Everyday contemporary life has been shaped, to some extent, by the political partitioning of nations. 9/11, the continued threat of nuclear wars, the rising fundamentalist threat of Islam, the increased military interventions by a 'retaliating' West are all considered to be some of the results of the partitions of Palestine and India. For those of us who live in Europe, partitions, reunifications and the threats of partition (in Europe) punctuate our daily news. The current debt crisis in Europe might result in yet another partitioning of Europe. This is a timely moment to examine the phenomenon of partitions and their repercussions on a global scale and to see how events, people, histories and ideas are all powerfully linked to each other. The Comparative Partitions Network aims to arrive at a fuller understanding of the relevance of nation-states, communities and belonging in a transnational, global world. By following a comparative approach, this Network will invigorate the subject by promoting a more cross-disciplinary, cross-methodological and cross-cultural study of partitions. It will also bring out the connections within the scholarship into the open and thus appeal to a wider audience of academics. Through its additional focus on partitions and reunifications within Europe this Network will energise discussions of democracy and freedom that are considered to be particular to Europe by involving scholars who work on postcolonial thought with those of European history and culture. The objectives of the Network are several: to bring scholars in diverse fields together to participate in three symposia which will lead to an edited collection of essays; to link public engagement events to the topics examined in the symposia; to develop a website on comparative partitions which will include announcements of conferences, podcasts of seminars and conferences, book reviews, job listings; and to link the Research Network with the oral history work done with migrant communities from partitioned countries. The public engagement events at each symposium are to underscore that the findings of the Research Network go beyond theoretical and scholarly knowledge to include the emotional lives of people, and to show the relationship between abstract knowledge and people's lives. This Network will bring together scholars in English Literature, History, Sociology, Philosophy, Law, Cultural Studies, Women's Studies and Politics spread throughout the UK, US, Italy, France, New Zealand, and India. The beneficiaries will be multiple and will include academics in diverse fields working on democracy and nation-states, migrants, cultural memory and violence. Because of its additional focus on community engagement events such as the screening of films, public readings in the library and other forms of discussion, this Network will also benefit migrant communities from partitioned countries as well as the general public that is interested in European and world history. PI Mohanram was team leader for an oral history project that collected memories of the Indian partition and has published widely on this topic. She also organised a conference on Comparative Partitions in 2009 as well as edited two special issues of refereed journals on the topic.

In this practice-led research project, a director/actor, dancer/choreographer/performance artist, and playwright/dramaturg will create a new piece of intercultural, post-dramatic theatre-TOLD BY THE WIND. Drawing inspiration from a variety of traditional and contemporary sources from both East and West, such as Japanese noh and butoh, and the work of such contemporary playwrights/performance makers as Samuel Beckett, Tadeusz Kantor and Heiner Müller, this project will examine how to create a performance that draws from diverse cultural traditions, and is experimental or 'post-dramatic' in its structure and dramaturgy. The production of TOLD BY THE WIND will be used to reflect anew on theatre that is made between cultures and that involves alternative dramaturgies.

REACT: Research & Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technologies. Knowledge Exchange gets lost in translation. Creative Economy demand and Arts and Humanities research culture too routinely fail to understand each other. They can seem to work to different rhythms and values. But they do and they must match, and they must talk, urgently. We will make that happen. REACT will engineer the radical change needed through its unique partnership with a leading Creative Economy broker, Watershed, pioneering a new model of dynamic creative interaction: Sandbox. REACT will match Creative Economy demand with Arts and Humanities excellence, creating sustainable partnerships that will provide significant economic and societal impacts, generating a transformative shift in capacity and HEI cultures at all levels. We will bring two cultures together and lead the necessary process of organisational change. Within four years we will have demonstrated the value of sustained tight integration of the CE sector and AH communities, and secured national and international recognition for our agile mechanism for dynamic knowledge exchange. The REACT Hub is a collaboration between the University of the West of England, Watershed Arts Trust, and the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. It reaches across two dynamic UK regions, and uniquely across three cultural areas and two languages and creative economies. It brings together Arts & Humanities research from fields as diverse as Archaeology, Architecture, Classics, History, English, Welsh, Translation Studies, Performance, Media and Cultural Studies, Design, Music, Computer Science and Digital Technologies. REACT will offer researchers the chance to work with Micro businesses and SMEs, technology partners from either the commercial sector or the partner HEIs and larger scale Cultural Economy and Cultural Industry partners who have an interest in new creative content, and assets to exploit in partnership with academics. REACT will bring together high quality academic research with creative technology partners to developing innovative ways of engaging audiences. Creative economy partners will have the opportunity to develop new delivery platforms and researchers will be able to engage with audiences in new ways. REACT Universities have teamed up Bristol's Watershed Media Centre to adapt their ground breaking innovation development programme, Sandbox, for working with academic researchers. This programme is supported by the University of Exeter's Innovation Fitness Test offering participating Creative Economy partners the chance to strengthen their market potential. Watershed's Sandbox brings together production teams around themed cohorts to make practice based prototypes; production teams follow a common timetable of development and testing, sharing their learning with one another across the cohort. This proven method aggregates ideas, talent and resources harnessing powerful outputs from diverse cross disciplinary inputs. See http://www.theatresandbox.co.uk/2010-evaluation/ for an evaluation of the 20101 Theatre Sandbox scheme.