experience in public engagement. Further, they will share their learning with the wider ICT community in a national symposium. Collectively this will help create an ecosystem where public engagement is viewed as meaningful, impactful and integral to high-quality research.

In 2009 the city of Birmingham will mark the bicentenary of the death of one of its most historically important inhabitants, Matthew Boulton (1728-1809). Two major exhibitions will be opened, new internet resources will be made available, books will be published, and an international conference will be held. In order to inform these bicentenary events and maximise their impact, a series of research workshops will be held by Boulton experts in 2007-2008, bringing together academics, curators, archivists and librarians from Britain and abroad. Knowledge and expertise will be shared as the workshops explore Boulton's historical significance and refine plans to celebrate his life in 2009.\n\nIn 1762, Matthew Boulton established a manufactory at Soho in Birmingham that, by 1767, was the largest in the world. He used division of labour on a new scale to mass-produce a range of metal products. Between 1775 and 1800, Boulton and James Watt held a monopoly on the production of the first rotary steam engines that could drive machinery and power Britain's accelerating industrialisation. But, as well as playing key roles in revolutionising industry's organisation and technology, Boulton also mass produced visual art on an unprecedented scale. Aiming to satisfy demand for luxury goods, he brought together artists, artisans and engineers from across Europe to design and manufacture high quality silverware and ormolu at home and abroad. Then, in the late-1780s, Boulton established a multi-skilled international team in Birmingham that developed the world's first steam-driven minting technology, producing millions of coins and trade tokens for use across the world. Much of this new, and difficult to counterfeit, money was designed for Boulton by leading European medallists like Kuchler, Ponthon, Dumarest, and Droz. Boulton's minting project put mass-produced visual art into millions of people's pockets, but also facilitated global trade and the emergence of capitalist wage economies. \n\nAs well as being a ground-breaking industrialist and entrepreneur, Boulton was a key member of British and international networks of scientists, theologians, artists, entrepreneurs, engineers, bankers, and politicians whose collaborations contributed significantly to the advancement of knowledge in diverse areas of human endeavour. His regular correspondents included the likes of John Flaxman (the leading British sculptor), Erasmus Darwin (the botanist and grandfather of Charles Darwin), Antoine Lavoisier (who discovered oxygen), and Benjamin Franklin (one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America). Boulton has become known as 'The Father of Birmingham', but his legacies are of lasting international significance to the arts, sciences, trade and industry.