The North of England has played a central role in debates about the causes and consequences of the Brexit referendum, especially in the widespread perception of a divided Britain. There is a pervasive vision of the North outside of the bigger cities, that it represented a "heartland" vote: notably in David Goodhart's romantic vision (2017) of "somewhere" people (core national, rooted, working class, "left behind") against the "anywheres" (affluent, educated, cosmopolitan, metropolitan elites). At the same time, Brexit has raised fears about the future of a multi-racial society with high levels of immigration. The North of England is also viewed as a place of simmering racism and xenophobia: pitting White British, older British minority groups, and newer incomers such as asylum seekers or East European workers against each other in deprived and depressed post-industrial locations. Not least, these tensions are thought to have provoked the murder of a sitting MP - Jo Cox - and to lie behind rising racially motivated hate crime in the region. Northern Exposure interrogates these perceptions of the North, while broaching sensitive questions of everyday nationalism, race and racism in largely understudied and marginalised places. The project fills out and enriches the argument that the disaffection expressed by voters, or in tensions seen in particular communities, is linked to the long term post-industrial transformation of the region. We must consider the varied paths of industrial, population and spatial change experienced by different localities. There has been a hollowing out of proud old civic solidarities anchored in class and occupation. Northern towns, with their grand histories and identities, have become amorphous, peri-urban entities, ringed by motorways and large shopping malls, with struggling centres and declining populations (Hatherley 2012). Some residents find it impossible to move on or move out. This changing geography, and its fragmenting diversity, have made it ever harder to imagine how to manage shifting ethnic relations or achieve social integration. The project will offer a detailed statistical profile of 16 "ordinary" large towns and small cities in the North of England, going back in time. We then engage in intensive ethnographic work on four localities- running from the North West, through West Yorkshire, to the North East-which capture key elements of the post-industrial North in their histories, changing identities, and contemporary struggles: Preston, Halifax, Wakefield, and Middlesbrough. Talking with local stakeholders, community organisations, and social work practitioners, we build up a clear vision of the everyday concerns that damage positive visions of diversity, community and inclusion. This leads on to interviews with older long term residents from different origins and backgrounds, gathering personal oral histories and views about the urban, social and political change around them. Policy makers in the region feel that conventional multiculturalism and anti-racism are not working, yet that a narrow focus on socio-economic solutions will not solve the riddle of "inclusive growth" or address emergent ethnic conflicts. Our research will transmit voices not often heard into local policy formulation. It will feedback residents' concerns into neighbourhood policing. With our partners, we seek tools for local intervention, identifying mechanisms that lead to community breakdown or community cohesion. Our work will also lead to a comprehensive of study of the state of Northern England in all its diversity as it comes to terms with Brexit. A website, policy roundtables, local presentations, and a large final event will make our work public. Alongside other academic outputs, we are also filming our research and the people we meet. This will result in short online films which portray residents and their lives today, along with a full length documentary for general release.

The current problems created by the diminishing funding of libraries and museums increasingly limit engagement with communities and inhibits collaborative partnerships. The problem is particularly acute in relation to the use and reuse of digital assets- both at an archival and community level- and this project seeks to provide one solution through the provision of the digital resources created as part of the AHRC funded Pararchive project (www.pararchive.com). Those resources have been branded as YARN (http://yarncommunity.com) and are now freely available. YARN provides a collaborative platform on which communities and public sector organisations can work together to help them establish effective digital community workspaces to deliver a range of co-designed impacts that respond to community needs and institutional aspirations. Thus the aim of this application is to work with a range of communities and public library and archive organisations to help them address a series of difficult self-identified issues relating to local history work, genealogy, co-working, publishing, working with disadvantaged and hard to reach audiences, and the use of 'hidden' or degraded digital resources. The project is based on the desire to build on the unintended consequences of our research and broaden community engagement. Follow-on funding would allow us to do this and act on a range of community requests, develop expanding networks and deliver broad social benefit. We are keen to work with new partners to further disseminate our digital platform and expand its application; to that end we have engaged in conversations with a range of providers about how they might use our resources and have sought to understand the nature of their ongoing problems and digital requirements to determine mutually reinforcing outcomes. Consequently, our focus will be on the development of impact through public networks to produce scalable strategies and demonstrate the value of our tools in a range of public facing contexts. We have been delighted by the responses to the prototype of YARN and the inclusion of the platform within a number of recently funded research projects and several ongoing applications that have developed in parallel with our own research. For example, YARN has been included on the recently successful Junction Arts HLF JA40 application for community history (http://junctionarts.org/2015/10/ja40/), as part of the AHRC funded Cultural Value Project Digital Tools in the Service of Difficult Heritage: How Recent Research Can Benefit Museums and their Audiences (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/news/article/4365/new_ahrc-funded_project_digital_tools_in_the_service_of_difficult_heritage_how_recent_research_can_benefit_museums_and_their_audiences ) and the British Academy-funded Leeds Voices- Communicating Superdiversity project(http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20045/leeds_humanities_research_institute/2718/leeds_voices_communicating_superdiversity). The follow-on funding would allow us to develop new collaborative partnerships that will ensure maximum benefits for users and allow them to achieve goals that they would not be in a position to realise for themselves. The four partnerships at the heart of the project allow us to co-develop new impacts directly related to pressing community and institutional need. We want our new partners and user communities to take ownership of the resource and shape it for use within their own contexts and allow them to produce scalable models and proof of concept for its application within their own spheres of practice and creative activity. We believe that this will both stimulate innovative practices and allow us to disseminate new approaches to collaborative working. We also want to facilitate inter-project mentoring and the sharing of best practice so that YARN can act as a means of building cross sector capacity and the basis for sharing impact potential amongst users.

In a context where health systems are under increasing strain and the social drivers of health disparities are increasingly being recognised, there is a growing acknowledgement of the value of non-medical responses such as creative, physical and nature-based activities in supporting health and wellbeing. Evidence reveals that one third of GP appointments are for issues that are not medical and many tangible health problems arise as a result of social drivers (for example, loneliness, anxieties around finances or housing, depression about body image or being unemployed). The potential for developing the wider use of creative and community-based approaches to address health disparities is therefore substantial. West Yorkshire is leading the way in developing the use of non-medical interventions to promote health and well-being. For example, the award-winning charity Creative Minds has developed an innovative approach to providing creative and outdoor activities through a network of over 120 community providers; and West Yorkshire is one of the National Centre for Creative Health pilots. However, creative and community providers rely on short term funding and are not fully integrated into the health care system with the result that provision can be ad hoc and unsustainable. This project will build on leading edge developments across West Yorkshire in progressing the creative health agenda by bringing together key stakeholders (health trusts, local authorities, creative/cultural practitioners, community providers and people with lived experience) to innovate thinking in order to better integrate creative and community-based responses into health improvement strategies and systems to address health disparities. The project will encompass a truly coproductive approach centred around the use of collaborative action inquiry as a participatory process of learning for change in four iterative phases. It will build on stories from people with lived experience to provide a deeper understanding of the social drivers and complexities of health problems in communities, as well as learning from the challenges and achievements of partners in practice. These will be complemented by a rapid review of evidence about different collaborative models for community health provision which together will inform coproduction of an initial programme theory in a cross-ICS collaborative action inquiry workshop. The initial programme theory will be used to focus community mapping of creative provision and partnerships and further coproduction in consultation workshops with community groups and people with lived experience in phase 2. This will be followed by a further cycle of collaborative action inquiry with key stakeholders to refine the programme theory about how to integrate community assets into responses to health disparities and work up into a logic model, principles and guidance. These will then be tested in 5 action research case studies which will involve setting up community asset hubs, one in each of the ICS local authority areas to further refine the cross-ICS consortium model for integrating community assets. The final phase will involve a third stakeholder action inquiry workshop to respond to learning from the action research case studies and further refine and finalise the programme theory for the consortium and develop plans for scaling up, embedding and sustaining the integration of community assets into health improvement systems research. The new University of Huddersfield Health Innovation Campus and Wellbeing Academy will provide a context for hosting these developments and undertaking the research and development functions needed to support, sustain and further develop health improvement initiatives. We have support from all the key health and local authority players along with creative community providers and people with lived experience and wider community representatives who will be actively involved throughout the project.