This transnational study explores histories and representations of wet-nurses, migrant domestic workers and sex workers in Latin(x) American photography, film, literature and digital culture from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It explores the similarities and differences between these kinds of work by analysing them as forms of immaterial labour, which is work that creates immaterial products, including social relationships, emotional responses and bodily feelings -- also termed 'affects'. This project is the first to ask: what does an analysis of Latin(x) and Latin American cultural productions featuring these workers contribute to our understanding of the links between these forms of labour, and to a public appreciation of these kinds of work, which are often marginalised or denigrated. To answer this question, it responds to the following four interdisciplinary research questions: 1) Which creative techniques do artists use to explore the challenges faced by Latin American and Latinx migrant workers employed in these forms of affective and immaterial labour? 2) How does an analysis of these creative works enable us to compare and contrast between different forms of affective and immaterial labour, such as wet-nursing, sex work and domestic work? 3) How can artistic depictions of affective and immaterial labour raise awareness of exploitative employment practices and contribute to a public understanding of the economic, social and cultural value of care work? 4) How can artists, academics and activists collaborate effectively and ethically with individuals involved in forms of affective and immaterial labour? It is the first study to trace the historical, geographical and thematic continuities (and differences) between artistic representations of archetypal forms of immaterial labour in Latin(x) American culture including wet-nursing, domestic work, migrant labour and sex work. The research comprises four strands, which analyse: (1) photographs and paintings of Afro-descendant and indigenous wet-nurses produced in Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) documentaries and a literary testimony that record the experiences of Latin American women working as live-in nannies and domestic workers in modern-day Europe; (3) several films, documentaries and a novel that portray the experiences of female sex workers from across Latin America from the 1940s until the present day; and (4) a film, documentary and digital artworks that explore the invisibility and immateriality experienced by Mexican and Central American migrant workers in the US. These research questions will be answered by the following six outputs: 1. An open-access book that addresses the four research strands identified above and draws on my own analysis of the chosen primary texts, as well as on interviews with the artists who produced them. 2. A peer-reviewed journal article - authored by the PDRA - that analyses a series of photographs of Afro-descendant and indigenous wet-nurses taken between 1879 and 1913, which were found at an archive in Lima. 3. A video essay - made in collaboration with an experienced video artist - that explores and illustrates the connections between visual representations of Latin American wet-nurses, nannies and domestic workers from the late nineteenth century until the present day. This output will be submitted to a peer-reviewed open-access video essay journal. 4. A policy advisory document that serves as a blueprint for effective, ethical forms of collaboration between academics, artists and activists and paid domestic and sex workers. This will represent the key output of an online workshop that unites these stakeholders. 5. A series of public film screenings and expert Q&As on the theme of 'Labour in Latin American Film' held at Watershed cinema, Bristol (subject to Covid-19 regulations). 6. An online platform featuring blogs, photographs and the video essay.

Artists Extending Realities will convene, commission and support a new inclusive wave of artists to make and share extraordinary immersive work. Our proposal brings together two universities, four producing venues and UK-wide expertise from organisations with specialist expertise around inclusion, training, showcasing and research. The partners - Pervasive Media Studio (Watershed, UWE Bristol, University of Bristol, England), Wales Millennium Centre (Wales), Nerve Centre (Northern Ireland), Cryptic (Scotland), Crossover Labs (Sheffield), Unlimited, XR Diversity Initiative and Immerse UK - are united by an ongoing commitment to support artists and reach audiences while building equity in the sector. Collectively we bring the practical experience needed to successfully deliver this programme. In three years, we will commission over 200 artists to engage, experiment and explore the possibilities of immersive technology. We will create inclusive opportunities for artists of all backgrounds, from across the four nations and multiple languages of the UK to bring their creativity to the fore. Through an integrated programme of research, we will capture and share insight and learning about what works best for the wider sector. We will establish a powerful network of practice and exhibition within which a distinctive UK immersive arts sector can emerge and flourish. The UK made early investment into first immersive content production, then XR infrastructure and skills. This programme will offer joined up support for artists to make work that integrates content and technology with purpose and audience in mind. To realise the potential of existing investment, artists (especially those currently underrepresented in the sector) need access to tools, training and expertise for experimentation, support from producers who understand the field, better distribution routes and showcasing opportunities, and audience development that builds confidence and criticality into the immersive arts. We believe that the unique characteristics of XR technologies create opportunities for artistic, cultural, economic and societal impact. Immersive tools allow artists and audiences to inhabit fluid personas and shape rich storyworlds alongside one other. Embodied experiences can have a profound effect on people; engaging them with each other, with their environment and with stories in visceral and long lasting ways. This sparks new forms of imagining, desperately needed in a divided and endangered planet. Hybrid and social XR enable new ways of being together in physical and digital space. People who are isolated from the arts through geography, a lack of economic opportunity and/or disability can find meaningful ways to create and connect with cultural experiences. If carefully supported, new business models emerge, attracting audiences who may not have otherwise participated in 'mainstream' arts and generating new distribution routes while minimising carbon impact. Through a responsible approach to research and development, in which inclusion, sustainability and ethics are considered at every stage, we will unleash this latent potential of XR to build a sector that can thrive in regenerative partnership with the wider ecosystem. Artists Extending Realities will act as a creative catalyst, raising profile and ambition, and generating a culture in three years that becomes the foundation for the next twenty.

Over the last decade, the creative industries have been revolutionised by the Internet and the digital economy. The UK, already punching above its weight in the global cultural market, stands at a pivotal moment where it is well placed to build a cultural, business and regulatory infrastructure in which first movers as significant as Google, Facebook, Amazon or iTunes may emerge and flourish, driving new jobs and industry. However, for some creators and rightsholders the transition from analogue to digital has been as problematic as it has been promising. Cultural heritage institutions are also struggling to capitalise upon new revenue streams that digitisation appears to offer, while maintaining their traditional roles. Policymakers are hampered by a lack of consensus across stakeholders and confused by partisan evidence lacking robust foundations. Research in conjunction with industry is needed to address these problems and provide support for legislators. CREATe will tackle this regulatory and business crisis, helping the UK creative industry and arts sectors survive, grow and become global innovation pioneers, with an ambitious programme of research delivered by an interdisciplinary team (law, business, economics, technology, psychology and cultural analysis) across 7 universities. CREATe aims to act as an honest broker, using open and transparent methods throughout to provide robust evidence for policymakers and legislators which can benefit all stakeholders. CREATe will do this by: - focussing on studying and collaborating with SMEs and individual creators as the incubators of innovation; - identifying "good, bad and emergent business models": which business models can survive the transition to the digital?, which cannot?, and which new models can succeed and scale to drive growth and jobs in the creative economy, as well as supporting the public sector in times of recession?; - examining empirically how far copyright in its current form really does incentivise or reward creative work, especially at the SME/micro level, as well as how far innovation may come from "open" business models and the "informal economy"; - monitoring copyright reform initiatives in Europe, at WIPO and other international fora to assess how they impact on the UK and on our work; - using technology as a solution not a problem: by creating pioneering platforms and tools to aid creators and users, using open standards and released under open licences; - examining how to increase and derive revenues from the user contribution to the creative economy in an era of social media, mash-up, data mining and "prosumers"; - assessing the role of online intermediaries such as ISPs, social networks and mobile operators to see if they encourage or discourage the production and distribution of cultural goods, and what role they should play in enforcing copyright. Given the important governing role of these bodies should they be subject to regulation like public bodies, and if so, how?; - consider throughout this work how the public interest and human rights, such as freedom of expression, privacy, and access to knowledge for the socially or physically excluded, may be affected either positively or negatively by new business models and new ways to enforce copyright. To investigate these issues our work will be arranged into seven themes: SMEs and good, bad and emergent business models; Open business models; Regulation and enforcement; Creators and creative practice; Online intermediaries and physical and virtual platforms; User creation, behaviour and norms; and, Human rights and the public interest. Our deliverables across these themes will be drawn together to inform a Research Blueprint for the UK Creative Economy to be launched in October 2016.

It is currently a very exciting and challenging time for video compression. The predicted growth in demand for bandwidth, especially for mobile services is driven largely by video applications and is probably greater now than it has ever been. There are four reasons for this: (i) Recently introduced formats such as 3D and multiview, coupled with increasing dynamic range, spatial resolution and framerate, all require increased bit-rate to deliver improved immersion; (ii) Video-based web traffic continues to grow and dominate the internet; (iii) User expectations coninue to drive flexibility and quality, with a move from linear to non-linear delivery; (iv) Finally the emergence of new services, in particular mobile delivery through 4G/LTE to smart phones. While advances in network and physical layer technologies will no doubt contribute to the solution, the role of video compression is also of key importance. This research project is underpinned by the assumption that, in most cases, the target of video compression is to provide good subjective quality rather than to minimise the error between the original and coded pictures. It is thus possible to conceive of a compression scheme where an analysis/synthesis framework replaces the conventional energy minimisation approach. Such a scheme could offer substantially lower bitrates through reduced residual and motion vector coding. The approach proposed will model scene content using combinations of waveform coding and texture replacement, using computer graphic models to replace target textures at the decoder. These not only offer the potential for dramatic improvements in performance, but they also provide an inherent content-related parameterisation which will be of use in classification and detection tasks as well as facilitating integration with CGI. This has the potential to create a new content-driven framework for video compression. In this context our aim is to shift the video coding paradigm from rate-distortion optimisation to rate-quality modelling, where region-based parameters are combined with perceptual quality metrics to inform and drive the coding and synthesis processes. However it is clear that a huge amount of research needs to be done in order to fully exploit the method's potential and to yield stable and efficient solutions. For example, mean square error is no longer a valid objective function or measure of quality, and new embedded perceptually driven quality metrics are essential. The choice of texture analysis and synthesis models are also important, as is the exploitation of long-term picture dependencies.

The Social Mobility Innovation Partnership (SMIP): city regions will bring together community partners, policy makers, city leaders, local industry and researchers to analyse barriers to social mobility, establish which can be most effectively tackled in a local context, and then co-create effective interventions that seek to make a real impact on those barriers. The SMIP will be established within the Greater Bristol city region, reaching out through its national partners and the LPIP Strategic Coordination Hub, to Core Cities across the UK. Our ambition is for the SMIP to deliver a programme of activity to promote social mobility and enable neighbourhoods and communities to develop and thrive, in turn supporting inclusive and sustainable growth in city regions. It will operate via three thematic lenses: 1. Access to education, skills and meaningful employment opportunities 2. Sustainable living and places 3. Culture and identity The project will adopt a participatory iterative research design. In Phase 1, the Partnership will explore the needs and opportunities for collaboration across all three themes through data gathering, landscape and evidence analysis and a series of workshops, chaired by co-investigators from key community groups. It will take a deep dive into the theme of 'Access to skills and employment in the green economy', applying learning and a 'what works' approach to the establishment of an appropriate model for Phase 2, as well as drawing on Bristol's extensive track-record in Connected Community approaches. The proposal has significant local and national support from senior political, academic, professional, and community leaders. It has the potential to transform the futures of disadvantaged and minority communities in the Bristol city region, influencing social mobility and inclusive growth in city regions across the UK.