In a recent forum on reinvigorating arts and humanities in Africa, the African Humanities Programme (AHP) highlighted the important contribution they can make to defining African approaches to building scholarship and meeting social challenges. The social challenge the iBali Network is focussed on is the complex combination of factors which exclude young people from learning in urban schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. Secondary school education underpins global development strategies, and is seen as a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills required to secure decent livelihoods in a globalised world. Enrollment in secondary education has increased nine-fold since the 1970s, but youth in urban areas face under-resourced and overcrowded classrooms, unstable home-environments, crime and gendered social pressures, forced employment, poor sanitation and health challenges. It is young people who have opportunities for schooling, but who are excluded from opportunities for learning, who are at the centre of the iBali Network. Learning exclusions are compounded by the little attention given in African public schools to young people's articulation of their perspectives and experiences of the world they inhabit and the world they want. We propose to create a network of expert and early career researchers (ECRs) and practitioners whose work coalesces around using participatory storytelling to tackle social issues, working at the intersection of GCRF challenges 3 (inclusive and equitable quality education), 8 (sustainable cities and communities) and 11 (poverty, inequality and gender). Storytelling approaches integrate international, scholarly and indigenous narratives and help surface and give value to different forms of knowledge. Through a focus on in-school youth and storytelling, the iBali Network is committed to both the promotion of arts approaches to address development challenges and the democratisation of knowledge about development through the arts. The AHP also highlighted under-funding of arts and humanities departments in Africa, and the limited opportunities scholars working across the arts/development boundary have for networking, collaboration and dialogue. We know from our own experience that creating a critical mass of scholars working across this boundary is compounded by the research methods training available for ECRs working on critical social issues. This sits firmly outside the arts, and predominant methodological approaches can be problematic in how they frame and investigate exclusions from learning. The iBali Network responds directly to these concerns. Through a range of activities which include a methodology-sharing summer school in South Africa, a bidding for funding workshop in Kenya, and sustained support for ECRs from across Africa, iBali aims to mobilise academics using participatory storytelling approaches. The network will demonstrate the approaches by working with academics, practitioners, and teachers and learners themselves to challenge the ways in which youth are excluded from learning in urban education systems. The core team is made up of internationally renowned scholars from Nigeria, Kenya, the UK, Sweden and South Africa. The Advisory Group extends the geographical reach to Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Sierra Leone. Further, through the recruitment of ECRs, the iBali Network, the methodologies it promotes, and the resulting impact, will be authentically pan-African. Fresh attention and more creative work is required to better understand why youth don't learn in urban schools. Through iBali's focus on storytelling, the arts become a mode of knowledge generation as well as a form of expression and engagement. The intention is to create the starting conditions for a sustainable and scalable network through which exclusions can be surfaced, highlighted and addressed by scholars, activists, policy makers, teachers and the youth of Africa themselves.

After a volume of rock forms its chemistry can be altered by geologic events, that move fluids through fractures in the rock. These fluids leach elements from the rocks, can transport them over significant distances, and potentially form enrichments of the elements we need for green technology. In pursuit of Net Zero carbon emissions, we need to use the properties of the volumes of rock beneath the ground. For example, to efficiently extract green geothermal heat energy, fluids need to efficiently flow through rock fractures. Yet we don't want to store clean energy (e.g. hydrogen) or waste energy products (e.g. CO2 and radioactive waste) deep within the ground if fluids can escape. We also need to better understand the processes and events that concentrate the metals within rocks, that we need for modern society. To use our subsurface resources appropriately and decarbonise our energy and resource intensive activities, we need to investigate fluid movement through rocks. For example, we need to understand how carbon dioxide and hydrogen move through volumes of rock and over what timescales? Which geological events form key metal resources and how can this knowledge be used to reduce the impact of their exploration? We also need to understand what will occur once humans have interacted with the rock by injecting, extracting and storing resources there. The spatial scale of many of these rock-fluid reactions requires that we can investigate extremely small chemical variations (isotopes) of specific elements in minerals at spatial scales 10s to 1000s times smaller than a millimetre and do this within the context of the surrounding mineral chemistries and structures. This is much smaller than we can achieve by the typical methods scientists use where rocks are broken-up and the elements of interest are purified from mineral grains in a laboratory. Instead, we need to use lasers to target and sample these extremely small amounts of sample, directly into an instrument (mass spectrometer). However, clashes or 'interferences' then occur between the isotopes we want to analyse and those we do not, because they behave similarly in the mass spectrometer. This limits our potential to answer important questions about the rocks, fluids and alterations. This bid requests funds to purchase new instrument technology - a collision and reaction cell, multi-collector plasma mass spectrometer (CRC-MC-ICP-MS) with MS/MS capability - that will be coupled to a large-array of existing laser technology already at the host institute. This instrument uses gasses to react with and purify specific elements, removing the interferences in seconds that would normally takes days in a laboratory, and can decipher mineral reactions at the necessary micro-scale. In this way we can contribute to the UK becoming a world-leader in using the subsurface to achieve Net Zero, whilst still providing the raw materials our economy requires.

The Centre for Care is a collaboration between the universities of Sheffield, Birmingham, Kent and Oxford, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Office for National Statistics, Carers UK, the National Children's Bureau and the Social Care Institute for Excellence. Working with care sector partners and leading international teams, it addresses the urgent need for new, accessible evidence on care. Arrangements for care, and people who need or provide care, are under unprecedented pressure. Quality, cost, unmet need and the situation of carers and care workers are central concerns. Care interacts with other systems in the NHS, jobs market and in policy on migration, welfare and housing. The cultures, values and public policies that determine eligibility for support and funding rules are also crucial, and 'shocks' like Covid-19 have profound and multiple effects. Together, these factors have led to fragmented care provision and unfair outcomes, and the need for reform is now widely accepted. The Centre for Care provides new evidence and thinking for policymakers, care sector organisations and for people who need or provide care. Its objectives are to: - work with people who need care, carers, care workers and others to produce studies that improve understanding of care and promote wellbeing; - publish robust findings on care systems, on paid and unpaid care, and on diversity, inequalities and sustainability in care; - exploit existing data and develop new studies, producing findings that policymakers and other researchers can use; - work with PhD students and emerging scholars, establishing a new generation of care specialists; - stimulate and inform public discussion of care and translate research into practice; and - collaborate with other care research teams, within and beyond the UK. In studying care, we focus on support, services and protections to promote the wellbeing of vulnerable or disabled people of all ages, and the networks, communities and systems that affect them. Our work will generate new knowledge on three major topics: 'Care trajectories and constraints: requiring, receiving and giving care' explores experiences of care at different life stages and as people transition between different parts of the care system. It also studies how giving or receiving care is affected when families are geographically dispersed. 'Inequalities in care: consequences, planning and place' uses latest statistical and data linkage techniques to learn how socio-economic, health and other inequalities shape experience of care, and the consequences of these for groups and individuals in different places and over time. 'Care workforce change: organisation, delivery and development' focuses on care worker recruitment and conditions; regulation and organisation of care work, including the introduction of new technologies; and efforts to improve job and service quality in care. Cross-cutting these studies, the Centre will also examine 'Care as a complex, adaptive ecosystem', 'Digital care' and Care data infrastructure', supporting the integration of all our research. This helps us develop new thinking on care inequalities, how care ecosystems operate and change, and the drivers and implications of digitalisation and other developments. It also enables us to exploit the UK's finest statistical datasets to produce compelling new insights on care and caring. Our multidisciplinary research team builds on a strong portfolio of care studies and is supported by researchers in nine other countries, all equally passionate about doing impactful research that can drive positive change in experience of care and caring. Our work is undertaken in partnership with care sector organisations and groups advocating on behalf of people who need care, carers and care workers. The Centre for Care is vibrant, innovative, and determined to make a positive difference through impactful, accessible research for all to use.

Our programme focuses on the care needs of adults living at home with chronic health problems or disabilities, and seeks sustainable solutions to the UK's contemporary 'crisis of care'. It is distinctive in investigating sustainability and wellbeing in care holistically across care systems, work and relationships; addresses disconnection between theorisations of care in different disciplines; and locates all its research in the context of international scholarship, actively engaging with policy partners. It will fill knowledge gaps, contribute new theoretical ideas and data analyses, and provide useful, accurate evidence to inform care planning, provision and experience. It develops and critically engages with policy and theoretical debates about: care infrastructure (systems, networks, partnerships, standards); divisions of caring labour/the political economy of care (inequalities, exploitation); care ethics, rights, recognition and values (frameworks, standards, entitlements, wellbeing outcomes); care technologies and human-technological interactions; and care relations in emotional, familial, community and intergenerational context. Our team comprises 20 scholars in 7 universities, linked to an international network spanning 15 countries. Our programme comprises integrative activities, in which the whole team works together to develop a new conceptual framework on sustainable care and wellbeing, and two Work Strands, each with 4 linked projects, on 'Care Systems' & 'Care Work & Relationships'. 'Care Systems' will: (i) study prospects, developments and differentiation in the four care systems operating in England, N. Ireland, Scotland & Wales, comparing their approaches to markets, privatisation and reliance on unpaid care; (ii) model costs and contributions in care, covering those of carers and employers as well as public spending on care; (iii) assess the potential of emerging technologies to enhance care system sustainability; and (iv) analyse, in a dynamic policy context, migrant care workers' role in the sustainability of homecare. 'Care Work & Relationships' will: (i) develop case studies of emerging homecare models, and assess their implications for sustainable wellbeing; (ii) focus on carers who combine employment with unpaid care, filling gaps in knowledge about the effectiveness of workplace support and what care leave and workplace standard schemes can contribute to sustainable care arrangements; (iii) explore how care technologies can be integrated to support working carers, ensuring wellbeing outcomes across caring networks; and (iv) investigate care 'in' and 'out of' place, as systems adapt or come under pressure associated with population diversity and mobility. Each project will collaborate with our international partners. These scholars, in 26 collaborating institutions, will ensure we learn from others about ways of understanding, measuring or interpreting developments in how care is organised and experienced, and keep up to date with latest research and scholarship. Our capacity-building strategy will build future scholarly expertise in the study of sustainability and wellbeing in care, and ensure our concepts, methods, and research findings achieve international standards of excellence. Universities in our partnership are contributing 5 UK & 12 overseas PhD studentships, enabling us to form an international early career scholar network on sustainable care, supported by our senior team and partners. Our impact strategy, led by Carers UK, involves leading UK and international policy partners. Informing policy, practice and debate, we will co-produce analyses and guidance, enhance data quality, promote good practice and engage decision-makers, policymakers, practitioners in the public, private and voluntary sectors, carers, people with care needs, and the media. Our Advisory Board of leading academics, policy/practice figures and opinion formers will guide all our work.