This project is dedicated to decolonising Victorian histories and environmental science. We shall address the present-day historical and ecological implications of a period in which the 'discovery' of Africa by Europeans was reaching fever pitch, when 'great' white explorers employed taxonomic and topographical practices that fixed Global North-defined parameters by which environments in the Global South were to be interpreted. The legacies of this for the present are clear. The environmental sciences lack diversity, and the histories of exploration and knowledge creation are still invariably told in ways that minimise the roles of Africans. This old model requires new insight and a new, decolonised energy. Our case study focuses on the yet to be studied collection of Victorian explorer Frank Oates, held at the Gilbert White's House museum in Selborne, northern Hampshire. We will work with the collection not as an act of biographical recovery but as the basis of a decolonisation work revealing marginalised indigenous voices and activities hitherto untold. This research will form the basis for a sustained collaboration with the museum, a curatorial specialist working on decolonising, and a network of History and Geography/environmental science teachers. The resultant co-creation of teaching resources and practices will move the decolonisation narrative forward by exploring ways the next generation of students can learn of more diverse and inclusive socio-cultural and environmental histories.

Creative Approaches to Race and In/security in the Caribbean and the UK (CARICUK) is a year-long collaboration between artists and educators. It aims to transform discussions about race and anti-racism in UK higher education institutions. It will redefine race as an in/security. This is based on the model of Caribbean In/securities, which sees security and insecurity as perspectival and relational terms that people negotiate in their everyday lives and through creative means. Understanding race as an in/security means that education institutions and black communities should negotiate anti-racist outcomes between them, with listening and change on both sides. The implication is that the fellowship aims to push institutional race discourse beyond inclusion and deficits, and towards education institutions actively participating in anti-racist learning and institutional transformation. Over a twelve-month period, Dr Pat Noxolo's fellowship will move through three stages: provocation, participation and transformation. Three artistic provocations, designed to provoke discussion about Caribbean and racialised in/securities, will each be followed by public discussion events. An online learning pack for schools, about Caribbean and racialised in/securities, will lead into a large-scale arts participation and exhibition. Finally, three short films and a publishing experiment will push towards institutional transformation. The bedrock of the project is that UK higher education can learn from Caribbean In/securities, because the UK's current racial disparities are an outcome of its historical relationships with the Caribbean, whilst the environmental and climatic in/securities that the Caribbean is now facing show the UK, itself a collection of small islands, the in/securities it will have to deal with in the future. Historically it was in the Caribbean, during the five centuries of European colonial rule (featuring enslavement, indentureship, and the establishment of crucial aspects of global production and trade) that the UK created its own peculiar forms of racialised hierarchy. These broadly informed the racialised hierarchies in Britain's later colonial practice across Asia and Africa, and have also informed everyday struggles over race relations in the UK for at least the last seventy years, since the symbolism of the arrival of the Empire Windrush from the Caribbean in 1948. Moreover, in the 21st century the Caribbean, rich in global resources and connections, is also key to revealing everyday negotiations over many other forms of in/security that the UK, and islands across the world, will have to negotiate for survival - for example storms and hurricanes, sea level rise, food in/security and the struggle for sustainable livelihoods. Geography is a key discipline through which to engage a range of overlapping publics - academics, educators, black communities, and arts practitioners - in thinking about this wide range of shared in/securities, whilst centring black perspectives on race in UK higher education. In addition to its expertise around climate science, UK Geography is in the middle of a slow and painful process of reflecting on the discipline's historical and contemporary complicity in the explorations and exploitations that laid the groundwork for the racialised inequalities and global catastrophes that we now face. In particular, decades of calls to transform institutions and to promote anti-racist practice in secondary and higher education teaching and research are building towards an effective shift, and Dr Noxolo, as part of the RACE group of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), is at the forefront of this effort. UK Geography is therefore a highly fertile terrain for mounting a year-long programme of creative engagements that draw on existing research on Caribbean in/securities in order to transform institutional practices around race.

The next decade will see the release of very large bodies of digital broadcast archives in parallel with the generation of new tools that allow richer use of media on the web. These developments will have consequences for any field of contemporary history, but are of particular significance for the environmental field. Framings of environmental change issues have typically been narrow and static, and have reinforced a policy field around these issues often unable to address the complexity and uncertainty of long term questions. Archive and web developments could combine to allow for more imaginative future responses to environmental change issues. However without a self-critical and open consideration of the 'digital ideologies' embedded in the tools and practices that mediating institutions develop for users' work with these enormous bodies of cultural content, there is a danger that the narrow and unproductive repertoire of environmental framings that is currently dominant will become further reinforced. This proposal responds directly to this urgent challenge. The project focuses on the archive of environmental programming collected by the BBC since the mid 1950s. Using a sample of programmes drawn from the archive it will critically examine their potential as resource for the making and debating of environmental histories in the context of imagining and planning for environmental futures. It builds on principles of co-production and social learning, and aims to support more plural and dynamic accounts of environmental change. Informed by a pilot study, which selected annotated and cleared limited use rights for approaching 100 programmes, amounting to 50 hours of programming, this study addresses the following question: How can digital broadcast archives inform environmental history and support public understanding of environmental change? This is broken down into four sub-questions: 1. In what ways does engagement with digital broadcast archives serve to revise and pluralise accounts of environmental history and politics? 2. What uses and expectations do publics have of digital broadcast archives, and how will they impact upon the way they engage with and act on environmental change issues? 3. What technical and cultural challenges and opportunities are presented to institutions that will be expected to have responsibility for, or will work with, online environmental digital archives (schools; universities; museums; media organisations)? 4. How can deeper knowledge of the production of past and present environmental understandings support more plural and dynamic imaginings of environmental futures? These research questions will be explored by means of three overlapping pieces of work. Firstly, a history of broadcast media and environmental change, drawing on the broadcasts, interviews with makers and presenters, and working with scripts, paper archives and sources. Secondly, a series of focus groups with a sample group in order to explore the practices and expectations of archive users; and thirdly, a series of working group meetings and interviews with professionals and institutional representatives working with digital broadcast archives. A series of outputs are designed to meet popular, policy and academic audience needs. A monograph, Earth in Vision, is offered as a media-rich and freely available e-book that revises contemporary environmental history with reference to the archive, and opens up a more plural and dynamic sense of possible environmental futures. It will include 25,000 words of linear text, but will also offer reader-chosen routes through the material, drawing on script content, programme descriptions, source materials and reviews. In addition to academic journal articles, a resource-rich public facing website, podcasts and a pop-up exhibition, we will draft a report for professional and policy audiences advising on digital broadcast archive planning.