Wave after wave of crises and polarising inequalities have renewed policy attention onto how local communities themselves can provide vital support, knowledge and leadership in forging solutions. The rise in deep poverty requires radical change and new ways to imagine and shape our transition out of such foundational challenges (Joseph Rowntree Trust, 2023). Brexit and the pandemic have simultaneously demonstrated stark uneven geographies and the potential power of neighbourhood resilience (Unwin, 2023). There is both a consultation need and fatigue around social infrastructures, regeneration, public health and sustainability (Wynn et al., 2022; RTPI, 2023). Creative practices present a source of transformational change that can stimulate new connections, imagine different futures and inspire action (Vervoot et al., 2023). My PhD research pioneers a creative participatory methodology that can make timely contributions to public engagement in these social policy realms, which this Fellowship aims to mobilise. I have developed a co-methodology, participatory listening research, that can be extended and applied to public engagement. Participatory listening research is a way of listening with others to our environment that generates new knowledge whilst embracing different listening experiences, practices and positionalities. Specifically, the PhD research applied this approach to gentrification, asking: What can listening with residents on the UK south coast tell us about urban seaside gentrification and displacement injustices? Gentrification is popularly contested and deeply rooted in policy-relevant spatial dynamics, offering a window onto broader societal trends (Smith, 2005). Listening creates a different way of connecting to over-rehearsed yet persistent issues of spatial injustice. By combining sound (Oliveros, 2003; Robinson, 2020) and mobile studies (Sheller, 2020) with a participatory ethos (Beebeejaun et al., 2013), listening with residents can expand our understandings of relationships to place and hyperlocal socio-environmental change. Looking to the other extreme of uneven geographies, the government's Levelling Up agenda is concerned with restoring pride in place and social infrastructures in 'left behind communities' (APPG, 2023). Defined as 'the framework of institutions and the physical spaces that support shared civic life' (ibid:6), social infrastructures can seed social capital (British Academy & Power to Change, 2023). This has refocused public engagement attention onto devolved and neighbourhood-led infrastructures, such as Labour's parallel Take Back Control (Norris, 2023). My gentrification-specific analysis can be expanded to these broader policy concerns, questioning how hyperlocal socio-environmental change resonates through: the re-engagement of underserved communities, de-gentrification, public health and sustainability agendas. Participatory listening research offers a new method for public engagement that is mutually beneficial, restorative and imaginatively-oriented. The Fellowship activities will extend, apply and deepen this methodology through creative engagement, knowledge exchange and academic dissemination. Firstly, I will add a novel dissemination method to the toolbox by co-creating interactive listening walks, geo-locative mobile soundwalks, a podcast and digital story that share the gentrification findings. These will be co-designed with local arts-based organisation, Brighton & Hove Music for Connection, in consultation with residents advisory and community groups. Secondly, using these creative outputs, a series of knowledge exchange symposia will be hosted with relevant academic, practice and policy networks. Thirdly, I will deepen the academic significance of this approach through journal publications, conference papers and funding proposals. Overall, the Fellowship will enable me to transition from the doctorate into a career as an applied and engaged social policy researcher.

A quarter of the stone surface of Stonehenge is inaccessible to conventional archaeological survey techniques such as laser scanning due to the dense coverage of lichen. This project will aim to: (i) create a novel method, combining machine learning and surface imaging techniques such as photogrammetry, to reveal carvings that may be hidden by lichen covered stone surfaces; and (ii) verify any findings using a subsurface imaging technique such as terahertz imaging. The project will answer the question of whether there are more prehistoric rock carvings hidden by lichen on Stonehenge, and whether, with only an understanding of the topography of the lichen, we can find these carvings. The results will be of use for further unravelling archaeological detail at Stonehenge, and aid conservation, presentation and management of the site. Outcomes will have wider applicability as a rapid non-invasive technique for measuring and monitoring the microtopography of vegetation-covered stone surfaces at other monuments and historic buildings.

This application sets out a programme of work which will allow me to study 'gender critical' advocacy through the lens of interpretive policy analysis (IPA) and field theory (Bourdieu, 1984, 1996) to better understand policymaking in the UK. By 'gender critical', I refer to the set of discourses deployed by those who seek to limit trans rights or resist gender self-identification on the basis of an essentialist understanding of sex/gender. A key contribution of my PhD was to show how policy could be studied by focusing on the everyday practices of policy actors, who operate with their own aims and preconceptions, within particular structural constraints. For my PhD I developed an innovative pairing of IPA and field theory to demonstrate that a practice-based approach can bring valuable insights. Although some scholars in IPA have explored practice (Wagenaar and Cook, 2003; Behagel et al., 2017; Bartels, 2018), and others have noted similarities between field theory and IPA (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012; Brenninkmeijer, 2018), these approaches had not been deployed together. Doing so enabled me to explore macro and micro influences on policy change, and show how actors create policy in the context of a specific set of macro-cultural influences. I am a fluent and reflexive qualitative researcher, and I approach data generation and analysis with confidence and curiosity. As an expert in the methodology I developed, I am in a unique position to bring it to an urgent area of policy change, that of the 'gender critical' influence on policymaking in the UK. In so doing, I will continue to enrich the tradition of IPA with my methodological contributions, and provide much needed insight into concerning changes in policy in the UK relating to trans inclusion. Individuals who may define as 'gender critical' frequently indicate that they feel silenced, and appear to be a minority voice. Nevertheless, some arguments appear to be influencing policymaking in the UK. For example, in December 2022 the Scottish Government passed a Bill simplifying the process of obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), but it was blocked by the UK government (Sim, 2023). This happened in spite of the Bill having been consulted on twice, both times finding a majority of respondents in favour ofthe changes (Scottish Government, 2023), and a poll in which 57 per cent of Scottish people surveyed agreed that it should be easier to get a GRC. It is this puzzle that I plan to create the conditions to research during the ESRC postdoctoral fellowship. The proposed programme of work is designed to generate societal impact and to form a crucial step in my career trajectory. These aims are entwined, as I am committed to pursuing research which contributes to a greater understanding of issues with relevance to policy, and leads to positive, considered policymaking. I am personally motivated by this topic, and intend to remain close to the issue on a long-term basis. The fellowship will give me the tools and capacity to design and pilot a research project investigating 'gender critical' discourse from an IPA perspective. This is likely to be small-scale, qualitative, and to incorporate the perspectives of those who engage in 'gender critical' advocacy. Being based at the Brighton Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender would give me the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the prevailing discourse surrounding the issue in a gender inclusive research environment with expertise across LGBTQ+ research and gender and citizen rights. The workplan is designed to pave a trajectory from my position post-PhD to one I intend to occupy as an established academic. I finish my PhD an expert in practice-based approaches to IPA with an orientation to issues relating to sexual harm. I plan to retain the methodological expertise, entrench myself in the discipline of IPA and establish myself in gender studies, fostering an expertise on gender inclusive policymaking.

This will be the first study of the creative representation, figurative and literal, of early modern Englishwomen as healers and medical practitioners in their own words and via their own practices. The interdisciplinary intersection of early modern medical practices and creative representations has been exposed by studies of Shakespeare and medicine (Slights, 2008; Heffernan, 1995) but women's own representation, expression and transmission of medical knowledge and practice through creative expression has not been addressed. I will examine how early modern women expressed the practices of healing, promoting wellbeing and bodily autonomy via their own literary and visual art, manuscript communication, and marginalia. I will intervene in discourses of social, medical, literary and art history engaging with a broad range of narratives and practices to query how we understand what it was, in the early modern period, to 'heal' and how that speaks to our contemporary debates around bodily autonomy, wellbeing, and the narratives around medicine. Stratford-upon-Avon is a uniquely well-documented site of early-modern life and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) is an approved place of deposit and early modern studies hub. The project will engage with new research and outputs generated by Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson's current AHRC RDE Fellowship project, 2022-3, 'Susanna Hall and Hall's Croft: Gender, Cultural Memory, Heritage', on which I am working as Research Officer. This work is producing ground-breaking spatial outputs in a digital spatial archive and a women's wellbeing-focussed garden at Hall's Croft that will create unique spaces for my own reflexive practice. I will continue to focus on Stratford-upon-Avon and south Warwickshire, the archives of the SBT, and a closer interrogation of provincial English women as patients and healers, as well as engaging with the SBT to create impactful public engagement through research outputs.

This research aims to offer a more specific insight into racialised violence under current conditions of capitalist democracy by drawing upon populism studies and biopolitical theory so that we can interrogate racial violence produced by right-wing populism as well as put us in a better position to discuss what constitutes a more democratic practice of biopolitics. We currently live in a "populist moment" (Mouffe,2018) whereby the internal antagonism between "the elite" and "the people" has been exploited by right-wing populist actors to produce a social frontier on the grounds of race. This is due to the continued lack of democratic control over many aspects of ordinary people's lives (Canovan,1999). Additionally, although biopolitical theory does offer an account of racism (Foucault,1975-76; Agamben,1998; Esposito,2008), since the Covid-19 pandemic, questions around how biopolitical mechanisms are deployed to police "the people" and its outside have come to the forefront. I argue that it is necessary to study this problem by drawing on both populism and biopolitics because populism's emphasis on formulation and political strategy means that there is no thorough survey of history and its effects on the construction of "the people" on the grounds of race, it only offers the means to reinterpret the discursive construction of these social movements. Yet, this normative element is something that is missing from biopolitical theory. Although theorists such as Mbembe (2003) offer an account of biopolitics that situates race at the heart of their work, it is too focused on diagnoses. Biopolitical mechanisms do not operate in a political vacuum, and the ideologies and discourses which underpin them warrant investigation. Yet, in both bodies of thought, there remains a profound yet unconfronted ambiguity in how racialised body features. A theoretical encounter is required, which shall be staged through this research project to overcome this.