While the large scale, established film industries of East and South Asia have garnered much attention in recent years, relatively few scholars have tackled the question of cinema and regionality in SE Asian contexts. This paucity is due partly to the reluctance to consider SE Asia as a legitimate regional formation: historically an artifact of Western, Cold War imaginings, the idea of "Southeast Asia" has been seen as an imposition of imperial power, external to the region and removed from local realities. However, at the same time, nation-states have harnessed this regionality towards political, economic, and cultural ends, promoting pan-Asian affiliations alongside local specificity as a means of promoting diplomacy, tourism, and the arts (for example, through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). The Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network seeks to investigate and understand better the nature and complexity of this cultural flow both within Asia and across the globe by bringing academics and practitioners into dialogue. Recent years have seen a growth of independent cinema across SE Asia, with growing inter-regional and international film circulation supported by new production and distribution companies (e.g. Kick the Machine and Mosquito Films Distribution), leading to increased visibility at international film festivals. Yet this occurs against a backdrop of increasing political instability, divisions amongst social classes and between ethnicities, and increasing levels of media censorship. Investigating these issues through the theme of 'Space, Time and the Visceral', this new Southeast Asia-UK-USA network will examine the effects (on both the industry and the film texts themselves) of postcolonial nationalism and censorship on the one hand, and globalisation and transnational flows on the other. These themes will be addressed at an international conference at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia and at workshops and symposia at the University of Stirling, the Hanoi Center for the Moving Image (DocLab), at the University of California and the Glasgow Short Film Festival. In a context where constraints over freedom of speech often mean that academics, students and filmmakers working within the region are severely restricted over what can be discussed publicly, SEACRN will play an important role in ensuring that these discussions have an international platform and audience, bringing an overall coherence to a more disparate set of individual research projects. In order to do this, the network will work with partners within the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas and will use the planned conference in Kuala Lumpur as a launch pad to begin a new, truly international research project that will bring together academics, filmmakers and students from the UK, Asia and North America to discuss these problems, and develop new areas of research that will be strategically important in the study of Southeast Asian Cinemas. In doing so, it will strengthen existing links and build new and lasting partnerships that reflect the international reach of the research in a way that existing networks based in the region (such as ASEAC) have not been in a position to achieve for economic, structural and institutional reasons. The network also seeks to further knowledge within the discipline of film studies by collaborating with individuals from other disciplines. For example, Abidin Kusno (Chair of Asian Urbanism and Culture, University of British Columbia) will be invited to be the keynote speaker for the conference in Malaysia at the beginning of the project, and sound ethnographer and Lecturer in Anthropology, Ernst Karel (Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab) will be invited to take part in a workshop at Hanoi DocLab. By incorporating perspectives from urban studies and anthropology, these discussions will help to push disciplinary boundaries that will help indentify new areas for research prioritisation.

While the large scale, established film industries of East and South Asia have garnered much attention in recent years, relatively few scholars have tackled the question of cinema and regionality in SE Asian contexts. This paucity is due partly to the reluctance to consider SE Asia as a legitimate regional formation: historically an artifact of Western, Cold War imaginings, the idea of "Southeast Asia" has been seen as an imposition of imperial power, external to the region and removed from local realities. However, at the same time, nation-states have harnessed this regionality towards political, economic, and cultural ends, promoting pan-Asian affiliations alongside local specificity as a means of promoting diplomacy, tourism, and the arts (for example, through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). The Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network seeks to investigate and understand better the nature and complexity of this cultural flow both within Asia and across the globe by bringing academics and practitioners into dialogue. Recent years have seen a growth of independent cinema across SE Asia, with growing inter-regional and international film circulation supported by new production and distribution companies (e.g. Kick the Machine and Mosquito Films Distribution), leading to increased visibility at international film festivals. Yet this occurs against a backdrop of increasing political instability, divisions amongst social classes and between ethnicities, and increasing levels of media censorship. Investigating these issues through the theme of 'Space, Time and the Visceral', this new Southeast Asia-UK-USA network will examine the effects (on both the industry and the film texts themselves) of postcolonial nationalism and censorship on the one hand, and globalisation and transnational flows on the other. These themes will be addressed at an international conference at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia and at workshops and symposia at the University of Stirling, the Hanoi Center for the Moving Image (DocLab), at the University of California and the Glasgow Short Film Festival. In a context where constraints over freedom of speech often mean that academics, students and filmmakers working within the region are severely restricted over what can be discussed publicly, SEACRN will play an important role in ensuring that these discussions have an international platform and audience, bringing an overall coherence to a more disparate set of individual research projects. In order to do this, the network will work with partners within the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas and will use the planned conference in Kuala Lumpur as a launch pad to begin a new, truly international research project that will bring together academics, filmmakers and students from the UK, Asia and North America to discuss these problems, and develop new areas of research that will be strategically important in the study of Southeast Asian Cinemas. In doing so, it will strengthen existing links and build new and lasting partnerships that reflect the international reach of the research in a way that existing networks based in the region (such as ASEAC) have not been in a position to achieve for economic, structural and institutional reasons. The network also seeks to further knowledge within the discipline of film studies by collaborating with individuals from other disciplines. For example, Abidin Kusno (Chair of Asian Urbanism and Culture, University of British Columbia) will be invited to be the keynote speaker for the conference in Malaysia at the beginning of the project, and sound ethnographer and Lecturer in Anthropology, Ernst Karel (Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab) will be invited to take part in a workshop at Hanoi DocLab. By incorporating perspectives from urban studies and anthropology, these discussions will help to push disciplinary boundaries that will help indentify new areas for research prioritisation.

Can the UK's trade and investment arrangements in the Indo-Pacific help reduce modern slavery risks? Given the Indo-Pacific is the region with the highest rates of modern, how can UK businesses and investors avoid exposure to modern slavery when they trade with and invest in the region? Our project seeks to develop answers to these questions, and use them to help the policy actors in the UK and the Indo-Pacific that are developing new trade and investment arrangements. To do this, we need to understand when foreign trade and investment increases the risks of forced labour and modern slavery, and when and how foreign trade and investment arrangements can be used to reduce those risks. We need to consider which legal and policy arrangements - such as bans on trade in goods made with forced labour, labor clauses in trade deals, or investor arbitration mechanisms - protect people and businesses against modern slavery risks, and which make it more likely. And we need to consider what role survivors, vulnerable populations and other people affected by modern slavery play in shaping trade and investment arrangements to prevent modern slavery. We will do this through four different areas of work. First, we will organize the first major global conference on these issues, online over 2 days in October 2022. This will bring together researchers, government practitioners, business and civil society to share new scholarship and develop new policy thinking. We will include representatives from affected communities, including survivors of modern slavery and affected Indo-Pacific communities. This conference will lay the groundwork for future exchange of knowledge and policy research collaborations, through a network of scholars and practitioners who will keep working on these issues after the project is complete. Second, we will build new data sets to help us understand how different trade and investment arrangements shape modern slavery risks and outcomes in the Indo-Pacific. One dataset will include international trade and investment agreements from across the Indo-Pacific, recording how those agreements handle modern slavery related issues. Another dataset will focus on the domestic laws and policies relating to trade and investment of countries in the Indo-Pacific. And third, we will update and develop a dataset recording government and company responses to allegations of large-scale forced labour in China's Xinjiang province. We will use each of these datasets to conduct original research into the questions we posed earlier. Third, we will conduct four in-depth case studies on China, India, Malaysia and Thailand. Working with our project partners Anti-Slavery International and the University of Nottingham Malaysia, the project research team will study how issues relating to modern slavery risks have been addressed when trade and investment arrangements have been developed and implemented. This will include direct, careful and safe engagement with stakeholders from each of these countries, including people vulnerable to modern slavery, to understand how these issues have been perceived and managed. Fourth, we will use the data and evidence developed in the previous work to produce policy findings and recommendations. Working closely with Anti-Slavery International and the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre, we will share these policy findings with policymakers, business leaders, civil society and researchers in the UK, in the Indo-Pacific, and in relevant international forums such as the United Nations and World Economic Forum.

In the UK we have research to try and understand how creating energy in our landscape may influence the local environment. The NERC grant 'Microclimates' is an example of such research; here we seek to understand how wind turbine deployment and biofuel crops may create and respond to local microclimates. However, members of the microclimate team propose to extend their research understanding to important biofuel crops overseas, that like wind turbines can also be deployed on peat soils, which are important C stores. However, our focus here is not on the C storage (as our project partners are considering that), but on the land management practise of draining the soils to render them more suitable for oil palm growth. This drainage significantly influences moisture availability in the soil and in turn how much water can be evaporated from the soil surface, and so heat flux. Understanding the impact of these management practises is important as changes in evaporative fluxes influences the development of a phenomena called the boundary layer. This is the zone of atmospheric mixing immediately above the Earth's surface and influences many things including weather and air pollution. Land conversion of tropical peats for agricultural biofuels is proceeding at a significant and uncontrolled rate and the upscaling of individual plantations could change at national scales the responses controlled by boundary layer dynamics, so we need to gather preliminary field data to better understand how significant this is. The pump-priming funding is supported by additional investment from three Malaysian Universities that demonstrates their commitment to formalising a nascent relationship.