This project seeks to enhance knowledge and understanding of the part played by indigenous peoples in the history of exploration, by developing and disseminating research on the subject based in the collections of a major scholarly society. It builds directly on research undertaken to date as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Award supported by AHRC and supervised by the PI in collaboration with the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) This project seeks to develop and transfer this knowledge into the public domain, by means of an exhibition in a prominent site of metropolitan learning as well as by an online electronic resource, and to consider the wider implications for contemporary research into similar collections of material relating to travel, exploration and discovery.\n\nThe project responds to criticisms of the standard narratives of voyages of exploration, which have until recently dominated the historiography of travel and discovery. In much of this literature, the role of the inhabitants of territory through which explorers and travellers passed is relegated to the margins. Where their contibutions to the development of geographical knowledge have been explicitly acknowledged, there has been a tendency to accord them a lower status - as 'local' assistants or informants, as guides or porters, as background characters, rather than as truly participants in the production of new knowledge. The project seeks to offer an alternative perspective grounded in scholarly research into the RGS-IBG collections.\n\nIn addition to its specific focus, the project has wider methodological and conceptual dimensions relating to research with geographical collections. The research raises questions about the extent to which certain voices and experiences have been systematically 'hidden' in the archival record of travel and exploration, and the possibility of their 'recovery' by means of new approaches to such collections.These are difficult questions which have no easy answers: the purpose of the project is to highlight not only the challenges, but also to suggest possible new ways of working with well-established collections, drawing on new approaches developed by curators and researchers in the context of related collections in Britain, Australia and the USA. These will be the subject of an international workshop on geographical collections held in parallel with the exhibition itself.\n\nThe project is designed to stimulate new ways of thinking about geographical collections which will have significant practical applications within the educational and exhibition programmes of the RGS-IBG and other bodies. On the basis of the success of the Society's recent exhibitions in the Crossing Continents series (notably those devoted to 'Bombay Africans' and 'From Kabul to Kandahar') it is envisaged that the exhibition will also highlight aspects of the Society's collections of particular interest to minority ethnic communities which have diaspora links to the areas visited by explorers in the past. This aspect of the project will be sustained through an online exhibition on the Society's website, which will be designed for a wide range of users.\n

Summary The environmental crisis and social injustice are the biggest challenges of our time and Black communities are disproportionately impacted by their intersections. The turn within dance practice to digital technologies such as virtual reality, screendance and immersive realities has allowed Black performance makers to navigate creatively through social and environmental injustice. Through the investigation of contemporary African and African diasporic dance, this network explores, from an embodied understanding, how digital Black dance practices illuminate the junctures of social and ecological injustice and offer strategies for imagining black futures through the ideas of fugitivity and belonging. The network brings together scholars, artists, practitioners, and artist-researchers whose work explicitly and implicitly explores social and environmental injustice across black geographies in both physical and digital spaces. These interlocutors are brought together to exchange practices and ideas in order to stimulate new thought, exploratory practice, and original research. It is essential that the connections between social and environmental challenges are explored and focused on within critical dance studies as their disproportionate impact on Black communities poses a fundamental threat to the sustainability and vibrancy of dance ecosystems around the world. As part of its aims, the network will catalyse digital Black dance research and practice in the UK. This will be achieved through a series of commissions and development workshops for black dance artists, early career mentorship for black dance scholars and workshops for writing a PhD proposal for Black postgraduate students in dance.

The discipline of geography has a long tradition of pioneering research and teaching in quantitative methodologies. It has high-end expertise in areas such as GIS, geostatistics, spatial statistics, spatial econometrics and the use of geoinformation in scientific visualizations. It retains the belief that there are common patterns of behaviour, the understanding of which is critical to appreciating society. It is the ability to extract knowledge from geographical data that feeds into evidence-based public policy (including crime or disease mapping) and also to private sector strategies (e.g. locational decision-making supported by large firms such as ESRI or Experian). Nevertheless it, like many allied subjects, has faced a general deskilling in, abandonment of and suspicion towards quantitative methods in social scientific research. Misunderstanding and under-appreciation of these methods is a vicious circle that gets transmitted from one generation of learners to the next. Our response to this situation is to strengthen the connections between schools, universities and workplaces. What is important is continuity in the learning experience, and for pupils and students to appreciate at an early stage that quantitative methods are both an essential part of what it means to do geography and a vital transferable skill that will assist in future career choices. To that end this research, with the backing of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), adopts a strategy targeted specifically at assisting researchers and teachers of quantitative methods to engage pupils and students with those methods, and to offer peer networks of learning, support and of knowledge exchange. It will do so by: (1) Undertaking a scoping study of teachers' experience, familiarity and understanding of quantitative methods, of the importance given to them in upper secondary school and early years undergraduate curricula, what the barriers to learning are, and what might be done to overcome them. (2) Producing a range of web-enabled case studies and vignettes for teachers of quantitative methods (at University and in schools) demonstrating the importance of quantitative methods in geographical research and in the sorts of jobs geography students might go into. (3) Cataloguing the resources available to support teachers of quantitative methods, especially within higher education, and to provide a simple website as a point-of-entry to those resources. (4) Developing a peer network to support the teachers and teaching of quantitative methods in geography, meeting face-to-face and with special sessions at the RGS-IBG annual conference. Whilst the project will have obvious benefits to the discipline of geography, its impact will be more widely felt. That is because almost one third of the more than 20 000 full-time undergraduate students in the UK go on to further study in a wide range of subjects not solely limited to geography, and because geography students go into a wide range of jobs including retail, business, finance, government and public service, conservation and environment, IT, health, media, teaching and research. The project is timely: it has the opportunity to inform discussions about the geography curriculum with information on what is being studied and what could be done to support quantitative methods teaching beginning at A-level. It has the opportunity to direct future updating of the QAA benchmark statements for geography and related social sciences, emphasising the importance of quantitative methodologies such as descriptive, inferential and relational statistics, numerical modelling, remote sensing, geocomputation and geospatial analysis explicitly. In summary, the projects aims to support change in the quality of quantitative methods teaching within geography, knowing that to do so will diffuse into the social sciences and into industrial sectors more widely.

Anthropogenic climate change is arguably the most significant threat confronting humankind in the early 21st Century. The intellectual history underpinning our growing insight into the nature and scale of the problem has received marked attention in recent years and yet the specifics of the Soviet Union's contribution in this respect have been marginalised in the English-language literature. This lacuna is significant not only in view of the Soviet Union's (and latterly the Soviet successor states') size and importance for global environmental systems, but also because of the contribution made by Soviet scientists to the international understanding and associated debate in this area post-1945. The Russian Federation remains a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, it has adopted a relatively negative stance with respect to recent and ongoing international efforts to curtail such emissions. In view of this, the overarching aim of this research project is to explore the development of Soviet climate science post-1945, with a particular focus on the debates concerning humankind's influence on climate systems and on Soviet contributions to related international initiatives. The research will also examine the intellectual legacies of these debates for Russia's positioning in post-1991 climate discussions. As part of this, the research will provide a first detailed account of Soviet engagement with international debate concerning climate change and key organisations such as the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The project will make extensive use of both Russian- and English language archival materials located in Russia, Europe and the USA. In addition, it will generate a series of oral history interviews with scientists involved in Soviet climate science. The contemporary element of the research will be underpinned by interviews with relevant policy and state actors and supported by secondary data analysis. The project's output will consist of a series of published works and reports in addition to workshops and a project conference to be held in St. Petersburg. In addition, it will produce a block of work for use in Schools concerning Russia and climate change in collaboration with the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). This would take advantage of the introduction of Russia as a required element of study within the Key Stage 3 (11-14) National Curriculum and help to strengthen the coverage of key themes including climate change, biomes, and carbon cycle within KS3 and the new GCSE and A level specifications effective from September 2016. Further outputs will include Master classes for teachers, public lectures outlining the main findings of the research, policy briefings, and materials for the project and RGS websites.

Next year is the centenary of the 1924 Mount Everest Expedition, with huge press and public interest anticipated in the anniversary of George Mallory's and Andrew Irvine's deaths. The AHRC Other Everests network (AH/W004917/1) has brought together international scholars, archivists, curators, professional societies, heritage charities and the mountaineering community to critically reassess the legacy of the Everest expeditions and has featured as a best-practice case study in the AHRC Creative Communities report By All, For All: The Power of Partnership. The network has developed a commitment to researching the hidden histories of indigenous high-altitude labour on these expeditions but faces a challenge. Late imperial meta-narratives of heroic white masculinity dominate popular narratives and perpetuate racial stereotypes, as well as dominating forms of commemoration and representation. Other Everests is seeking to critically engage with public discourse in 2024, delivering two major commemorative interventions that will be co-produced with partners from India, Nepal and Tibet, enabling us to share postcolonial perspectives on these expeditions from the contemporary Greater Himalayan region with the wider public. With project partners the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG), the National Trust (NT) and the Kendal Mountain Festival (KMF), we have developed two main objectives: a major exhibition and a commissioned film score. The exhibition will be co-curated with stakeholders from Archive Nepal and The Confluence Collective (an activist collective of young scholars and artists from Kalimpong, India) in conjunction with the Tibetan artist Nyema Droma. It will feature archival photographs of indigenous workers on Everest from the RGS-IBG collections, as well as newly commissioned art installations showcasing contemporary mountaineering and environmental issues in Tibet. The exhibition will be installed June-November 2024 in the NT's Wray Castle on the shores of Windermere, one of the Lake District's premier tourist destinations, enabling us to engage with a huge and diverse range of visitors. The exhibition also forms part of the KMF2024. We will commission the composer and sound artist Lee Affen to compose an original film score for the 1922 silent film Climbing Mount Everest. The newly scored film will premiere at KMF2024, supported by a series of lectures highlighting the significant contribution of indigenous high-altitude workers to the 1920s Everest expeditions. Our overall aims are to challenge and inform the public understanding of Everest and to enable voices from the region to give their own perspectives on the legacies of these late imperial expeditions. We aim to use the co-curation process to pilot methods for digital recovery and repatriation of archival materials, supporting the strategic goals of the RGS-IBG to diversify access to its collections. We will create a 3D digital version of the exhibition in Matterport that will form part of a permanent legacy website for the exhibition archived by the RGS-IBG. Digital versions of exhibition outputs will be hosted on Archive Nepal's digital platform and a physical version of the exhibition will be installed in a marketplace in Kalimpong, enabling us to make archival sources accessible to people whose histories feature in those archives.