Improving the sustainable management of agricultural biodiversity is a key objective in regional and international natural resource policy, and is also critical for safeguarding food production and adapting to climate change. Within Europe, small farmers are custodians of the region's greatest agro-biodiversity assets, yet without remuneration for this stewardship activity. As public sector budgets struggle to provide compensation, the case for exploring the potential support from the agro-biodiversity based food chain is the driver of this Fellowship which aims to explore innovative business models and learning approaches not only to support sustainable management but also to reconnect food chain players and civil society with conservation values. The prospective Fellow, Dr Humberto Rios Labrada, is an experienced plant breeder and winner of national and international awards for innovating with participatory and action research methodologies for rural innovation. He will be hosted at Coventry University, UK, in its multidisciplinary Centre for Agroecology. Field research, and industry secondments and visits, will involve institutions in the UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Cuba, to explore initiatives that have been generating economic benefits through participatory agro-biodiversity management (termed Agro-biodiversity Management Enterprises) and identify opportunities for their scaling up. The Fellow will receive training in social enterprise development and entrepreneurship which will diversity his skillset to become a lead player in sustainable rural innovation. He will also develop transferable leadership skills in academia and rural development. Key outputs include two peer-reviewed articles, a Policy Brief, an arts-meets-science Performance, and training curricula for the continued development of AMEs.

Women are often thought to be more religious then men. At the same time, a number of women disaffiliate from their religious tradition and/or community. This research explores the lived realities of women from Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious backgrounds in the UK and the Netherlands, who self-identify as having left religion. It is expected that different former faiths, the community one belongs/belonged to, and aspects such as age, education and sexuality all inform women’s experiences of leaving religion. This project will contextualise these women’s trajectories in relation to the different religious and secular dynamics and circumstantial differences of the UK and the Netherlands. Using a new and innovative life history approach , the project contributes to the study of non-religion and leaving religion, the interdisciplinary study of religion and gender, and the empirical comparative study of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Bringing women of different religious backgrounds (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) together in the same research will lead to new and original insights into the dynamics of current Western European secularising and diversifying societies. This research will investigate: a) how and why women leave their Jewish, Christian or Islamic faith and/or community; b) how aspects such as gender, generation, education, sexuality and race/ethnicity contribute to women’s experience of leaving religion; c) and their post-exit relations with family and community. This project combines a life history approach with participant observation at events organised by and for formerly religiously observant individuals, as well as interviews with organisers, activists and therapists dealing with formerly observant women. The results will be used to theoretically rethink the connections between (non-)religion, leaving religion, gender and race/ethnicity.

Choreography is an art form well-known for combining rigorous physical and mental training with the highest degrees of creativity. However, as dance is the most ephemeral of art forms, this extraordinary embodied creativity has been in danger of disappearing without leaving a significant trace. That was until several leading dance artists began over a decade ago to experiment with digital technology as a means to document their unique approaches to choreography. The result today is an impressive accumulation of interdisciplinary research showing how embodied creativity in dance can be systematically studied and documented, how computer-aided design can effectively communicate the outcomes and how digitised recordings can be processed computationally to reveal new information about choreographic principles, processes and methods. Drawing on these developments in dance digitisation and recent progress in computational arts, the Fellowship will focus on fusing artistic skills in dance with artistic skills in computing. The goal is to achieve a new level of sophisticated creative transfer at the intersection of the two fields by taking advantage of significant advances in the fields of computer vision and machine learning combined with the high-level of expertise the Fellow brings from the field of generative computer art. Generative computer art techniques have until now not been integrated fully into the dance digitisation process, but they have extraordinary potential in combination with machine learning to expand the capability of computational systems to learn from and model existing artistic approaches. The Fellow’s extensive experience of working at the intersection between dance technology and computer art and science means he is extremely well placed to facilitate and achieve this encoding of embodied creativity with lasting impact for mixed machine-human collaboration and interdisciplinary art and science research.

The interplay between transitional justice and reconciliation processes in peacebuilding is still a rather empirically under researched issue. Existing literature on these processes and their relationship has remained normative, as most studies have lacked an examination of their overall effectiveness, and have not attempted to compare the impact such processes can have on society, at large, across different countries. The result has been a knowledge gap, which has produced decision-making based on weak data, ex-ante evaluation and speculation. Although there are some important insights from various single cases, we still need more in-depth empirical and theoretical inquiries, as well as comparison between cases, in order to explain how the interplay between transitional justice and reconciliation processes works in practice across different contexts. This research project aims to address this gap through a comparison of how various transitional justice and reconciliation mechanisms function and how their combination affects peacebuilding, either positively or negatively, across two countries—Algeria and Rwanda. Methodologically, the project’s design is that it is a comparative qualitative case study that proposes to use a novel methodological approach of participatory visual methods combining photo-voice and art, along with elicitation and auto-driving. This novel method in peacebuilding is to be combined with interviews and documentation to ensure triangulation of evidence.