Valuing and conserving our diverse heritage is an important endeavour for our presents and our futures. Recognising how certain aspects of heritage are prized over others, and how such imbalances can be mitigated are equally significant. In an adaptation of George Orwell's famous lines from his book, 1984, those who control the past control the future, and those who control the present control the past. Experiences and practices of discrimination and inequity in the current era has repercussions for whose, and which kind of heritage continues for future generations. Our vision is to develop and consolidate a UK-India network that highlights and deepens a framework of analysis that is conscious of social and institutional discrimination when it comes to valuing heritage. Our framework is informed by gender and intersectionality on Indian and Diasporic (GRID) heritage so as those people and practices discriminated along the intersecting lines of gender, caste, class and/or ethnicity along with their heritage work are fully appreciated, engaged and supported at the national and transnational level. We plan to consolidate the GRID Heritage network through the organising of two workshops, linked exhibitions and musical performances in New Delhi and London, a project website with an online exhibition of case studies and digitised archive along with other more long-term strategies. The network will include academics, researchers, curators, heritage practitioners, managers and other specialists in three main areas: (i) Craft: paintings, illustrations and three dimensional objects (co-ordinated by Parul Dave-Mukherji, Principal Investigator, India), (ii) Threads: embroidery and textiles (co-ordinated by Raminder Kaur, Principal Investigator, UK), (iii) Echoes: music and performance (co-ordinated by Navtej Purewal, Co-Investigator, UK). Each of these components will be developed by network participants, and supported by free public events in New Delhi and London to which the general public including local Asian, heritage, arts and youth groups will be invited. We encourage network participants to apply a gender and intersectionality lens to heritage issues and cases by asking the following questions: - How do we develop a context-specific understanding of gender and intersectionality as they apply to Indian and Diasporic heritage? In what ways have practitioners felt discrimination with respect to their identity and heritage? What are the implications of this for the individual and the community/ies with which they self-identify in changing contexts? - To what extent is the value assigned to forms of heritage used to include some groups and the devaluation of other forms of heritage used to exclude others? How are categories such as 'art' and 'craft', 'artisan' and 'artist' applied for work that draws upon an individual's heritage? - How do we make sense of heritage objects and practice located across diverse caste-class, religio-ethnic and regional contexts? How does this influence an understanding of their various homes, whether they be in India or in UK? - How can we use gender and intersectionality lenses to empower individuals and communities to build upon their heritage? - How can we place what might be off-the-grid or hidden heritage associated with marginalised people on a platform where they can be valued now and in the future? The network activities will lead to a project website with digitised case studies, visual and audio-visual recordings of public events, open access working papers, reports, a GRID Heritage roadmap including an executive summary to send to stakeholders, teaching material for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, interim and final network reports including a comprehensive evaluation report for participants' and partners' own networks. This final report will later inform the development of a firmer focus, aims, objectives and partners for further international research.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The aim of this research is to examine the nature and impact of China and India's strategies on the governance of biomedical innovation at national, regional and global levels and the implications for UK policy. Medical biotechnology is a government priority in the UK, which claims a world-leading position in several sectors. Policy priorities and the design of the present research were debated in a high-level workshop with UK policy makers who endorsed the research. Two priority fields of medical biotechnology are investigated, each focused around two case studies of substantive biomedical/economic activity: Regenerative Medicine (Stem cell research; Tissue-engineered wound care); and Stratified/Personalised Medicine (Bioinformatics; Pharmacogenomics). These areas of scientific research and development of products promise to revolutionise healthcare globally, and respond to major public health needs. The 'Rising Powers', especially China and India, are becoming increasingly influential in these fields, and national governments, regulators, scientific institutions, industry actors and other stakeholders are moving to develop new strategies to maintain and improve their positions in the global biomedical economy. At the same time, the increasing use of 'bio' science and technology and the development of complex biosocial databases and human cell banks ('biobanks') for therapeutic exploitation raise a host of ethical, social and legal issues which different societies approach in very different ways. The research draws together concepts from disciplines of political science, innovation studies, and sociology of biomedicine and healthcare, to provide a new evidence base of these emerging developments. Building on the platform of an ESRC Rising Powers Network project, the research focuses on relations between India, China and the UK, in the global context of US, EU and South East Asian scientific and economic influence. Focusing on the four case studies, the research will: 1. Describe the primary components and directions of China and India's innovation policies, strategies and actions; 2. Analyse how these strategies align with or depart from those employed by the developed economies of the UK, EU, North America, and Japan; 3. Assess the extent to which the Rising Powers strategies engage with, challenge or confirm existing cross-cutting regional and global governance institutions and actions in both private and public spheres; 4. Evaluate the implications for UK policy around these priority strands of biomedical economy and health policy. The research uses a combination of research and policy analysis methods, comprising secondary analysis of quantitative datasets, primary fieldwork data collection (interviews, observation of conferences) in the UK, India and China. Data collected will include: patent/intellectual property trends; standard-setting activity; investment trends; 'private' regulatory initiatives such as via professional associations or scientific networks; formal regulatory initiatives; modes and content of patient and public engagement with governance processes; public policy visions of future healthcare. Throughout the research, policymakers in the UK and Rising Powers countries will be involved in debating the research through a series of expert workshops. Similarly, public/patients forums will be convened in the UK to provide involvement of these stakeholder groups. The research team will advance the theory of global biomedical innovation by aligning political science theory of states' competitive and cooperative global interaction with sociological/innovation studies' analysis of how emerging medico-economic sectors emerge and stabilise. This theoretical work will be of broader application, beyond the substantive field of medical biotechnology. The substantive findings of the research will inform UK policy for medical biotech innovation for developing the healthcare of the future.

In the wake of climate change, there is an ever-increasing need to bring socioeconomic (SE) and critical infrastructure (CI) perspectives within conventional physical hazard assessment models. High-mountain hazards impact lives of some of the most vulnerable communities globally. The exposure to and the frequency of hazards have increased and are highest for events such as landslides and cascading hazards, prevalent in mountains. We aim at developing an interdisciplinary analytical framework for identifying and assessing the risks to communities and CI from landslides and cascading glacial hazards. While the framework will be applicable to any high-mountain region, we will implement and test it for Bhagirathi and Bhilangana Valleys, known for their hydrological, hydropower, touristic, and religious significance. The designed workflow blends cutting-edge geoscience and social science research to develop new insights enabling the amelioration of the hazard risks. Targeting the existing research gap on spatiotemporal spread of landslides in Himalaya, our research will be performed at two spatial scales: (1) mapping, analysing, and understanding the direct hazardous impacts of landslides, and (2) modelling the indirect but cascading hazardous impacts of glacial landslides. In addition to mapping and modelling the events, the project also incorporates SE and CI factors, and community perceptions within the assessment and mitigation plans. While we will use high-resolution satellite datasets of past ~20 years to generate a multi-temporal landslide inventory, we will also use dendrogeomorphology methods to extend this inventory to past ~100 years of timescale, deducing the landslide patterns with respect to extreme weather, infrastructure development, and climate shifts. Furthermore, the relationship between rock characteristics/composition and the landslide failure mechanism needs more investigations. Such holistic and interdisciplinary framework covering all the aforementioned aspects on landslides for a high-mountain catchment is yet to be adopted and can set a benchmark for similar research in other high-mountain regions. The main objectives are: (1) to develop a temporally exhaustive landslide inventory using Earth Observation (EO) data and tree ring-based reconstructions, and understand their evolution with respect to extreme weather events and CI projects, (2) to assess the direct hazard impact of landslides on CI and habitation through spatial and demographic analyses, (3) to model the impacts of cascade hazard potential of glacial landslides at the identified sites, (4) to perform geotechnical analysis to understand the relationship between slope failure and slope material compositions and characteristics in this region, (5) to understand the community perception of hazards (with respect to land use and transhumance patterns, trade and migration routes, and kinship and alliance distributions), and (6) To design community-based and socially acceptable mitigation guidelines. The anticipated outcomes will be beneficial to high-mountain communities, taking a step towards mitigation through preparedness and increased awareness. The multi-temporal landslide inventory will help assess the hazard-prone regions for present and future CI. The community perception of hazards will further inform policy makers on acting accordingly while implementing the mitigation measures. The tree-ring-based reconstruction of past frequency series will serve as an excellent basis for the calibration and accuracy assessment of process-based landslide cascade simulation models. As a future prospect of the geotechnical investigations, the improved understanding on the relationship between slope failure mechanism and slope material compositions and characteristics in this region, will help develop reliable geotechnical models on landslide prediction.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.