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.

Encounters with dead bodies are becoming more commonplace in a range of socio-cultural, socio-economic, political, medical and emotional contexts. However, public understanding of, and academic research regarding, these encounters is limited and not very coherent. Changing social attitudes, new technologies, migration and multi-culturalism, medical demands and economic opportunities relating to dead bodies are changing rapidly. Migrant communities bring different demands in terms of claims on space connected to the rituals and practices of bodily disposal in the UK (eg. how are cemeteries organized, how can different burial practices be accommodated?). Social trends regarding the dead body are also changing. There is a strong class divergence with respect to viewing the body before burial, for example. Alternative choices of bodily disposal are also increasingly popular, such as different ways of disposing of funerary ashes or choices about forms of 'green' burial. Forms of artistic practice (eg. the "Bodyworlds" exhibition of plasticised human remains), archaeology (eg. Richard III's remains), popular culture (eg. TV forensic crime series) and tourism products (eg. 'dark tourism') and their media coverage have made human remains more visible in the everyday. The donation of bodies for medical research and the global trade in post-mortem body parts, combined with the growth of technologies that make these possible, also bring the dead body into play in contemporary social encounters which raise important questions about the regulation and management of biomedical material and the experience of relatives of the dead. This series of meetings will thus bring together a wide range of researchers and practitioners with the aim of increasing understanding of these changing social trends related to managing, disposing of and presenting dead bodies. In each seminar a range of international academics and professionals involved in managing human remains will debate present-day societal, cultural, ethical and technological concerns related to the dead. The discussions will cover a wide range of contexts, from funerals to tourism, donating bodies for medical research to the economic trade in body parts, accommodating 'green' and faith-based requirements for burial, understanding the ethics of disturbing human remains (eg. in major infrastructure projects such as London Crossrail or HS2), to the use of dead bodies by political regimes. The seminars will also produce information for the various professionals and members of the public who encounter the dead in these contexts. A key outcome is to enhance understandings of social attitudes and practices with regard to the dead body in these situations and to explore the implications for policy-making and practice eg. how should churches, local authorities and cemetery managers use space to accommodate different faith groups, what kinds of new products might a manufacturer produce for the growing market in 'green' burials, how might a tourism company sensitively use human remains for economic gain? In all of these contexts and processes the seminars are also aimed at generating a better understanding of public attitudes in order to ensure that the dead are dealt with sensitively and in an ethical way.

Active touch theory states that sensors must move and engage in task-specific behaviours in order to improve efficiency and performance in sensory tasks. Human fingertips are an active touch system as they make purposeful, task-specific movements, for example they sweep over textures, feel around edges to judge shape and squeeze objects to judge hardness. Most mammals do not have mobile, tactile fingertips and they have whisker touch sensors instead. Whiskers are part of a unique sensory system and are highly sensitive and moveable. Although many researchers assume whiskers do active touch sensing, it has never been quantitatively investigated in any animal. Seals, Sea lions and Walruses, use their whiskers for foraging, navigation and object identification in dark and murky underwater habitats. They have the longest and most sensitive whiskers of all mammals, that are specially-shaped and are moved systematically with purpose. Seal whiskers are undulating while sea lion and walrus whiskers are smooth. These shape specialisations are likely to affect what the animal can feel with their whiskers. However, no one has ever investigated this. For this fellowship I will characterise active touch sensing strategies in seals and sea lions using behavioural experiments, 3D mechanical models and robot platforms. I suggest that the control of specially-shaped whiskers allows Seals and Sea lions to discriminate between different objects. I will discover if actively controlling whiskers enables them to sense more efficiently, improving our understanding of active sensing, whisker mechanics and motor control. This will be tested by: 1. Describing whisker movements in Harbor seals (wavy whiskers) and South African fur seals (smooth whiskers). Animals will be trained at SeaQuarium Rhyl to complete 3 different tasks: colour, texture and size while blindfolded and selecting a target object from a range of different distractors. The whiskers will be filmed underwater and tracked allowing me to visualise how whiskers move during each different discrimination task. 2. Identifying task-specific whisker strategies in Harbor seals and South African fur seals using three different discrimination tasks as detailed above. 3. Estimating how whisker shape effects sensation by investigating different forces applied along the whisker using mechanical models and a robot sensor. I expect whisker shape to affect the bend of a whisker when in contact with an object. Dissected seal and sea lion whiskers from museum specimens will be scanned and modelled in specialist 3D software (called Finite Element Analysis) looking at how an object behaves in a given situation. 4. Exploring how different-shaped whiskers (wavy or smooth) affect movement strategies. Dissected Pinniped whiskers will be attached to a robot sensor arranged like a muzzle; the robot will make movements to detect object size and texture. Robot movements will be compared to my experimental data to see how efficient seals and sea lions are at sensing. This will improve our understanding of active sensing and whisker mechanics, by combining aspects of anatomy, whisker tracking, whisker robotics and detailed 3D digital models. 5. Examining if these strategies are altered during a hydrodynamic task (the ability of some animals to sense water movements). My tactile task will be adapted to a hydrodynamic task and whisker and head movement strategies will be compared.

I see this project as an opportunity to facilitate young participants in performing (Butler 2006) potential history (Azoulay 2019) as a 'form of being with others, both living and dead, across time, against the separation of the past from the present and history from politics' (2019: 93). The challenge and the excitement in potential history work are in recognising and advocating 'others' rights to and in' those histories (Azoulay 2019: 93). This is relevant to this project on several counts, describing both my role as a facilitator in the youth participatory action research (YPAR), the participant's interpretation of the Working Class Movements Library (WCML), and the resources and collections they will produce to engage future users of the library. The project will be collaborative and co-produced, I will facilitate participants to shape the project according to their interests and values. As such, it is important to note whilst this proposal contains an outline for how this project might evolve, it is subject to change and transformation as the collaboration unfolds and sparks begin to fly. The academic contribution this project will offer is twofold. In terms of scholarship, I will generate knowledge on, and analysis of, how young people respond to and orient themselves in relation to working-class movements, working-class history and politics. In terms of practice, the project will facilitate learning, and empower engagement with working-class movements of the past, present, and future, and resources will be produced to facilitate future young people can learn about working-class histories. Combined, these outputs will demonstrate the growing importance of prioritising collaboration and engagement with politics in heritage, and the embodied impact of YPAR. This research will project the voices of young working-class people into the academy and hopefully demonstrate by example the value and importance of embodied and action-orientated ontological research in expanding and diversifying the field of heritage.2. Positionality Given the strong social and political elements of this project, I feel it is important to state my positionality to indicate my worldview and the social and political context from which I will conduct this research. I am 29, white, and working class, I am also queer and disabled. I was born in Sheffield and grew up in Derby so in two Northern cities with similar histories to Manchester. I went to state school, then art school, and am the second generation in my family to go to university. I am not religious but am guided by a strong moral compass and a political stance which more or less aligns with anarchism.3. State of the art Laurajane Smith's conceptualisation of heritage as "a process of engagement, an act of communication, and an act of making meaning in and for the present" eloquently underscores the imperative for active involvement in contemporary contexts (2006: 1). This resonates deeply with the ethos embodied in the motto of the WCML, "explore the past, change the future". Heritage studies and the WCML are united thematically by identity, memory, value, belonging, and collective social, cultural, and political experiences across space and time (See Smith 2006; Lowenthal 1998; MacDonald 2009; Harrison 2023). With this synergy in mind, I believe my training in heritage studies uniquely positions me to conduct this research. My academic, professional, and creative experience in collaborative work and youth work, my own experiences in youth engagement projects, and my lived experience as a working-class person give me further unique perspective on this research area. The little published scholarship on YPAR with working-class young people indicates the limited scholarship on this topic. In the last decade, only 14 texts have been published, only one a book, the rest in academic journals.

Haemostasis is the important biological process that controls blood clotting. It is a complicated process involving the blood vessel wall, cells in the blood and proteins circulating in plasma. Understanding how haemostasis is regulated is crucial, as when it goes wrong it can lead to life threatening bleeding or clotting. Currently the main way to investigate factors which affect haemostasis is by using the tail bleeding model. This involves cutting off the end of a rodents tail and timing how long it takes to stop bleeding. Different drugs and treatments can then be tested on the animals to see if they change the bleeding time. These experiments are very variable and therefore require lots of animals. They are also not a very good representation of haemostasis in humans as there are many biological differences between rodents and humans. The aim of this study is to develop an alternative haemostasis model that uses human blood and human blood vessels to replace the tail bleeding model. To do this we will take human blood vessels from placentas, which are usually discarded following the birth of a baby. We will flush out existing blood from the vessel and flow human donor blood through it. When blood is passing through the vessel, we will use a small needle to puncture the blood vessel wall causing bleeding. This will stimulate the formation of a blood clot and we will time how long it take to stop bleeding. As well as measuring bleeding time in our human haemostasis model, we will also use high power microscopes to look in detail at what the blood clots are made up of. This will tell us more information about the process of haemostasis and how it is controlled. To enable other scientists to use our model and have a greater impact reducing the number of animals used in research, they need access to human placental vessels. We will therefore test different ways of storing the blood vessels, so that vessels can be stored for longer and scientists can use the model without access to fresh placentas. In summary, this study will provide a new way to measure haemostasis that does not use animals. It will also produce more reliable results and provide more detailed information about how haemostasis is controlled. The use of human blood and human blood vessels also means that the results are more relevant to human haemostasis than the current tail bleeding model.