With a bias towards participation and interactivity, the digital realm has created conditions to allow people to engage with life more playfully using everyday devices (e.g. computers, smartphones). Digital technology has also allowed alternate public spaces to be created, helping to re-imagine citizenship and activism (e.g. Facebook campaigns, e-petitions). One area where playful engagement in civic life has started to generate serious attention is, in the field of videogames and experimental games. A burgeoning 'Games for change' movement has emerged in the last decade, which has appropriated videogames to engage people, beyond entertainment. A growing number of artists, educationalists and activists are developing games that contend with personal, social and political subject matter: e.g. poverty (Cost of Life); immigration (Escape from Woomera); forced labour practices (Sweatshop); the fiscal crisis (Layoff); and the war on terror (September 12th), with the explicit intention of altering or affecting player opinion outside of the game world. The network will also focus on other emergent game platforms (e.g. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and Urban Games) that use digital technologies to create games, played online as well as in physical locations. These games allow immersive and interactive storytelling experiences to play out across a range of (trans) media platforms. There are notable examples of these types of games engaging with social justice, community and humanitarian issues (e.g. World Without Oil; Raiders of the Lost Crown). They provide the network with a second key focus. Social change games tend to be the products of a burgeoning independent game scene, which represents the interests of those outside of 'big' industry - developing games that challenge normative, mainstream and commercial values. The network is keen to situate and undertsand these types of games within the scenes and sub-cultures that comprise the independent game industry. The recent emergence of global 'Game Collectives' (e.g. Copenhagen Games Collective; Invisible Playground in Berlin; The Larks in Manchester), which are developing a mix of 'on' and 'off-screen' games, are an important independent scene, to locate social change gaming. Not only do Game Collectives connect independent game communities to specific locales, they often foreground games and play as a means to explore notions of community, identity and togetherness. They provide the network with a third key focus area. Focusing on these key areas, this network will create an international multi-disciplinary community of practice. It will involve a range of core partners and associates with expertise in the key focs areas, representative of research and practice based perspectives (Manchester (MMU, The Larks, Madlab); the EU (The Copenhagen Games Collective; Utrecht University, University of Leuphana) and; North America (Tiltfactor at Dartmouth College; Diego de La Vega)), to explore the potentials of digital games as change agents. This will be done in collaboration with other participants, representing key stakeholder groups. Working collaboratively as a community of practice, the network will host a variety of activities (e.g. conferences; seminars; meetings; open-space workshops and game jams) to allow participants; academics, game developers, community practitioners, activists and third sector bodies, to explore and develop the potentials of digital games. It is anticipated that these activities will enable the network to generate key insights, identify areas for future research and investment as well as raise awareness around social change gaming and facilitate growth in the field within the UK and in the Manchester region, in particular.

The field of the Digital Humanities has developed both in France and globally over the last decade, in line with the penetration of digital technologies into all levels of society and the academic sphere. Coined by Unsworth and Siemens in 2004, the term ‘digital humanities’ was originally intended to signal a shift away from the first phase of humanities computing, which largely involved the digitisation of texts through the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Doing ‘digital humanities’ has since comprised the application of computational methods to the study of texts and also the application of the critical theoretical methodologies of the contemporary humanities to digital objects. It thus overlaps with media studies, which looks at the relationship between technology and the kinds of thought and cultural expression to which different technologies give rise. It has begun to converge, too, in this respect, with the emerging discipline of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which analyses the relationship between technological cultures (scientific instruments, institutional practices) and the formation of scientific knowledge. Just as the digital humanities subsumed the earlier field of the computational humanities, we now argue that the time has come for the digital humanities to be superseded and subsumed within the broader field of digital studies. This is in recognition of the way that all fields of knowledge, including not just the humanities but the social and ‘hard’ sciences, and all aspects of social organisation, are reinvented with every change in the technical systems that constitute culture. With the advent of the digital, this reinvention has been both creative and traumatic in equal measure. Science has been revolutionised by new techniques that permit the unprecedented sharing of data (the human genome project, the compilation of climate data), but has stumbled over intellectual copyright and the privatisation of knowledge, not to mention the profound ‘flattening’ of scientific expertise that comes with the proliferation of media and the prospect of undifferentiated access to all manner of different opinions (Bruno Latour). Similar issues of access are transforming the spheres of politics and the economy (the replacement of ‘professional’ classes with unpaid, free content: from HuffPo to ‘Uberisation’). In each of these cases, we are seeing the realignment of existing social structures around an economy of contribution, in which knowledge is produced not by private, proprietorial users who buy and sell information, but by collaborative participants and amateurs who make their data open to and modifiable by all. Digital Studies is the field of research that takes this emerging ‘economy of contribution’ as one of its objects and systematically investigates the epistemic and epistemological stakes of this new state of affairs in the field of knowledge. The purpose of this bid is to bring together researchers across institutions in Europe, Asia and North and South America to build an international Digital Studies Network, focusing on the way in which society and its institutions are being transformed by digital culture, and by different technologies more generally. In addition to these theoretical and epistemological dimensions, the network will also develop open-source technologies to foster the growth of the economy of contribution as well as new instruments for contributive research. This is where we want to develop an ambitious European and international research program (FET-Exchange) on technologies for contributive categorization, annotation, certification and editorialization with the goal of developing an hermeneutic and negentropic conception of the world wide web.

Decarbonising both heating and cooling across residential, business and industry sectors is fundamental to delivering the recently announced net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets. Such a monumental change to this sector can only be delivered through the collective advancement of science, engineering and technology combined with prudent planning, demand management and effective policy. The aim of the proposed H+C Zero Network will be to facilitate this through funded workshops, conferences and secondments which in combination will enable researchers, technology developers, managers, policymakers and funders to come together to share their progress, new knowledge and experiences. It will also directly impact on this through a series of research funding calls which will offer seed funding to address key technical, economic, social, environmental and policy challenges. The proposed Network will focus on the following five themes which are essential for decarbonising heating and cooling effectively: Theme 1 Primary engineering technologies and systems for decarbonisation Theme 2 Underpinning technologies, materials, control, retrofit and infrastructure Theme 3 Future energy systems and economics Theme 4 Social impact and end users' perspectives Theme 5 Policy Support and leadership for the transition to net-zero