The shift in young people's use of telephones from one-to-one voice communication to written and visual communication through texting and engagement with social media represents a pivotal cultural development. While the potentially harmful effects on young people of excessive mobile phone use continue to be studied, the COVID-19 emergency is emphasising further the importance of telephone technologies as tools for young people's social connection, education and skills development. These developments in young people's distanced communication have a vital, yet largely unstudied, history. My research is the first study of young people's telephone use in modern Britain, covering the period c.1984-1999. Through combining archival research, oral history research and research with community participants and in contemporary youth contexts, I investigate young people's access (and restrictions) to using telephones in this era, incorporating the landline, public telephone and mobile phone. I examine the significance of telephones in diverse facets of young people's lives, including in play cultures; leisure; the construction of home; mediation of family life and friendships; the assertion of fashionable identities; as an educational tool; in the workplace; and for locating advice and help. In doing so, I trace how young people's telephone use has been historically at the heart of debates over the meanings of privacy, protection, dependency, and social inequality. Young people's current-day phone use is analysed typically as an expression of individualisation. I ask what this illuminates and overlooks about the historical connection between telephony and children and young people's empowerment; their negotiation of family and community surveillance; their socialisation; and construction of selfhood. These connections evolved particularly rapidly in the years between 1984 and 1999, linked to changes in the marketization of the UK telecommunications sector; the rise of mobile phone ownership; and new ethical formulations of children's and young people's rights. Potentially unmediated by adults, telephone use was mobilised by the media, state and market in this era as a tool for young people's self-expression and social participation. This research centres children's own experiences and feelings in its analysis, moving between examples as varied as five-year-olds learning how to dial '999' and telephone providers' advertisements encouraging teenage boys to talk to their girlfriends. Tracing contestations between corporately-prescribed messages; those constructed in the media and popular culture; and informal ('everyday') education, I examine young people's telephone use in the 1980s/90s as both an activity in itself and its contribution to identity formation. The value of this research extends beyond historical scholarship. The Fellowship enables deeper understandings of the affective, cultural, and social impact of young people's telephone use upon modern debates about the relationship between telephones and young people's wellbeing and safety. I am collaborating with BT Heritage & Archives and the John Hansard Gallery, and the project combines historical research and co-research with community groups and young people in three strands: i) archival research in local and national collections, and research in cultural and media sources, to recover historical voices of children in relation to telephone use across diverse settings; ii) oral history research, collecting adults' childhood memories about their experiences using telephones; and iii) co-research using arts practice in contemporary youth settings, and crowd-sourced research using digital humanities methods to create an interactive online map of young people's 'phone spaces' in Southampton since the 1980s. The map is a pilot-study for a planned UK-wide project mapping where, when and how young people have used telephones, to be conducted after the Fellowship.

Writing has been essential in driving contemporary art forward since the middle of the 20th century. However, where once we entered galleries to find words displayed on walls or in vitrines, now we are encountering language in the artworld in a qualitatively different way. Art's literary content is entering the gallery as sound, through the medium of the recorded voice, as artists are drawn increasingly to present texts in the form of voiceover. The concept of voiceover is familiar to us from documentary film, but video, installation and new media artists are pushing the format in new and unexpected directions. Voices in the Gallery aims to carry out the first investigation of the voiceover as a phenomenon that exists simultaneously as art-form, literary genre and sonic intervention. By bringing together ideas and perspectives from art, literature and sound studies, it will deliver an original, interdisciplinary theory of voiceover. This project will use the voiceover as a medium by which to explore how writing operates in art practices today: Why is the human voice so pervasive in contemporary art? How do audiences engage with voiced writing? How does vocalization affect our experience of language-driven artworks in the gallery? How can we critically assess the literary and aesthetic features of a voiceover track? How can galleries equip listeners to 'read aurally': to interpret vocalized text that remains unseen? In answering these questions, this project will produce a range of academic and non-academic outputs and activities. My research presentations and article will establish a new field of crossdisciplinary inquiry. My agenda-setting monograph will shape how artists, institutions and critics make, curate and analyze voiceover in future. Partnership with creative industries is integral to this project. The research will be carried out in collaboration with engagement, exhibitions and public programming professionals at Nottingham Contemporary and John Hansard Gallery. These organizations combine international reputations for curating the most innovative contemporary art with a profound commitment to engaging diverse local audiences. By embedding ongoing research in the galleries, and engendering dialogue and exchange between arts professionals and HE, the project will mobilize insights from the research to open entry points into language-driven arts practices. Close listening workshops and study sessions will invite participants to explore new ways of experiencing and interpreting voiced writing in art. Broadside leaflets freely distributed in galleries, will guide and enrich audiences' experiences of voiceover. An off-site exhibition in Southampton city centre will invite new publics to experience a specially curated voiceover installation in their civic space. Crossing between disciplines, working with cultural institutions and their communities, this innovative leadership project will transform how we encounter, mediate and explicate an important, emergent mode of contemporary art-making.

On the 10th of October 1965, 'Make yourself at home' was screened on BBC One. A companion radio program also appeared on BBC radio. The screening of this show marked a pivotal move in the BBC's approach to immigration and had a lasting impact on its ethnic minority programming. While the show demonstrated an important shift in how the BBC saw its role in the public life of an increasingly multi-cultural U.K, the programme also marks a crucial moment in the lives of the South Asian migrants. MY-HOME is an intergenerational public engagement project that tracks the initial reception and legacy of 'Make yourself at Home'. Through a case study of the community experience of this show among the South Asian community in Southampton we will explore how this show and others that followed it (Nayi Zindagi Naya Jeevan' and 'Gharbar') contributed to the construction of South Asian diasporic identity in the UK. The project is co-designed with the BBC to mark the centenary year of the BBC and outputs from the project will add to the corporation's collection of 100 Voices and the 'Story of US'. Through a programme of oral history interviews, participant driven workshops and a public exhibition with the John Hansard Gallery which will be co-created with our audience of first, second and third generation South Asians-the project will illustrate the long-term history of BBC's role in making immigrants at home in the city of Southampton. As MY-HOME is an intergenerational project, we will focus on three specific age groups within the British South Asian community of the city. First generation migrants aged 65 and above Second generation migrants aged 35-50 Third generation migrants aged 18- 35 Engaging with this project will benefit our public audience by allowing them an opportunity to share their thoughts on BBC programming and articulate what it is that they are looking for in public broadcasting. It will allow them to record and save collective memories of early engagement with The BBC and to speak about the impediments to engaging with the BBC. As a recent 2020 Ofcom study on ethnic minority engagement with public broadcasting has illustrated, different generations South Asian are looking at BBC for reasons ranging from the need for greater belonging in British society to connecting with their other homeland. The project will allow them to articulate these needs collectively and critically.

Connecting us across space, our voices reach each other in ever more diverse and innovative ways. Emerging technologies are generating new conceptions of what it means to 'speak' and to have a voice. Social distancing has brought new attention to the means by which we communicate remotely. It also brings new pressures to bear-highlighting gaps in the conduits upon which individuals, communities and organisations suddenly and solely rely. This accelerated transition to conducting conversations, classes, performances, medical consultations, business and relationships via digitally mediated speech and text transforms our cultural experience of vocality. Crisis has provoked mass adaptation. Later, it will necessitate reflection. Assistive technologies--synthetic voice assistants, text-to-speech programmes, automated transcription, closed captions--have long been used to translate sound into text and vice versa. In recent years, these systems have passed into mainstream consumer use: enhancing inclusivity in some domains and bringing obstacles to access into relief in others. All of these innovations are registered and creatively processed by contemporary artists whose work already interrogates the potentiality of this expanded, multimodal vocality. Voices in the Gallery 2 extends the original project's theorisation of voiceover in contemporary art to engage stakeholders across the creative industries in a cross-sectoral exploration of the transformed nature of 'voice' today. Through partnership with creative industries organisations, advisory access agencies and creative practitioners it asks: a) How are new tools of communication, remote-access and assistive technologies changing our experiences of text and voice, connection and containment, presence, absence and isolation? b) How can art's expanded vocality be harnessed by artists and institutions to incite the development of a more inclusive art environment? Voices in the Gallery 2 will mobilise the multisensorial, technologically-mediated nature of 'visual' art to transform how the cultural/creative industries conceive of accessibility. -Newly commissioned artworks will explore the implications of voice technologies, and activate their potential to produce radically inclusive artworks. -A geographically and digitally distributed exhibition and event programme will galvanise a network of institutions, practitioners, professionals and local publics to gather-virtually/in-person-to consider the changed state of vocality today. -Articles and presentations will analyse the cultural, social and political ramifications of these technologies. -A collection of lecture-poems will explore the relations between speaking and writing, co-presence and delayed connection through critical-creative and formally innovative means. -Access will be enhanced and remote engagement enabled by an audio-guide produced through practice-based research collaboration with a social practice sound artist and in consultation with audio-description specialists VocalEyes. -An education pack developed with a freelance arts educator in consultation with engagement professionals will facilitate teachers and schoolchildren in exploring expanded vocality in everyday communication. -Site-specific community co-creation projects will activate participants in three locations to explore experiences of automated voices in public space. -An inclusively designed accessible broadside pamphlet, developed through tripartite collaboration with Daly & Lyon and the UK Association for Accessible Formats, will facilitate audiences to engage via print and digital formats with the project concept, artworks and investigative strands. -A co-created Inclusive Design for the Arts Toolkit will share insights, model solutions and disseminate best practice in inclusive graphic design to creative industries professionals.

Later life is where individuals' experiences and resources from across the life course accumulate. For older individuals from particular Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities, later life comes with a higher risk of having low financial resources and experiencing poverty compared to White British persons. However, our understanding of the differences in pensions and other types of savings between individuals from different BAME communities remains limited. We also don't know how individuals from such communities themselves understand financial planning for later life, and whether there are differences between men and women, and between younger and older persons. Through an innovative, mixed methods approach which involves statistical analysis of two national datasets (Understanding Society and Family Resources Survey) and qualitative interviews with mid-life and older persons from BAME communities, this project aims to address this gap by placing individuals from BAME communities at the heart of the investigation. Ahead of the interviews, respondents will be sent disposable cameras to take pictures which, for them, show what financial planning for later life means. These photos will form the centre of the interviews, allowing respondents to talk through their lived experiences and perspectives, and share insights which may not have been captured by academic research before. The project's ultimate goal is to offer new insights into pension protection and other forms of saving among individuals from BAME communities by inviting the perspectives of individuals from different age groups, and by combining different types of data and information in a manner which has not been done before. In addition to academic outputs in the form of journal articles, the project will host a number of non-academic engagement activities from the start. An Advisory Board made up of a user representative and local and national stakeholders in the area of pensions, such as the Southampton branch of AgeUK and the Southampton City Council's teams promoting 'Stronger Communities', community engagement, and better employment opportunities and skills across the population, and including older persons from BAME communities and the wider community, will be invited to discuss the aims of the research and how best to achieve them. This group will meet every 6 months with the project team, where preliminary findings will be discussed and all members of the Board can feed in their views. The project aims to place the perspectives of individuals from BAME communities at the heart of policy and public debates on pension protection. To that end, and with the respondents' permission, a selection of their photos will be exhibited in public at the Winchester School of Art Gallery, and in a Community Centre in Southampton and advertised through the Southampton City Council's Public Libraries network as part of Southampton's 'City of Culture 2025' initiative. The photo exhibition will also be used to engage with smaller groups of secondary school pupils in the South-east UK, and with young adult, mid-life and older women and men from the Southampton Pensioners Forum and the wider community, in order to facilitate further discussion among and between different age groups on what it means to financially prepare for later life. Finally, the members of the Advisory Board will also be invited to attend the final Dissemination Workshop organised by the project in London, and hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pensions which is made up of Members of Parliament at Westminster. This project aims to move beyond the mapping of ethnic differences in pension protection, and to place persons from a BAME heritage at the centre of this research, in order to provide an inclusive and more holistic understanding of what it means to prepare for a financially secure later life.