The significance of the religious and the spiritual in society has been resurgent in the British and North American media since 'September 11th'. Debates upon marriage and civil partnership legislation for same sex couples in both countries have also raised the profile of religious approaches to homosexuality, as has popular curiosity with anti-materialistic beliefs. This project aims to engage with the topical question: what place is there for LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex) people in spiritual space(s)? \n\nLGBTQI peoples who wish to affirm both their sexual/ gender identities and their membership of a faith/ spiritual community, are faced with articulating their relationship to the faith mainstream. LGBTQI relationships to spirituality and spiritual space are complex because homosexuality and gender 'deviance' have been both historically and contemporaneously subject to punitive sanction within many majoritarian religious contexts.\n\nThe Principal Investigator is a practising Unitarian and an ex-Evangelical Christian. The Project Researcher is a member of a queer spiritual network and has been active in queer Neo-Pagan community for the past eight years. She was also raised as a Quaker. Both are committed to producing robust academic research, through a process of consultation, of benefit to queer religious/ spiritual communities and their understanding in broader culture. \n\nA significant aim, in partnership with scholarly investigation, is to represent LGBTQI religious/ spiritual voices as research participants. The project hopes to promote LGBTQI inter-faith discussion, particularly around experiences of creating/ negotiating queer spiritual space. It intends to co-create, in partnership with participants, a queer inter-faith website (QUIFSS / Queer Inter-Faith Spiritual Space) as a lasting resource/ project outcome.\n\nThe project will take place in several phases. It is intended to organise two LGBTQI inter-faith encounters where queer spiritual practitioners from different paths and traditions come together to discuss their understandings of queer spiritual space. During these encounters, it is intended to think collectively, in pan-faith community, about how the QUIFSS website can become user-led and function effectively as a space and a resource for LGBTQI inter-faith dialogue, networking, education and exchange. The next phase of the project will involve a more in-depth engagement with specific LGBTQI groups, networks and individuals. The groups selected are ones with which the project leader and researcher already have established links. These are the Quakers, the Unitarians, Imaan and Al Fatiha, and the Radical Faeries. This means sustained encounters with specific 'non-traditional' forms of both Christianity and 'beyond Christianity', with LGBT Muslim organisations, and with one particular Neo-Pagan tradition. \n\nWe shall conduct one-to-one semi-structured video/audio interviews with LGBTQI individuals from these groups, sampling for diversity across age, ethnicity, LGBTQI identifications, social background, class etc., in total six such 'deep' interviews from each group. Research will involve attending relevant meetings and gatherings, notably Radical Faerie Sanctuaries and an Al Fatiha conference in the USA. In the tradition of action-oriented research (research actively designed to promote social change) it is the intention of the project that each one-to-one interview takes place as a two-way process where interviewees feed into the methodology and suggested outcomes of the project. \n\nQueer Spiritual Space(s) is a project in which university researchers already involved in LGBTQI historical and cultural scholarship, themselves spiritual practitioners with diverse faith histories, seek to engage in consultative and collaborative research with LGBTQI faith and spiritual groups. Because the project is designed to be as consultative as possible, other material may emerge.

The Central & Eastern England Regional Centre for exploring the FWW spans Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. It will mark the centenary of the FWW through collaborative histories, creative performance, source exploration, practical experiment and digital sharing. We aim to connect academic and local experience, and to build productive community engagement and research partnerships with the capacity to stretch and even surprise all involved. In developing objectives and a programme of activities for the Centre, the team worked through the University of Hertfordshire's Heritage Hub to consult heritage and arts organisations, history groups and community associations in the region. Reflecting on this process, we selected themes that will bring new angles to familiar stories and inspire an extensive programme of community engagement at regional and (inter)national levels: food; theatre; military tribunals; learning disability; supernatural beliefs; military intelligence; childhood: * FWW food production, supply and consumption highlight international and local economies, creating a powerful tool in exploring memory, scale and present-day relevance. * FWW theatre offers participants another experiential route into a past more commonly shaped by war poetry. * Military tribunals link national institutions of war with individual lives on the Home Front; as conscientious objection (CO) emerges as an 'alternative' perspective to trenches, tribunals put CO in broader context. Reconstructing their proceedings has considerable research and engagement potential. * The theme of learning disabilities draws on Hertfordshire's distinctive institutional history of asylums and challenges us to think broadly about communities. * Beliefs in ghosts, angels, mediums and fortune-tellers provide important insights into the lasting psychological impact of disorientation, fear and huge loss of life. * Academically FWW intelligence is an under-researched area but, because of the resonance of intelligence in popular culture, it is one that is likely to stimulate community interest. * The impact of the FWW on those born since 1919 allows the Centre to address inter-generational relationships and re-think the meanings of 'legacy'. Geographical communities are significant to the Centre, but so is the inclusion of communities of interest, belief, practice, circumstance or experience. Through co-produced research, the Centre will develop intellectual and cultural contexts to enrich historical understanding of the FWW. It aims that by 2016 community organisations that have already embarked on research (with or without HLF funding) will have incorporated at least one new question or perspective; that people living in the region who have not yet thought about the centenary will have contributed to it; that the regional dimensions of the conflict will have come into focus; and that audiences and topics of research will have diversified. Micro-histories, documents and artefacts will emerge from local projects to benefit researchers across the board. The Centre will maximize these effects by connecting discrete projects through face-to-face events and digital communities. It will manifest the sheer variety of FWW heritage in Britain today and record it for the longer term. The centenary of the FWW is an opportunity to probe in innovative ways the historical significance of a period which resonates strongly in contemporary Britain. Looking forward from 2013, the precise form of centenary activities, the relationship between academic and public histories, and the influence of the state and other bodies in shaping memorialisation, are still uncertain. A conjunction of meticulous research, living tradition and multiple end uses, is creating a situation that is itself a fascinating subject for analysis and an occasion for profound dialogue about the nature of scholarship and heritage in 21st-century Britain.