Asia-Europe is a geopolitical terrain with histories of forced migration within and across national borders, armed conflicts and increasing climate change impacts. DISTERRA will create new international networks of migration, conflict and environmental crisis scholars to innovate challenging transdisciplinary and creative research directions across terrains of disappearance. These are physical but also temporal and cultural environments of precarity, devaluation and absence in persistent migration. Joining typically disaggregated regions and fields of inquiry, the network innovates around conjunctures of armed conflicts, state violence, climate and environmental crisis, and internal and international migration in and across Asia-Europe. Its thematic focus is threefold: (i)Ambiguous terrain addresses relationships between people and environments generated through sites, places and historical and contemporary terrains of disappearance. 'Ambiguity' links physical terrains of disappearance to forms of anguish associated with unresolved loss (Crocker 2021). (ii)Disappearance is a fertile laboratory for analysing hostile terrains of absent investigation, political blank spaces, official denials and unresolved deaths across diverse crisis terrains in Asia-Europe. DISTERRA will develop interactions between human and environmental disappearances, interrogate diverse crises and their temporal and relational formations. (iii)Migration is a dynamic cross-cutting context for linking disappearances through a climate-conflict-displacement nexus in Asia (COP27); relationships between climate-change, armed conflict and asylum-seeking across Asia-Europe (Abel 2019), and in urban settings. By routing disappearance through new conjunctures of relatedness, the DISTERRA network encourages new understandings, shifts of action and ethical positions on social and spatial justice. We propose the following interrelated projects: 1. Three workshops specifically connecting international, transdisciplinary and creative approaches to ambiguous terrains, disappearances and migration in Asia-Europe. Three distinct approaches are identified, each to be led by acknowledged experts. Workshop 1 in Edinburgh 'Ambiguous inquiry' will focus on methodologies, creative methods and processes of strategic erasure that account for, officialise, represent or 'disappear' missing people. Workshop 2 in Warwick 'En-routing disappearance' will develop new research conjunctures of ambiguous, disappearing and moving terrains; and absence generated through migration and diverse crisis. Workshop 3 in Karachi 'Layering disappearance and place' will develop an emplaced, relational focus on urban environments produced by conjunctures of armed conflict, environmental crisis, forced migration and historical overlays of forced and mundane disappearance. 2. Two public hearings will build on the workshops featuring speakers from academic, public and non-academic contexts. 3. A website will host relevant & interactive content, including: -Articles & publications associated with the network as a cumulative open-source scholarly resource; leading to an edited volume. -An interactive moderated forum to enable informal discussion with provocations by keynote speakers; -An annotated list of relevant URLs/websites; -A short film highlighting new connections in disappearances across different migration contexts. -Videos of keynotes & workshops. -An executive position paper; guidance paper for policymakers. 4. A final event and art exhibition to interrogate representations and contexts of absence in migrant disappearances. A network coordinator will engage stakeholders via social media, the website and UK broadcast media to maximise our audiences. The networks generated will synergise collaborative research projects, new methodologies, public debates & creative outputs. The project will benefit scholars, affected communities, related stakeholders & the general public.

'Voice Notes' is a creative writing and sound arts initiative working with displaced communities in Nottingham and Slemani in Iraqi-Kurdistan. Building on my AHRC-funded 'Crossed Lines: Literature and Telephony' project, 'Voice Notes' engages international audiences with original research on the mobile technologies, literary communication and forced migration, and facilitates new pathways for knowledge exchange using innovative approaches to the telephone with a broad range of cultural organisations. Enabling emerging voices through transnational cultural exchange activities supported by the UNESCO Creative Cities network, the project will result in the co-creation of an interactive performance and exhibition, a mobile app, an online sound archive, a co-edited pamphlet of poetry, and a toolkit. Through these activities and outputs, it will engage refugee communities, NGOs, cultural partners, educators, artists, activists and members of the public with creative approaches to everyday technologies, shaping new ways of thinking about ethical networks, transnational communication, and the possibilities of talking and listening across borders. Offering new opportunities for transnational engagement and empowering under-represented voices, the project will involve a series of writing and spoken word workshops delivered in collaboration with refugee arts organisation Compass Collective. Supporting displaced communities in Nottingham and Slemani, these workshops will explore the transmission of the voice and the possibilities and limitations of telephone technologies in navigating and communicating experiences of exile. Extending the original methodologies developed during 'Calling Across Borders' (part of the 'Crossed Lines' project), young refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons will be invited to compose, perform and record their contributions on the phone, resulting in the co-creation of a multilingual collection of 'voice notes' left by and for people who have experienced forced displacement. These voice notes will form the basis of interactive performances and exhibitions produced by acclaimed Kurdish-Swedish composer Hardi Kurda to be held in Nottingham and Slemani. The events will make use of a directional sound bar that responds to the movements of audience members, enabling visitors to experience and contribute to the shaping of the project by moving through the exhibition and tapping into intersecting telephone calls. Members of the public will also have the opportunity to leave their own voice notes in response to the project; a selection of moderated responses will in turn feed into the dynamic and evolving telephone soundscape. Furthermore, the voice notes will be shared online through an interactive mobile app and sound archive on our project website, and selected voice notes will form the basis of a co-edited pamphlet of poetry developed in partnership with a refugee writer, with an accompanying toolkit produced in collaboration with Compass Collective and disseminated through Counterpoints Arts and the UNESCO Creative Cities network. This project has been co-designed with a number of international cultural organisations, NGOs and artists including Compass Collective, Counterpoints Arts, Hardi Kurda, New Art Exchange, Refugee Roots, Nottingham and Slemani UNESCO Cities of Literature and STEP. Developing the methodologies established with Compass Collective during 'Calling Across Borders' through participatory arts and collaborative exchange, and disseminating to a wider international audience the potential for innovative approaches to everyday telecommunication technologies to facilitate creative self-expression, the literary arts, civic dialogue, and cross-cultural communication, the project will significantly advance ways of thinking about the relationship between migration, literature and new developments in telephone technologies.