The recent mass proliferation of digital technologies means that people now live in a state of permanent connectivity. The effects of this on the availability of time, the use of time and experience of temporality for the individual and for society are presently unknown. The TIMED project will establish, for the first time, the specific effects of digitalization on time experience and the sense of temporality across Europe. WP1 will determine what digitization means to people, using a qualitative and quantitative methods. WP2 will use questionnaires to establish how the forms of digitization identified in WP1 affect the passage of time, time pressure and time perspective. In WP3 interviews will explore what constitutes free time in the digital age. WP4 will use real-time behaviour analysis to establish how digitization affects time usage and the passage of time during daily life. WP1-4 will be conducted in 6 European countries: UK, Germany, Spain, Poland, Switzerland & Czech Republic enabling comparisons across countries and cultures, and between people of different ages, genders, employments, levels of digital engagement. Finally, WP5 will use lab studies to establish the psychophysiological mechanisms through which digital engagement affects time experience. The TIMED project will provide a ground-breaking account of how and why the perception, use and allocation of time are affected by personal levels of digitization and cultural norms, and how this then impacts on quality of life. The information generated will enable us to, for the first time, establish how digitalization affects individual temporal experience and whether it is aiding the development of unified European temporal experience or enhancing existing cultural differences. The evidence generated will have significant implications for the promotion of health, wellbeing and economic outcomes through the mitigation or enhancement of the consequences of increased digitalization on temporal experience.

Slavery is an issue of absorbing concern in today's society, as evidenced by the increasing number of news stories about trafficking and forced labour, many of them on our own doorsteps. It is estimated that there are 30 million slaves in the world today, a figure roughly equivalent to 50 per cent of the UK's population. Yet it is one thing to identify this problem, another to do something about it. The current project speaks to the need to create a modern anti-slavery movement and, as a first step, to educate our children about slavery, in both its historical and contemporary forms. To that end, the aim of the proposed engagement activity is to devise an educational package (songs, music, lesson plans, DVD) and a parallel music event for public performance, as a means of introducing school children and the wider public to the scale and complexity of slavery, as well as to the life experiences of those caught in its grip, past and present. The model here is 'Cargo', which was written and composed by Paul Field in 2007 with input from members of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull. The success of 'Cargo', which has been seen by over 70,000 people in the UK, France, Holland and the USA, demonstrates that quite complex ideas about slavery and abolition can be conveyed through music and drama. The current proposal, 'Child Cargo', draws on the knowledge and expertise of the same creative artists, principally Paul Field, as well as the expertise of schoolteachers and researchers at WISE. As a first step, the project team will need to decide on content and choose appropriate themes and subject matter. This will necessarily involve a series of workshops involving all of the team members -- who will also seek the assistance of interested parties, including teachers and members of community groups (e.g. Hull Black History Partnership, Hull Freedom Festival). It is expected that most of the content consultation will be concentrated into this first phase of the project, which will take up to three months to complete. Thereafter, the emphasis will shift to the creative element of the project: writing songs, developing visuals, consultation with teachers, and, finally 'road testing' the end result at Hull's Freedom Festival in September 2015. By its very nature, this is a collaborative project, involving those working within and without higher education institutions. WISE already has established links with local schools in Hull and surrounding region. It also has close links with local community groups and with museums and archives, including the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the National Maritime Museum in London. We have already consulted widely with these groups and with the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), Anti-Slavery International and Stop The Traffik, who have become Project Partners to add their expertise and weight to the enterprise. In developmental terms, we are able to draw on the expertise of digital media staff within the University of Hull (Scarborough) and across the University as a whole. The University of Hull is the lead institution in the AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Heritage. The management team will therefore have access to experts in museums and heritage interpretation, public engagement and the more than 70 international heritage organizations of the CDT. Similarly, members of WISE have links with Hull's Freedom Festival, which regularly attracts an audience of 80,000, and have been involved in the University's contribution to Hull City of Culture 2017. The project will therefore support the development of the comprehensive approach needed to raise awareness of modern slavery and to maximise impact from the completed research and this follow-on proposal.