Astronomy and human affairs were once much more closely connected than they appear today. Revolutionary discoveries about the size, structure and mechanics of the universe had serious ramifications for religious doctrine and, by implication, human futures and morality.\nDuring the late nineteenth century the new science of 'astro-physics' opened up the interior of stars to investigation. The sources of stellar energy and the evolution of the stars became accessible to men with bunsen burners, electric wires and tubes of gas. Meanwhile, mathematicians began to grapple with models of space and time derived from Einstein's new law of gravitation. In November 1919, just days before the first anniversary of armistice day, newspapers in Britain and America announced that Newton had been deposed by a Swiss Jew from Germany / and that a team of British astronomers had helped to prove Einstein right. \nThere was one serious problem, however: nobody could explain in plain terms how the new theory worked. For all the money being poured into eclipse expeditions, huge telescopes and fancy laboratories, astronomers had stopped talking sense. One man, a Quaker astronomer who had come within inches of jail for conscientious objection during the War, offered hope. Spinning stories about the weight of light and the perils of love in four dimensions, Arthur Stanley Eddington coaxed the English-speaking world into at least an illusion of understanding Einstein. \nRelativity captured the public imagination, featuring on cigarette cards, in limericks and even the Einstein cigar. On a more serious level, the Archbishop of Canterbury wanted to know how Einstein would affect our morals, while the Bishops took heart from the more mystical pages of popular science books. The literary elite, appalled by popular enthusiasm for such misconceptions, sought to contain and counteract the 'relativity effect' in their own writings. \nYet the poet who understood most about relativity took it to heart in his metaphysical love poems / and found that romance in four dimensions was indeed a dangerous game. Loving Faster Than Light opens up William Empson's poems to a wide audience for the first time, asking what newspaper satires and poetic analogies can tell us about the social implications of complex scientific theories. \n\n

The first project for completion is the book 'Cinesexuality'. 'Cinesexuality' is the first dedicated volume to deal with continental philosophy and film in configuring a new mode of desire unique to the film spectatorship. Cinesexuality is part of the new series of Queer Interventions edited by Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke for Ashgate Press. The series addresses a variety of new directions in queer theory. Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship, making it both a text on queer theory and film theory. Cinesexuality will intervene into film theory, feminist studies, sexuality and perversion theory. I was invited to propose this book based on recent publications in which I invoke but do not elaborate these issues.\n\nCinesexuality represents a new example of a variety of ways in which queer theory and transgressive sexuality can alter relations between spectator and cinema. The central premise of the book is that cinema spectatorship represents a unique encounter of desire, pleasure and perversion beyond binary dialectics of subject/object and image/meaning. This unique relationship is what I have termed cinesexuality. Cinesexuality is a desiring matrix that encompasses all cinema spectatorships, frequently beyond gender, hetero- or homosexuality, encouraging all spectators to challenge traditional notions of what elicits pleasure. In this sense all cinematic spectatorship is a queer form of desire. Images are not gendered forms or reflective of possible objects of desire, yet all spectators take pleasure from film, thus sexual matrices are neither determined nor dialectic. All spectators are thus queer and queered. Additionally film seduces through images and ideas which we may find perverse or non-pleasurable outside of cinema, so concepts of what constitutes desire and pleasure are similarly queered. Extending the purpose of the book as a challenge to broader paradigms of sexuality and subjectivity, the encounter with the screen and images incites the spectator to reconfigure their own subjectivity, through desire encountering the mobile self outside of self but within the world. For this reason the challenge to hermeneutic subjectivity represents a feminist and queer ethics that can be extended to larger social interactive situations. Through a variety of cinematic examples, including abstract film, extreme films and films which offer examples of perverse sexuality and corporeal reconfiguration, Cinesexuality will encourage a radical shift to spectatorship as itself inherently queer beyond what is watched and who watches. Based on anonymous readers' and editors' reports the project is both accessible and highly theoretically rigorous.\n\nThe second project is the completion of 'Flesh, Fold, Infinity', a journal article for the internationally prestigious refereed journal 'New Formations'. The special issue on Deleuzian Politics comes from the conference on the same topic. 7 participants were invited to submit a 7000 word article. 'Flesh, Fold and Infinity' uses the strategic model of female genitalia, after feminist philosopher Irigaray's model of the 'two lips', which challenge the dominance of culture as phallic. The paper extends the idea of symbolic models of gender to thought as itself enfleshed, where ideology, philosophy and paradigms of thinking otherwise are capable of effectuating material change. The article breaks down barriers which binarise male/female, body/mind and materiality/philosophy. The underlying ethics of the paper demand all subjects - male, female, queer, heterosexual - to address different modes of thinking which fold them within and between other subjects rather than positioning them in opposition to. Using Irigaray with Deleuze and his work on Leibniz and 'the fold' this article creates connections between an ethics of queer, corporeal philosophy and attempts to reconcile the traditionally perceived antagonism between Irigaray and Deleuze.

Children who are above healthy weight are more likely to be ill and to miss time off school. Being overweight in childhood can also sow the seeds for health problems in later life such as heart disease and diabetes. Most overweight children become overweight adults. One solution is to try to prevent children becoming overweight by intervening very early in life. Researchers have looked at some of the factors which suggest that a baby may be at greater risk of becoming overweight compared to other babies without these risk factors. We have developed a questionnaire which asks parents about these risk factors such as whether their baby was heavy at birth and how quickly their baby is gaining weight. As with all such questionnaires there is a risk that some babies might be identified as at greater risk of becoming overweight children when they are not. This research project will design a computer-based interactive educational programme to enable health visitors to present this questionnaire to parents, calculate a baby's risk and feed that risk back to parents. Where necessary, health visitors will also present some possible solutions, such as additional help around feeding. However, the question remains as to whether parents would like to know about their baby's risk of overweight and what they could do to keep their child healthy. We also need to know how health visitors feel about giving this sort of information to parents so the project will ask both health visitors and parents for their views. Parents will also be asked if they would be willing to enter a future study that calculates their baby's overweight risk score and, if this is high, offers additional health visiting support with diet, feeding and physical activity.

As the environmental impacts of climate chdevange accelerate, so do its emotional impacts. 'Climate distress' is now used to denote the range of emotions involved (including eco-anxiety, -anger and -grief), with climate change a significant cause of young people's concern over their future. In fact, evidence of the increasing scale of climate distress across generations is expanding (through work in emotional geography, psychosocial studies, public health), yet there is scarce research on how societal responses to these emotional impacts can support both Net Zero and health goals. This project will address this gap. Mapping and case study work will explore how third sector organisations (who are currently leading the way in this field) are learning about effective responses to climate distress. A variety of interventions can be chosen as case studies. Examples could include Climate Cafes, Active Hope workshops, creative practices such as theatre making and the arts; the supervisory team have links to all these areas. The project will also closely track developments in national sector policy, through partner Mind (the mental health charity) and its linked 'Climate Minds' coalition.

This project will explore how story-based interventions in urban green spaces might foster nature-connection and wellbeing among disabled and/or neurodivergent people. Research areas include: Barriers experienced by disabled and/or neurodivergent people in engaging with local green spaces, especially in contexts of rapid urban development How existing story-based schemes (such as smartphone story walks) may reproduce exclusion of disabled and/or neurodivergent people from green spaces How innovative, multi-sensory stories can be coproduced with disabled and/or neurodivergent people so as to support their engagements with local green spaces Impacts of creating and engaging with these stories for the nature-connection and wellbeing of disabled and/or neurodivergent people. Proposed methods include in-depth qualitative tools and participatory "experiments" developing story-based interventions in case sites.