Our project Children's Magical Realism for New Spatial Interactions: AR and Archives (henceforth CMR:AR) had two main aims. The first contribute to design research for new Augmented Reality technologies on mobile phones. We argued that there was a real potential for thinking differently about how the digital space in Augmented Reality (AR) applications could be made more interesting, creative, and have more genuine connections to the real environment in which they are experienced. To do that we looked at magical realist literature for children. David Almond is an author who situates magical realist stories in and around the North East. His archive had recently been acquired by our project partners Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books. We worked with specialists from Seven Stories, with children and young people and with smartphone developers to translate ideas about place and memory from David's books, to interaction design ideas about encountering AR objects in specific places using design prototyping workshops to enable participants to foreground their knowledge. Magical realism is particularly interesting and useful for the development of immersive technologies because of the way that it blends everyday places and events with eerie, magical or fantastical elements. By working in this way we were also modelling a process for other cultural organisations who wish to commission new digital work with immersive technologies. Our aim was to provide such organisations with ideas for better collaboration with designers and developers. Our new proposal takes the interaction design research ideas developed in our workshops and uses it as an education and outreach tool working with young people in economically disadvantaged areas of Newcastle upon Tyne. Working with our partners we will take the workshop methods we have developed and translate them into a Seven Stories offer which can be taken to schools and community groups in East End wards of the city. Together with our partners we will work with children and young people in creative design activities which will present our ideas about memory place and immersive technology and empower participants to relate them to their own community locales. Our follow on project will also work to further develop our impact with cultural organisations and digital developers. We will plan and facilitate a short workshop series with local cultural organisations and digital professionals in and around Newcastle to present our collaborative process and to relate it to their digital strategies. By doing so we aim to have impact in the commissioning and development by cultural organisations of new digital work in immersive technology.

Those who manage heritage sites face the continuing challenge of how best to engage children and young people with the buildings and landscapes they have been charged to present and protect. It is a vital task. The future of these sites can be safeguarded only by interesting the young in their heritage. One strategy for achieving this end has been to use literature and storytelling to engage children with the past and with specific heritage sites. Indeed, it is a strategy as old as children's literature itself. Thomas Boreman's 'Gigantick Histories' (1740-43), often called the first children's books, were designed to stimulate their readers' imagination with accounts of 'Curiosities in the Guildhall', 'What treasures in the Tow'r [of London] are laid' and the architectural splendours of St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey. Ever since, authors and illustrators have sought to produce books that cement the bonds between children and their historical environments: Kipling's 'Puck' stories (1906-10) for example, through to Jacqueline Wilson's 'Hetty Feather' (2010, inspired by her fellowship at the Foundling Museum). Children's fiction has sometimes even directly addressed preservation issues, as in Penelope Lively's 'The Whispering Knights' (1971), a fantasy set around the neolithic Rollright Stones and dealing in part with the incursion of a motorway. This - how literature has hitherto been used to engage children with heritage sites - is what the first phase of this project will investigate. The chief source, besides the books themselves, will be the archives of the project partners: English Heritage, Historic Royal Palaces, and Seven Stories: the Centre for the Children's Book. The latter in particular holds a wealth of printed and manuscript material from authors, illustrators, publishers, teachers, and children, which will illuminate how the producers of these books hoped they would be used. The archives of English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces, as well as Seven Stories, will reveal much about how literature actually has been used in heritage education, and with what results. Contributors from other academic disciplines will contextualise these findings, by presenting both theoretical and applied research on young people's interactions with heritage, and on heritage education. The second phase of the project is concerned with how these research findings can be used to inform current and future policy and practice. The project partners already use literature in their educational programmes. But this kind of activity now stands at a crossroads. Digital technologies allow young people to access writing in many new ways. They are as likely to read on smartphones, iPads or computers as in books, and might read while at the sites as well as at home and in school. Above all, new technologies allow reading experiences to be much more interactive: with specific reading experiences triggered by GPS technology for example, or with stories leading via embedded links to different kinds of information and activities. The project's workshops have been conceived to consider exactly how creative literature can now optimally be used in heritage education. To achieve this, the project will bring together a group of partners, some from the heritage sector and others from a range of disparate academic disciplines. Academics participants in the workshops will come from children's literature studies, heritage studies, development studies, and creative writing. The project will also have the input of Newcastle University's Culture Lab, a centre for the creative arts and interactive technology, as well as from consultants from the private sector who specialise in digital media. The exchange of knowledge between these academic and commercial partners, and with Seven Stories, English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces, is the principal purpose of the project. Further collaborations will, it is to be hoped, spring from these newly forged links.

The present moment is in many respects a traumatic time to be a child. Children exist at the intersection of the Covid-19 pandemic which has restricted access to family, friends and education; armed conflicts which are displacing them from their homes; and a climate emergency which is threatening their future. At the same time, the years 2021 and 2022 bring significant landmarks for global thinking on the child. 2022 marks the twentieth anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child coming into force in the UK, while 2021 saw the launch of 'Children's Commission' on 'the future of childhood'. As such, this timely project, which has the potential to feed into the commission's findings, comes at a moment when the status of the child is both evidently on the international social and political agenda and subject to a variety of threats and destabilisations. Contemporary culture has for some decades interrogated the precarious nature of modern childhood, an interrogation which frequently registers a specific anxiety about the missing, displaced or otherwise 'spectral' child - the child who is, like a ghost, simultaneously absent and present. These concerns have reached a particular pitch in contemporary culture in recent years. However, to grasp their implications for the ways in which children are understood not only culturally, but socially is an interdisciplinary challenge within and beyond the UK. We propose that by instigating a humanities-orientated approach to areas of contention which are more conventionally considered in terms of social and political science it becomes possible to see the imaginative engagements which have always played a central role in shaping the policies and structures - educational, clinical, familial - which have had the effect of rendering multiple groups of children spectral subjects granted only a haunting presence within public and political discourse. These ghosts can be sensed across a diverse range of sources, including literature, cinema, and folklore, and demand analysis by humanities scholars skilled in drawing out the interplay between cultural constructions of the child and their real-world counterparts. The research network seeks to address three key questions provoked by the motif of the spectral child. The first of these concerns the child at the boundary of life and death. The second asks how, at a time when the political union of the United Kingdom appears increasingly fragile, conceptions of nationality are generative of certain kinds of spectral children. Finally, in the wake of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes Commission report (2021), the third interrogates the responsibility for care which exists between the State and the child, asking how particular modes of care-giving might occlude, compromise or otherwise allow the child to 'go missing'. To address these questions, the network brings together scholars from the fields of literature, film, history, sociology, and philosophy, to investigate the intersection between childhood states and states of spectrality as registered in imaginative or creative texts. This investigation will take place through three workshops, each taking as their opening session a contribution from a professional outside of arts and humanities scholarship. Three strands of engagement activity (a visual arts project with refugee and asylum-seeking children, a film festival, and a creative writing initiative with children in hard-to-reach constituencies) will run alongside these nodal points in the network's lifespan. The interdisciplinary approach proposed here facilitates a broader understanding of shifting attitudes to the figure of the child, both as emblematic of a previous state of being and as a problematic receptacle for various visions of futurity. In doing so, the network engages with the wider 'Care for the Future' theme, asking what failures of care, broadly understood, might generate such 'haunting issues'.

This proposed project from Newcastle University originates from three complimentary areas of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences who have a long standing interest in working with communities. They are the: International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies (ICCHS) Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (NCLA) School of Architecture Planning and Landscape (SAPL) The proposed work involves 18 academic researchers from the above research units. Three 'open days' are proposed each of which relate to the research units areas of interest - they will take place at venues associated with partner organisations: Beamish Museum, County Durham The Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle upon Tyne Gateshead Town Hall, Gateshead Researchers will help formulate research questions, support the research activities themselves, help interpret findings, advise on dissemination, help evaluate of the project (effectiveness of collaboration), support community groups in capturing learning from the project, continue to support community groups for future activities and, for some projects, facilitate more in-depth co-production of activities. The partner organisations and identified community heritage groups will help provide direction to the activities The partner organisations will help provide access to the heritage groups that they have contact with.