Broadly characterised by the politically engaged and aesthetically innovative use of moving image media, 'radical film culture' has expanded rapidly in recent years as contemporary socio-political, economic and environmental contexts have meshed with access to digital technologies. Comprised of academics, artists, filmmakers and other digital creatives, as well as festivals, financiers, distributors, commissioners and the myriad community organisations and collectives that feed into them, radical film culture is now a diverse, multidisciplinary and international field. However, despite its rapid expansion, there is at present a major lack of interaction between the researchers and stakeholders involved in radical film culture, which is in turn currently dispersed and fragmented along industrial, geographic, political and aesthetic lines. As a result, researchers and stakeholders across the many strands of radical film culture are working in disconnected ways, often unaware of one another and of the history, culture and contemporary international developments in the political moving image. A recent increase in scholarship in the field has also focused almost exclusively on the past. There is thus urgent need to counter that fragmentation, stimulate debate across these boundaries and apply and develop existing historical knowledge to our contemporary context. This bid proposes the creation of a Radical Film Network (RFN), which will stage four events across 22 months in the UK and US, taking place at key dates in the industry and alternative film calendar. The RFN builds upon a successful pilot project led by Dr Steve Presence at the University of the West of England's Centre for Moving Image Research, which will conclude with a conference in February 2015. The pilot project has demonstrated a clear need for such a network, having generated interest from 83 organisations in 18 countries across the globe, many of which bring existing relationships with other cross-disciplinary academic and industry institutions and community groups. The network will bring together this community of stakeholders with an international research community - ranging from world-class academics to PhD students - to address the past, present and future of radical film culture as a holistic entity, exploring four interrelated research questions based on key themes: 1. Ontology: What was/is radical film culture? 2. Praxis: What were the conceptual, theoretical and practical concerns of previous radical film cultures? How do they compare to contemporary concerns? 3. Challenges: What are the challenges facing the vitality and sustainability of radical film culture? What can we learn from the past to address contemporary challenges? 4. Policy: What kind of policy will assist the RFN to continue in the long-term, and what kind of film policy do we need to enable and sustain alternative film cultures more generally (thereby encouraging more diverse film cultures overall)? By addressing these key questions across the four events, the network will facilitate the exploration of ideas that will generate new knowledge in the field. The network and the knowledge it generates will bring theory and practice into a productive relationship both inside and outside the academic community and lead to collaborative, creative advances across these boundaries. More broadly, it will position the UK as a global centre for independent and alternative film scholarship and establish a sustainable, international network for the researchers and stakeholders involved. That network will play a key role in the critical interrogation of contemporary film culture and the power with which the medium can convey ideas and stimulate debate about some of the most important issues in culture and society today. Funding at this stage is essential to ensure groundwork of the pilot project does not go to waste and that the far-reaching potential impact of the network is realised.

Relationships between species, and between populations within species, have long been likened to branches in a tree - Darwin's own notes include a well-known example. Since the development of DNA sequencing, methods have been developed that allow reconstruction of historical relationships among populations from sequence. Understanding of historical relationships among populations (which includes both the splitting of ancestral populations into daughter populations, and dispersal of individuals between populations) is important in many areas of biology, including where and when our own species evolved. In conservation biology, reconstruction of population history allows us to identify where species are likely to have their greatest genetic diversity (so we know where to concentrate conservation efforts), which populations are connected by migration (and so may support each other) and which are isolated (and so at higher risk of extinction). More generally, inferring population relationships is also essential if we want to correctly understand how populations are responding to natural selection. Population history is usually inferred using data for only a small number of genes (usually 5 or less), sampled in lots of individuals. A major reason for this has been the difficulty in getting sequence data for more genes, and a belief that sampling of many individuals is necessary to understand what is going on. Recent major advances have changed this view. First, there has been a quantum leap in availability of sequence data through development of new "nextgen" sequencing technologies, able to generate data for thousands of genes across the genome of any species. Second, advances in coalescent theory show that it is much better to sample many genes in a small number of individuals than vice versa (the common practice). This is exciting because it means we can work even with rare animals for which sampling of many individuals is unwelcome or impossible. However, the sheer size of genomic datasets makes it difficult or impossible to analyse them with available methods. A major aim of this project is the development of better tools for inference of population history from genomic datasets, which will be made available on the web for all to use. We will then apply our new tools to real data for two natural insect communities (European oak galls and eastern Australian figs), each of which comprises herbivores and their parasitoid wasp natural enemies. By comparing population histories across species in each community, we will test whether herbivores and parasitoids spread together through space and time, or joined their communities over a range of timescales. This is a major area of current research in ecology that matters because long associations between species commonly result in strong ecological dependence, and disruptions of such interactions (for example through human-imposed habitat change) can be very hard to restore. We will also test the more specific hypothesis that herbivores can escape their natural enemies for a while, and so enjoy a measure of 'enemy-free time'. We choose these in part because of their importance as model systems in the study of multispecies interactions, and in part because an aspect of the genetics of all the insect species involved (presence of a single set of chromosomes in males) makes it particularly easy to generate and analyse genomic datasets for them. And while this example focuses on a biodiversity-related issue, the methods we will develop can be applied equally to more applied associations, such as those between humankind and their parasites. Ability to extract information from small numbers of individuals provides enormous potential to make better use of existing samples, or minimise impact on rare species. These opportunities will be discussed with stakeholders at 3 supported workshops through the project, and communicated to school teachers in a supported SSERC summer school.

Growing numbers of digital archive projects are engaging with cultural heritage issues, from digitising historic photos of archaeological sites in regions in conflict, to recording data on sites under threat from climate change. However, often these projects do not communicate with each other as best they could, leading to a duplication of efforts. Additionally, projects have been focused so far on academic audiences rather than on other groups of users, even though they are useful and important resources for museum and cultural heritage professionals, students, and other groups. The 'Premodern Digital Cultural Heritage' research network aims to address both of these issues by promoting collaboration between open-access (i.e. freely accessible) digital projects based in the UK and in Ireland that focus on ancient and medieval cultural heritage, including art, architecture, and archaeology. The network is run by the Manar al-Athar ('Guide to Archaeology') photo-archive of images of archaeological sites, buildings, and objects in the Middle East and North Africa. Over the course of the next year, the network will host three workshops, two at University College Dublin and one at the University of Oxford, allowing members of participating digital projects to gather and discuss issues related to project missions, operating processes, sustainability, usability and accessibility for different audiences, and outreach to younger audiences, particularly secondary school students. Through knowledge exchange and collaboration, the projects will aim to coordinate their activities, including linking resources when appropriate. Several research projects will emerge from the workshops, targeted at various groups. First, the network will produce two articles, intended especially for museum and cultural heritage professionals, on collaborative practices between digital heritage projects and on the use of digital projects for research. Second, the network will draft a model curriculum for the teaching of cultural heritage issues in secondary schools, with the aim of promoting heritage education in schools through the use of digital projects. Finally, these research projects will be made freely available on the network website that will serve as a home for information and further research activities. By producing opportunities for collaboration, the 'Premodern Digital Cultural Heritage' network will deliver meaningful results for museum and cultural heritage professionals, secondary school students, academic researchers, and other audiences.

Extreme events can be highly impactful. They are typically rare, which is fortunate if their consequences are negative on society, but also makes them difficult to predict. The scope of this project is to develop computational tools that can be applied to gain understanding of how extreme events occur in complex stochastic systems. Examples are models for the forecasting of extreme weather-related events like tropical storms and flooding as well as the spread of pollutants in case of ocean oil spills. Our tools will enable researchers to ask questions beyond of what is currently possible. This will lead to transformative improvement of current predictive models, which is essential for efficient management of natural and man made disasters. Further applications include the characterization of extreme events in stochastic models that behave similar to fluids, for example in the context of epidemics, traffic, and star formation.

The proposed research network will explore how the teaching of social practice can be improved for arts practitioners through partnership between cultural and higher education institutions. It will use online communications to test practical possibilities for augmenting learning through collaboration across national boundaries, and investigate other benefits that networking across institutional and geographical divides can bring. The network will result in the formation of a nascent community of practitioners, cultural providers and educators to encourage cooperation, exchange and possibilities for greater future collaboration. Communications will commence between a core of four arts institutions and universities in the UK and US, two countries that are, relative globally, foundational to social practice arts and its education. This will then be expanded into a wider network. The core organisations are Tate Exchange and Middlesex University (UK), and Queens Museum and City University of New York (CUNY) (USA), each with specific experience of supporting social engagement in art. Social practice is a growing phenomenon amongst artists globally, who are increasingly drawing on their creativity to address urgent intersectional issues of social and environmental justice. There are nevertheless still relatively few opportunities to formally develop the knowledge and understanding needed for effective practice in this field. The nature of learning for engagement in the wider social sphere inherently questions whether it could be more effectively achieved by drawing on a wider pool of experience than UK HEIs have to offer. It is envisaged, particularly in relation to current developments in decolonizing arts education and museum provision, that much could be achieved through collaboration and exchange supported by online learning strategies. The project will progress through bringing together representatives from other cultural and educational centres of expertise, including institutions in Ireland with its significant legacy in this field. An initial half-day online symposium will facilitate discussion and the sharing of ideas. This peer-practitioner-educator dialogue will lead to a series of four half-day online workshops for emerging artists from UK and US locations, hosted by each of the core organisations, to test possibilities for longer-term future programmes. A face-to-face exchange hosted by Tate Exchange and Queens Museum will support this work, enabling in-depth dialogue and the sharing of methodologies and learning strategies between the different organisations. The programme will culminate in a full-day live-streamed virtual symposium where programme findings, outcomes and outputs will be demonstrated, discussed and disseminated. With wider international participation, this event will address how future learning in this field can be expanded through cooperation, exchange and ongoing networking. The work will be informed by a Project Advisory Group of established practitioners, educators and artists, together with alumni of Middlesex and CUNY courses. The main benefits of the research will be realised through future collaborations leading to educational initiatives that can offer greater support to emerging artists in this field. These will benefit through discovering new and effective ways of developing their work in the social sphere, which will in turn aid the publics and environments with which they engage. Artists, educationalists and academics will gain perspective and ideas for different ways of delivering educational activities, while workshops participants will have opportunity to gain skills and experience. Dissemination through journal articles will not only be aimed at academics and cultural institutions, but also arts practitioners via professional publications.