The proposed study advances understanding of an under-researched topic; the lived experiences and support needs of marginalised young fathers (aged 25 and under). It has an ambitious aim of both understanding and transforming the way society currently thinks about young fathers and the extent to which these ideas influence policy and practice support that enables them to be positively engaged in their children's lives. In the current UK context, young fathers are often viewed as 'a problem' within family social policy (Duncan 2007). In professional settings, including maternity, child and family support services, these negative pervasive assumptions have been found to translate into practices of surveillance or sidelining by practitioners (Neale & Davies 2015). Such practices also exclude young fathers from dominant expectations of 'engaged fatherhood' (Miller 2011), despite proven societal and wide-ranging benefits of men's involvement in caregiving for children, mothers and fathers (Ives 2018). Current policy and practice approaches therefore reinforce and reproduce the very stigma and exclusion they seek to diminish against a backdrop where knowledge about the diversity and dynamics of young fatherhood remains limited. The broad aim of this research is to address this gap in knowledge, offering a unique extended, longitudinal and international evidence base, and evidenced practice and policy solutions that promote gender equality and the citizenship of young men who are fathers. The data and findings generated will be interrogated through fresh theoretical and substantive lenses, addressing the following research questions: 1) How do the multiple disadvantages faced by marginalised young fathers impact on their parenting trajectories and longer term outcomes and aspirations? 2) How are young fathers' experiences shaped within a shifting climate of policy and professional practice and evolving ideologies of engaged fatherhood? 3) What are the benefits and key challenges of initiating supportive, client centred models of intervention in the UK and what might be learnt across comparative, international contexts? The study will document and intensively track the changing lives of a number of young fathers, both over time and in different comparative contexts and implement and evaluate equality friendly practice. This will enable a clearer picture to emerge about the impact of different cultures of understanding and expectations on young fathers and how varied professional responses shape their experiences, their orientation to fatherhood and their capacity to sustain positive relationships with their children and families. The study is multidisciplinary in scope, straddling youth, family and parenthood research and provision, and social work, housing, employment and health care policy; fields that will be drawn upon and integrated. It also engages with a shifting policy landscape that has moved on since the days of New Labour's 10-Year Teenage Pregnancy and Parenthood Strategy (1999-2010). Using creative, participatory qualitative longitudinal (QL) methods of enquiry, the study will produce new understandings of this shifting landscape of family, parenting and youth policy and its impact on the lives of young fathers. Three complementary strands of work will ensure research impact and uptake including: 1) an extended QL study of the dynamics of young fathers' lives and support needs in the UK, examined within a shifting climate of policy and professional practice and evolving ideologies of engaged fatherhood; 2) longitudinal engagement with practice partners from the Young Dads Collective and Grimsby to track and evaluate developments in innovative forms of good practice that respond directly to key policy challenges by recognising young fathers as 'experts by experience'; and 3) an international, comparative enquiry (UK and Sweden) and the development of an international research network on young parenthood.

With the launch of the Coalition's plans to mark the centenary of the Great War, the Communities Secretary observed: 'As the First World War moves out of common memory into history, we're determined to make sure these memories are retained', but which common memories did he have in mind? Remembering, just like forgetting, is always a political act. The war was a global conflict which left its mark on the local. Was it experienced differently in urban and rural areas? What were the relationships between soldiers and civilians during and after the war? Did it shape individual and community identities? Did it have different meanings for contemporaries? There was a consensus that the dead were to be commemorated and remembered, but there was less agreement over how the example of sacrifice was to be understood and the meanings to be attributed to and experiences to be drawn from acts of commemoration. How have these meanings changed over time? How will it be understood today? Is it a truism that 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'? Certainly, Britain today is a very different country to that of 1914 and has been described by Parekh (2000) as 'a community of communities.' What sense will young people make of the local memorials to the dead which sit in the urban and rural landscapes and the acts of commemoration organised by an older generation which will centre upon them? What meaning will the war have for young people who have grown up in a society where live reports of conflict are readily available on a smartphone and where the return of the dead from Afghanistan is instantly reported in the media? How will they connect the past with their present and their future? As the First World War moves out of memory into history, what will be the record of commemoration they will have experienced that will be left after 2018 for future historians to reflect upon? These are just some of the questions which have been generated by reflecting on the joint Arts and Humanities Research Council/Heritage Lottery Fund commemorative project. These reflections have in turn shaped the 'Voices of War and Peace: the Great War and its Legacy' project proposal. At the core of this cross disciplinary project is an institutional commitment to community engagement with research and a professional commitment 'in a mission of understanding' to investigate, analyse, apprehend, criticize and judge and thereby translate Edward Said's idea of 'communities of interpretation' into practice (Said 2003). Using Birmingham, the UK's second city, as its primary place of memory, the project will reach out to multiple communities/publics both local and national to explore through dialogue issues around memory, remembering and commemoration. The research network will respond to community requests for support in terms of capacity building and support community driven research agenda. Working with other funded centres and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) the project will invest in developing the community engagement experience of early career researchers. A strength of the network beyond its relevant knowledge expertise is the experience embedded within its membership of effective partnership working. As an internationally engaged network, it will seek out relations with cultural institutions in Birmingham's sister cities and through the Universitas 21 network to understand other national and local processes of commemoration and thereby further illuminate our understanding of memorial activities in the UK. Sharing knowledge, expertise and resources, it is intended that the project will leave its own legacy for community/academy relations in terms of the capacity for the co-design and co-production of research, an understanding of the complicated relationship between remembering and forgetting and a desire to continue to 'think forward through the past'.