This proposal is to develop a network to disseminate and share research findings and experiences from Heritage projects funded by the AHRC's Connected Communities (CC) programme. The network will also provide support and guidance for communities involved in the co-design and co-production of heritage research. Across the Connected Communities (CC) programme, many projects are working on heritage related topics. For instance De Montfort University is working on the Digital Building Heritage project which is exploring digital methodologies and technologies for meeting the needs of heritage community groups concerned with reconstructing and presenting historic buildings and their associated artifacts. Another example is the University of Hertfordshire's 'Partners in History' project which has focused on topics from regional new town heritage and First World War commemoration to the use of creative writing in museum education programmes. Other heritage projects are working in areas such as industrial heritage (mining, textiles, bicycle manufacture), transport heritage (waterways and railways), the history of workhouses and poverty, slavery history/black history. Several round table discussions at the AHRC Connected Communities Summit in July 2012 and more detailed subsequent discussions identified that there was considerable interest in setting up a cross-disciplinary network to enable collaborative activities between heritage related Connected Communities projects. The aim of the network would be to allow researchers and community groups to share and explore common themes and experiences and to identify gaps in knowledge to feed through into the design of future projects. It is was also clear from the summit that many CC projects are generating a huge repository of heritage related research materials, knowledge and experience which could benefit both current and future CC projects. Specifically a number of pertinent shared research questions were identified: -How can locally based heritage groups benefit from networking with each other both nationally and internationally? -What can groups within a network learn from each other about making the most of academic expertise and accessing each others knowledge? -How can locally based heritage groups draw in new participants and enable a greater variety of voices to be expressed? -What is the role of digital technology in enabling community groups to discover and disseminate their heritage? -How can spaces be created to challenge and disrupt older dominant narratives and enable new stories to be told and old stories re-understood? -How do we facilitate better sharing of knowledge, expertise and insight across sectors, between 'amateur' historians and professionals, between communities and academia? -How do we best address the 'skills gap' for academics working on community heritage initiatives? The intention of the proposed network would be to provide a range of fora to allow both the University and Community partners on heritage related CC projects to collaborate and exchange knowledge. It is expected that this exchange would generate significant efficiencies and insights across the CC programme by reducing both the number of repeated mistakes and duplicated research as well as help identify and disseminate best practice. Moreover it is hoped that this type of cross disciplinary and cross community collaboration will help identify new opportunities for developing community inspired co-created and co-designed heritage research.

This project will bring together community partners and academics from 4 existing Connected Communities (CC) projects in a workshop and small working groups to share ideas and experiences and develop guidance and learning materials on ethics in community-based participatory research (CBPR). The project will be supported by international advisors from 5 countries and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) as a partner. Recently interest has grown in CBPR - that is, research tackling issues relevant to communities of place, interest and identity and involving affected people in planning, undertaking, disseminating and using research. This approach is often adopted to give people who are usually the objects of research greater control over the process, to embed research skills in communities and to increase research impact. CBPR approaches are regarded as particularly useful in the context of 'hard to reach' communities, and in research on sensitive issues. Many ethical challenges arise in CBPR - particularly in relation to the power of professional researchers, the blurring of boundaries between community members and researchers and the inflexibility of institutional structures (including university research ethics committees) to cope with unpredictability and complex partnership arrangements. Aims: To deepen understanding of the complex ethical issues and challenges in CBPR and develop ethical guidance, case studies and practical exercises from the UK in a range of settings and disciplinary areas for use in future CC and other research projects. Objectives 1)undertake a rapid review of ethical issues in published findings of all CC projects and a detailed synthesis of 4 existing CC projects. 2)Engage in dialogue with a range of stakeholders, including community partners from the projects, international advisors and NCCPE to identify further ethical issues, share and analyse ethical problems and ways of tackling these. 3)Produce a document and web-based materials offering ethical guidance, case studies, case examples with commentaries and learning materials relevant to CBPR. 4)Encourage improvement in institutional research ethics review, policies, procedures, training and support to take account of the challenges and complexities of CBPR. 5)Develop greater awareness/improved practice among university and community researchers and other stakeholders in relation to ethical issues in CBPR. The project will 1) Finalise 'guidelines on ethical conduct' to be drafted by the current Durham CC project. 2) Produce 4 case studies, each featuring a different CBPR project, written to show how ethical principles are applied in practice and to highlight ethical issues in the project (e.g. how a partnership agreement was put in place). 3) Produce 4 case examples of specific ethical problems/dilemmas, written from the perspective of a research participant, outlining details of particular ethical difficulties (e.g. discriminatory attitudes in the research group). Each case example will be followed by 2 or 3 commentaries - at least one written by a community researcher and another by an academic or research student (including international advisors). 4) Practical exercises for use by CBPR teams and in training for academic staff, students and community partners. The materials will be published on the NCCPE website as a downloadable pdf file and also in sections, to which further cases, commentaries and exercises can be added over time as an on-going resource in partnership with Durham University's Centre for Social Justice and Community Action. The project has potential to benefit academics, research ethics committees, third and public sector bodies, funders/sponsors and communities where research takes place. Dissemination by NCCPE and other bodies will result in raised awareness of ethical issues in CBPR amongst researchers, funders and participants; and improved policies and processes.

Decision-making about heritage is changing and changing with it are definitions of 'heritage'. New legislation in the form of the Localism Act (2011), which aims to give more decision-making powers to local communities, can be located within a wider participatory turn which is questioning professional expertise and institutional legitimacy and is having the effect of pushing the definitions, knowledge, valuing and management of 'heritage' into new areas. To set a responsive research agenda for heritage studies and policy this project will co-design (Phase 1) and co-produce (Phase 2) research through creating new connections between the knowledge and perspectives of people from a range of organizations, communities, groups and perspectives who are situated in different places within heritage decision-making. The project Research Team will work together in the Phase 1 co-design phase through a series of iterative cycles informed by the 'extended' or 'radical' epistemology (Schon 1995) associated with participatory and systemic action research approaches (e.g. Banks et al. 2012; Burns 2007). Ideas we have drawn on relate to valuing and creating space for different ways of knowing such as experiential; presentational; propositional and practical (Heron and Reason 1997), the different ways through which 'knowing' is produced through action, interaction, experience, conceptualization and reflection (after Kolb 1984; Burns 2007, p. 34) and the productivity of feeling confident in what you know (your own perspective and opinions) as well as the productivity of a sense of 'unknowing'(Vasudevan 2011). Our co-design process will happen through a six-step process. In Step 1 'Entry points: Initial Reflections and Conceptualizations' the team will work with the PI to individually delineate their own positions and perspectives. In Step 2 'Workshop 1: Scoping the issues' the team will meet up and use techniques of storytelling and diagramming to scope the issues which will inform the final research design. In Step 3 'New perspectives: Experiential "unknowns" and Reflection', there will be a shifting of perspectives through the innovative use of 'day a life swap' which will see team members spending a day with someone else in the team and, through this, draw on the embodied learning than comes from being in unfamiliar places and contexts. In Step 4 'Workshop 2: Making decisions about the research project' a final workshop will draw on the experiential and reflective learning of Steps 2 and 3 to underpin the co-designing of Phase 2 research and Step 5 'Write and Collaboratively Revise final plan for AHRC'. The final step, Step 6, will see the submission of the 'interim progress report'. The Phase 1 outcomes will be the new relationships formed between team members and the development of a broader network of critical friends for the project. The Phase 1 outputs will be the Phase 2 research design itself, an 'in process' blog and website and a 2 page PDF reflecting on and capturing the co-design process. Looking forward to Phase 2, the Phase 1 Research Team will become the management group and will oversee the research direction. Indicatively we anticipate that we may identify a small number of parallel lines of inquiry that will give us targeted insights into different issues and questions related to the project's guiding question. Drawing on a systemic approach, we might deliberately site these inquiries in different places and use them to illuminate otherwise disconnected aspects of heritage practice and decision-making. These lines of inquiry could be led by any member of the Phase 1 Research Team and certainly might well be led by members of the Research Team not based in HEIs, with support from the PI. The connections between the lines of inquiry might be drawn out in workshops which will increase the reach of engagement and bring together the Research Team and wider academic, professional and community networks.

The 'University of Local Knowledge' (ULK) is a community project that celebrates local skills and knowledge, helping community members to value and spread their knowledge which in turn will aid community stability. The project has the full support of the local community, and is led in part by a steering group of community representatives. Working with artist Suzanne Lacy, KWMC has begun to capture film clips, or 'classes', in which residents share expertise and co-construct knowledge through events and performances.We will build on this foundation by developing technologies and techniques that help us scale up and study community skill and praxis. The University of Local Knowledge will bring together KWMC and the Knowle West community with a team of academics, artists and educators to study the deployment and use of technologies and techniques to collaboratively develop knowledge to enhance our understanding of the relationships between physical and digital community. We will help capture skills in a University-like structure in order to teach and publicise to others within and beyond the community; individual 'classes' will be assembled into programmes of 'study' that will be housed in 'departments' and 'faculties'. We will build systems through which further 'classes' can be added and pedagogic structures can be changed by contributors. We have chosen University as a deliberately contentious metaphor to provoke debate around what constitutes knowledge and why values are placed on different spheres of expertise. These 'classes' will be films/videos of Knowle West residents describing how to do something that they are an expert at; KWMC have captured an initial pool of examples which can be used to populate ULK. The resulting ULK structure will be visualised as a network of classes, departments and faculties. We will implement such structures within an online web service, and allow users both to comment and upload new classes, but also allow experienced members to adapt and 'mash up' the structure of ULK itself in order to better organise or present programmes of study. These web services will also be displayed in physical installations deployed within Bristol. In addition to configuring programmes of study we will convene a series of events including a conference with 'seminars' arranged in local sites, including shops, libraries and homes, with academics and local experts paired in conversation.

This project advances an authentic, strategic community university partnership working across the Connected Communities Programme and beyond. It kick starts a cultural shift that acknowledges community engagement in research as essential to understanding and promoting community university collaborations. One of the drivers for community partners and academics engaged in community university partnership working is the potential these ventures have for improving social conditions and tackling inequalities. Collaboration between communities and universities in the UK as a device for social change is gaining impetus, as more and more partnerships produce findings that demonstrate positive impact. However, there is a major capacity issue for community partners to participate effectively both in individual partnerships with university academics and in the larger strategic policy making groups that have impact and promote good practice. For example, whilst many academics have the opportunity to support any ongoing learning by attending conferences and securing faculty buyouts, community partners rarely get to meet or network to share their experiences and increase their knowledge base. Funding for their participation is hard to acquire. So far, the majority of what we know about what helps and hinders community university partnership working has been presented from an academic viewpoint. The chance to learn from community partner experience and feed this into improving future working and related HE policy is overlooked. We want to set the foundation for a UK wide community partner network that once formed, will influence HE policy and practice: 1: Community partners have co-written this bid and will lead on delivering its objectives in relation to community mobilisation and inclusion. An academic engagement group will work in parallel with community partners. We plan to start by bringing together a group of 20 experienced community partners to share their successes, reflect on the challenges and identify promising practices that support partnership working to tackle social inequalities. To do this, we will create a core planning group of community partners and others, to organise the first UK wide community partner Summit in June 2012, drawing on the expertise of our North American partners. By creating a safe space at which partners can explore their experiences of working with universities openly and freely, we hope to build community partner capacity to influence both the university that they work with and share the learning from this at a national level to inform HEFCE policy and funding. Summit planning will be informed by collating the learning and common issues of concern identified by the CCP, Beacons and SECC projects. 2: The Summit should inspire and enthuse attendees so that they help advance the recommendations and actions from the Summit at local, regional and national levels. The experience should help sustain and build the resilience of community partners so that they feel fit to shape conversations and influence policy regarding issues of power, equity, shared decision making, funding and sustainability. Working groups will be established to provide the vehicle/mechanism for community partners to contribute to Summit follow-up activities. A significant feature of this stage will involve community partners and CCP academics meeting together to continue dialogue and action immediately after the initial Summit to produce high quality outputs. 3: We will create a hub for a self-sustaining community partner forum to collectively share and learn from the Summit when project funding ceases. It is vital that the capacity built through this project is available to future CCPs and feeds into strategic developments for individual universities, HEFCE and the Research Councils. Post project resources will be available for academics and community partners to use, hosted through a dedicated presence on the NCCPE website