This research project tackles the complex problem of how to increase participation in social and cultural life for all as we age which has been shown to make a vital contribution to raising quality of life. The project will address the fundamental issue that arts and cultural participation drops dramatically in older populations and that disabled, Black, Asian and minority ethnic and older people living in poverty are even less likely to participate. It will tackle inequalities related to accessibility and content of digital arts and cultural provision, enable vital R&D and establish new business models to encourage digital innovation in the arts and cultural sector to support healthy ageing. Arts and cultural organisations have been slow to adopt digital innovation, but there is huge potential in using emerging technologies to enable diversification of content and build new older audiences. The pandemic has increased the urgency to harness digital technologies to enhance the accessibility and content of cultural participation so that those who are socially isolated may be able to benefit, increasing their quality of life. The impact of the project will be include: disabled, Black, Asian and minority ethnic and older audiences living in poverty participating in digital arts and cultural experiences that will support their social connections and contribute to improved quality of life; provision of vital R&D support for collaborations between cultural and technology sectors in designing digital innovations, helping them prosper and thus contributing to regional and national sectoral growth; supporting creative industries to build a better understanding of diverse older audiences and to robustly evaluate their offer; and new evidence based policy making that tackles inequalities in arts and cultural provision for healthy ageing outcomes. The project will involve an interdisciplinary team working alongside the cultural sector, creative technology partners and communities of 'next generation' older people (i.e. aged 60-75 years) to understand older people's experiences of digital exclusion, and what they value culturally and socially. This knowledge will then inform the co-design of digitally driven cultural experiences that 'support social connections'. The research will involve designing a new tool to measure the impact of digital cultural experiences on social connectivity for healthy ageing. The audience research will enable new understandings of digitally experienced cultural value, that takes account of older age and inequalities. It will provide robust evidence of how the cultural products we design can potentially contribute to next generation older people enjoying at least five extra healthy, independent years of life.

The recent Casey Review (2016) and Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper (2018) have revived integration as a national policy priority. The problem these strategies address is the perceived lack of integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities. The fix they propose combines English Language provision and the promotion of 'fundamental British values' with curbs on immigration and interventions to address what are viewed as harmful cultural practices. Whilst most will agree that integration is desirable, there are different views on what integration is and how best to achieve it. Our approach is distinctive in at least three ways. First, we view integration as a process involving everyone, not just immigrants and ethnic minorities. The drawback of approaches that single out certain populations as 'unintegrated' is that they relieve other, 'integrated' populations of responsibility for integration. Integration, we argue, can only work if it involves everyone, where everyone shares its responsibilities and benefits. Second, we view integration as beginning in the situated practices and local contexts of everyday life. The drawback of approaches that stress fundamental national values is they trade in abstractions that may have little bearing on people's day-to-day concerns. Integration, we argue, should be pursued and achieved through social intercourse grounded in everyday life, not (only) through the promotion of abstract national values. Third, we view integration as a bottom-up phenomenon, where the aim of policy should be to capture and encourage existing best practices whilst simultaneously attenuating local barriers to integration. The drawback of approaches pitched at the national level is they are less sensitive to variation in local context. Integration, we argue, must begin with and attend to the specificities of local context. Our Everyday Integration approach reclaims and retools integration for academic and policy purposes. Our approach represents a step change in the scholarship on integration. Integration has been criticised for its assimilationist undertones and lack of conceptual clarity, leading some to abandon it in favour of cognate concepts such as incorporation or inclusion. Given integration's continued policy relevance, however, our aim instead is to redefine and reclaim it in ways that identify and then remedy its earlier shortcomings. We begin with integration as an assortment of locally grounded everyday practices and mobilities that facilitate meaningful and constructive social exchange. We will develop this approach as our main scholarly intervention to integration. Our approach is designed to achieve maximum impact for the everyday users and agents of integration. Integration is not just a matter of fostering good relations between citizens and migrants in national contexts. Rather, integration occurs through the grounded practices, exchanges, and mobilities of everyday life in local contexts. Our policy interventions are designed to capture and facilitate existing good practices whilst simultaneously addressing remaining barriers to integration. Working with the Mayor of Bristol, the Bristol City Council, and a wide range of City and Community Partners, we will use our research findings to co-produce and implement an Integration Strategy for Bristol. We will then distil the insights from our research and Strategy to formulate an Integration Toolkit that can be flexibly adapted for other urban contexts across Britain. Rather than simply seeing the lack of integration as a problem, we contend that a focus on the ways in which different groups of mobile and settled residents of the city already experience and practice integration - that is, the people who are its everyday architects and agents - can provide insights and creative approaches for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and foster integration.

This Project expands thinking and practice on digitization and open access programs and their implementation by smaller and less well-resourced UK and US cultural institutions and community organizations. It does so by establishing an interdisciplinary cross-border clinic (GLAM-E Lab) that provides cultural institutions and community organizations with support on aspects of law and digitization, and it co-produces tested and scalable best practice resources to support digital heritage initiatives beyond the Project. The heritage sector is increasingly interested in building successful open access programs and exploring the new business models that flow from them. However, participating in open access programs remains too difficult and expensive for smaller and less well-resourced cultural institutions and community organizations. This is because obstacles and risks arise due to legal and cultural challenges, which can revive old disputes around access, restitution, repatriation, sensitivity, and representation. These challenges pose critical questions like: Should we digitize? Who (if anyone) owns rights to the digital reproduction? Is open access appropriate for these digital materials? Similarly, who is liable if the reproduction is used in a way that violates the law or harms others? Existing guidance on these questions is often static, or shaped by the experience of a single program, leaving significant gaps for smaller and less well-resourced cultural institutions and community organizations. Until addressed, these challenges will continue to hinder digitally-enabled participation and lock-in cultural data. GLAM-E Lab creates a new resource to bridge this gap using complementary and reflexive approaches. GLAM-E Lab establishes an interdisciplinary cross-border digitization clinic at the University of Exeter Law School and NYU Law School Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy with institutional and community partners. First, GLAM-E Lab provides pro bono legal and digitization support directly to UK and US lab participants working to implement open access programs and release digital collections online. Second, the Lab will use the lessons learned from that clinical support to co-develop a best practice tool-kit for the wider heritage community. Third, in 2023, the Lab publicly opens and invites new participants to test and expand the GLAM-E Lab methods and resources. GLAM-E Lab brings together UK and US practitioners, academics, and students from Law, Digital Humanities, and Museum Studies to overcome the legal and cultural obstacles to digitization and open access programs. Through this work, the Lab will explore key questions related to the legal status of cultural materials, ethical approaches to digitization, and open access and new business models. GLAM-E Lab will improve global conditions for the sustainability of digitization projects and digitally-enabled participation, leading to the generation of new knowledge in heritage management, humanities, and law. The Project will disseminate the research via GLAM-E's Lab's clinics, website, workshops, and publications. This Project contributes to more than a single discipline, cultural institution, or collection. GLAM-E Lab activities and outputs will enable any cultural institution or community organization to tackle the challenges preventing collections digitization and their participation in the open access movement.