Context\n\nDance music culture is ubiquitous in Europe, North America and South East Asian cities, yet historians have yet to account for the scene that unfolded in New York between 1980-85. The exclusion is understandable. Emerging out of the counter-cultural movement of the late 1960s, disco became the dominant dance sound of the 1970s before its production was dramatically halted following the backlash against the genre in 1979, after which Chicago house (the dominant electronic paradigm in global dance during the 1990s and 2000s) was popularised in cities such as New York, Manchester and London around the middle of the 1980s. Lacking a singular sonic identity, the New York dance scene of the first half of the 1980s was always going to be easy to overlook, yet its chaotic status also made it one of the most invigorating and innovative periods in the history of western dance. Life and Death On the New York Dance Floor will provide an original and groundbreaking account of this neglected era.\n\n\nAims and objectives\n\nDrawing on interviews conducted with one hundred protagonists as well as a wide range of documentary sources, the book will provide a detailed history of New York dance during the first half of the 1980s. Its first task will be to map the way in which DJs, dancers, remixers, producers, musicians, club owners and record label employees drew on a range of sound system and studio technologies to forge a complex network that cut across race, gender, and sexuality while pulling together a post-genre mix of disco, dub, hip hop, electro, new wave and even orchestral music. The manner in which the 1980-85 period formed a crucial bridge between disco and house will be established by highlighting the way New York influenced dance scenes in Chicago, Manchester, London, Rimini, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo and other cities. The book will also argue that the New York scene amounted to a uniquely hybrid and decentred formation that was defined by its interaction, openness and community.\n\nIn addition to this archaeological work (work that becomes ever more urgent as protagonists continue to pass away, many of them from AIDS-related complications) Life and Death will also analyse the New York dance network 1980-85 within a range of broader contexts. Particular attention will be paid to the way the scene negotiated the early years of neoliberalism and its associated mix of welfare cuts, arts funding cuts and property price rises. And the book will also describe the development of the AIDS epidemic from within the most popular (yet least historicised) gay male pastime. The systematic omission of New York's queer-driven dance culture from the recent flurry of studies that have charted New York's prolifically creative downtown movement of 1975-84 will constitute another important reference point.\n\n\nPotential applications and benefits\n\nShifting between these perspectives, Life and Death will plug a significant gap in the history of twentieth century popular music while generating archival material and theoretical perspectives around race, gender, sexuality and class that will be of relevance to American Studies, Cultural Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and History. In addition, the book's nocturnal outlook will contribute to a fuller understanding of the history of Manhattan, as well as the city's dynamic contribution to the crisscrossing flows of transatlantic culture. Thanks to its focus on New York's gay male population, Life and Death will also double up as an original case history of the early years of AIDS. And through its examination of the relationship between the dancing body, amplified sound and pre-recorded music, the book will illuminate the state of affect in the twilight years of the 'analogue era'. The book's unrivalled fieldwork and collection of rare artwork and DJ playlists will establish it as the definitive account of an influential yet under-appreciated cultural moment.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

The Urban Big Data Centre aims to promote innovative research methods and the use of big data to improve social, economic and environmental well-being in cities. Traditionally, quantitative urban analysis relied on data designed for research purposes: Census and social surveys, in particular. Their qualities are well understood and the skills needed for extracting knowledge from them widely shared by social researchers. With the arrival of the digital age, we produce an ever increasing volume of data as we go about our daily lives from physical sensors, business and public administrative systems, or social media platforms, for example. These data have the potential to provide valuable insights into urban life but there are many more challenges in extracting useful knowledge from them. Some are technical, arising from the volume and variety of data, and its less structured nature. Some are legal and ethical, concerning data ownership rights and individual privacy rights. Above all, there are important social science issues in the use of big data. We need to shape the questions we ask of these data with an informed perspective on urban problems and contexts, and not have data drive the research. There is a need to ask questions about the data themselves and how they affect the resulting representations of urban life. And there is a need to examine the ways in which these data are taken up by policy makers and used in decision making. UBDC is a research centre which brings together an outstanding multi-disciplinary team to address these complex and varied challenges. We are a unique combination of four capacities: social scientists with expertise from a range of disciplinary backgrounds relevant to urban studies; data scientists with expertise in programming, data management, information retrieval and spatial information systems, as well as in legal issues around big data use; a data infrastructure comprising a substantial data collection and secure data management and analysis systems; and an academic group with strong connections to policy, industry and civil society organisations developed over the course of phase one and wider work. In the second phase, our objectives are to maximise the social and economic benefits of activities from phase one. We will do this in particular through partnerships with industrial and government stakeholders, working together to produce analyses which meet their needs as well as having wider application. We will continue to publish world-leading scientific papers across a range of disciplines. We will work to enhance data collections and develop new methods of analysis. We will conduct research to understand the quality of these new data, how well they represent or misrepresent particular aspects of life, and how they are and could be used by policy makers in practice. Lastly, we will build capacity for researchers and others to work with this kind of data in future. Our work programme comprises four thematic work packages. One focuses on understanding the sustainability, equity and efficiency of urban transport systems and on evaluating the impacts on these of infrastructure investments. There is a particular focus on public transport accessibility as well as active travel and hence health outcomes. The second examines the changing residential structure of cities or patterns of spatial segregation, and their consequences for social equity, with a particular focus on the re-growth of private renting. The third studies how urban systems shape skills development and productivity and, in particular, how the combination of home and school environments combine to shape secondary educational attainment. The fourth explores how big data are being taken up by policy makers. It asks what the barriers are to more effective use of these data but also whether they distort the picture of needs which a public body may form.

The MaTHiSiS learning vision is to provide a product-system for vocational training and mainstream education for both individuals with an intellectual disablity and non-diagnosed ones. This product-system consists of an integrated platform, along with a set of re-usable learning components (educational material, digital educational artefacts etc.), which will respond to the needs of a future educational framework, as drawn by the call, and provide capabilities for: i) adaptive learning, ii) automatic feedback, iii) automatic assessment of learner’s progress and behavioural state, iv) affective learning and v) game-based learning. To achieve these educational innovative goals, the MaTHiSiS project will introduce a novel methodology in the education process. The so-called learning graphs which, acting as a novel educational structural tool and associated with specific learning goals, will foster novel ways to guide how the different learning material and artefacts can be deployed throughout a prespecified learning scenario. The building materials of these graphs are drawn from a set of Smart Learning Atoms (SLAs) which will constitute the vertices of the graphs. SLAs are learning elements that carry stand-alone pieces of learning materials, targeting certain problems. More than one SLAs, working together on the same graph, will be able to help individuals reach their learning/training goals. The learning goals as well as the SLAs involved will be decided and pre-agreed based on common practices, goals derived from formal and non-formal education (general education, vocational training, lifelong training or specific skills learning) as well as learner’s own goals (so as to equally serve in-formal education contexts).

Summary\nGetting Over Trauma: New Paradigms in Trauma Theory\nSusannah Radstone\n\nThis project aims to increase understanding of how personal and collective traumatic experiences are communicated to the wider world through the medium of film. Over the last fifteen years, and under the continuing impact of traumatic events such as 9/11 and ongoing revelations concerning the extent of institutional sexual abuse, humanities scholars have begun investigating how media, including film, represent to audiences experiences that stretch or even exceed capacities for comprehension. Research to date has drawn on new theories of trauma developed by psychologists. These theories propose that fragmentary images of traumatic experiences are consigned to an area of the mind to which traumatized subjects have no voluntary access. These unprocessed fragments are then understood to erupt into consciousness involuntarily, producing symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). \n\nScholars have drawn analogies between trauma victims and trauma films, suggesting that like trauma's victims, trauma films bear the invisible marks of experiences too shocking to be easily represented or remembered. Building on this analogy, film scholars have argued that trauma films place spectators in the position of witness to personal or collective trauma. But psychology argues that trauma leaves its mark by consigning fragmentary images to inaccessible parts of the mind. Film theory has to ask, then, how films can represent inaccessible images. To date, film theory has limited its study to a range of films that are directly connected with traumatic experience, assuming that it is within these films that analysts will find traces of traumatic memories in fragmentary images that impact on spectators in the process of their becoming witnesses to the testimony of trauma films. \n\nThis project expands the range of films to be included in studies of trauma cinema by exploring how films belonging to genres and styles not obviously connected with traumatic experience are associated with historical catastrophes. It investigates, also, how films about personal or collective traumas offer spectators a broader range of positions than that of witness. The project adds to our knowledge of how traumas are communicated by film and, more broadly, contributes to our understanding of the cultural means at our disposal for helping (or hindering) communities struggling to come to terms with trauma.