Other Everests is a new interdisciplinary research network that takes as its starting point the centenary of the post-war British Everest campaigns of 1921-1924. It will bring together international scholars, archivists, curators, learned and professional societies and the UK mountaineering community to critically reassess the legacy of the Everest expeditions and to re-evaluate the symbolic, political and cultural status of Everest in the contemporary world. Everest became the object of British mountaineering attention after the First World War for a number of reasons. Himalayan mountaineering presented the opportunity to reconstruct a form of heroic masculinity. To 'conquer' Everest would demonstrate British racial vigour and imperial fitness to rule in India. The mass media were avid for stories of heroism and adventure. The mythopoeic disappearance of Mallory and Irvine in 1924 reinforced dominant narratives of ill-fated adventure and the nobility of sacrifice. Enduring archetypes were created that continue to shape the popular understanding of Everest to the present day. The Other Everests network will bring post-colonial perspectives to bear on Everest mountaineering narratives, challenging us to broaden and deepen our understanding of Everest's mountaineering history, its symbolic legacy and contemporary meanings, shifting the focus away from colonial-era narratives, providing access to the hidden histories of Everest. It brings historical perspectives to bear on the multiple contemporary ethical, social and political challenges thrown up by Everest, bringing together historians, geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and literature scholars to examine subjects as diverse as: the legacy of British imperialism, the hidden histories of exploration, labour hierarchies and welfare; 'overtourism' and the environmental and social impacts of adventure tourism, the disposal of human remains on the mountain, and the globalisation of mountaineering. The Other Everests network will develop a network of academics and the custodians of significant archival collections relating to Everest, such as our project partner, the Royal Geographical Society, enabling contemporary scholarship to contribute to the discussion around appropriate forms of commemoration of the post-war Everest expeditions. The network will reflect on the commemorative activities that have already taken place in 2021 for the centenary of the much smaller Everest Reconnaissance Expedition of 1921, as well as taking part in the debates around the much more significant forthcoming centenaries of the British attempts to climb Everest that will be in 2022 and 2024. The network will ask fundamental questions about commemoration, memory and meaning and the role of contemporary archives in understanding Everest today: questions such as 'Whose history are we commemorating?'; 'How do we incorporate Nepalese and Tibetan perspectives in our interpretation of mountaineering on Everest?'; 'What are the sources for the history of indigenous high-altitude labour?'; 'How does history continue to shape contemporary globalised mountaineering cultures on Everest?'; 'How can digitisation facilitate co-production and digital repatriation?'; 'What are the challenges of engaging different communities and publics as co-producers of knowledge, enabling them to be part of the process of reinterpreting the legacy of mountaineering on Everest?'. Other Everests will take a once-in-a-100-year opportunity to critically reassess the legacy of Everest and its meaning in contemporary culture and society. It will make its findings widely accessible in an Open-Access collection of critical essays that address key themes highlighted by the network and it will work with our project partners at the Kendal Mountain Festival to develop public lectures and events that translate contemporary scholarship into publicly accessible formats.

Hundreds of millions of people live close to, and depend upon, the world's large rivers for water, food, transport and the maintenance of a thriving ecosystem. However, these rivers are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of a wide range of natural and human-induced disturbances, including climate change, construction of large dams, river engineering works, deforestation, agricultural intensification, and mining activity. Over the past 20 years, climate change and deforestation have impacted on the hydrology and sediment fluxes within the Amazon River Basin. However, the Amazon has remained one of the few large river systems that has been largely unaffected by dams. This situation is changing rapidly, because widespread hydropower dam construction in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador now threatens the basin, with >300 dams planned or under construction. These dams are expected to trigger severe hydro-physical and ecological disturbances throughout the basin, including massive reductions in sediment and nutrient delivery to the lowland Amazon and its floodplains, substantial degradation of river beds and banks, significant changes in river water levels and flooding, and adverse impacts on river and floodplain ecosystems, on which the human population depends. Recent high profile studies highlight the need for international action to assess and mitigate these impacts, both in the Amazon and elsewhere. However, our capacity to do this is severely restricted by an absence of quantitative models that can predict how environmental disturbances propagate through large rivers and floodplains, over continental distances, and decadal to centennial time periods. Critically, environmental disturbances driven by dams, climate and land cover change promote dynamic river responses (e.g., changes in river width, depth, slope, sediment size, degree of branching and rate of floodplain reworking), which in turn control changes in flood conveyance and downstream sediment delivery. Despite advances in modelling of river dynamics over short distances (<100 km), hydrological models that are applied to continental-scale drainage basins treat rivers and floodplains as static conduits. Consequently, such models are unable to represent or predict the future impacts of environmental change on flooding, sediment fluxes or river and floodplain functioning. This project will deliver a step-change in our ability to model, predict and understand how the world's large rivers are impacted by, and respond to, environmental change. We will achieve this by implementing a research strategy that involves six elements: First, we will develop a new multi-scale numerical modelling approach that enables the effects of river dynamics on environmental disturbance propagation through continental-scale drainage basins to be simulated. Second, we will develop a suite of environmental scenarios representing climate and land cover changes and dam construction throughout the Amazon Basin for the recent past (1985-2015) and future (up to 2200). Third, we will collect new field datasets at sites on the Amazon River that are required to test key components of the model. Fourth, we will work with an international team of project partners to assemble high-resolution field, satellite and model datasets that quantify channel and floodplain processes, and river morphology and dynamics throughout the Amazon Basin. Fifth, we will use these data to carry out rigorous testing of our new model. Sixth, we will apply the model to predict the future evolution of the Amazon River and its tributaries for a wide range of environmental change scenarios, and quantify the controls on hydro-geomorphic disturbance propagation within large drainage basins. We will work with our project partners to disseminate our model code, datasets and project outcomes to non-academic stakeholders, both nationally and internationally.

Context ‘The Places that Speak to Us and the Publics We Talk With’ develops the work of two Networks funded under the Researching Environmental Change Network call: ‘Local Places, Global Processes: Histories of Environmental Change’ and ‘Cultural Spaces of Climate’. ‘Local Places’ revolved around three site-specific workshops on location at Wicken Fen (Cambridgeshire), Quantock Hills (Somerset), and Kielder Water and Forest Park (Northumberland). At each venue, we worked with a formal project partner - the National Trust, the AONB service and Northumbrian Water, respectively - and forged relationships with other environment management organizations, including the Forestry Commission and the Wildlife Trusts. We combined indoor pursuits such as academic papers, presentations by project partners and round table discussions involving partner representatives, with direct engagement with the locales themselves. The Cultural Spaces of Climate’ Network was more orientated towards traditional academic discourse in the seminar room, and entailed innovative engagement with arts and humanities representatives, the broader research community, learned and professional societies and the public sector, to identify ways to redress the global and scientific bias in climate discourse, to explore the meaning of climate for different groups in different spatial and temporal contexts and to interrogate climate’s ontological status. This joint proposal from the ‘Local Places’ Investigators and the Principal Investigator for ‘Cultural Spaces of Climate’ combines their experience and expertise in pursuit of a new round of activities that develops the original research agendas but uses them in combination to shed light on how processes of communication and the transformation of meaning in different contexts shape understanding of the environment, through the structured interaction of different research strands engaging with a variety of publics. Aims and Objectives The principal aims are: 1. To generate innovative and productive knowledge exchanges between academics studying past environmental change from arts and humanities perspectives and professionals – our project partners – who manage environments and address environmental change. 2. To endeavour to contribute to management decisions by applying perspectives that take account of human perceptions, community involvement and other cultural considerations. Our longer term aim is to help inform public policy. 3. To examine, through the inter-relations of our different sub-projects embracing the broad category ‘the environment’, how different methods, contexts and publics, and processes of communication across these elements, shape environmental understanding and the translation of understanding across audiences. 4. To pursue a range of projects, workshops and events in collaboration with partners to secure these ends. Some of these undertakings are directly related to previous workshops and Network outputs: an interview project, with professionals involved in managing the site and local community members, and a workshop to advance the book arising from ‘Local Places’. Others are spin-offs: the Quantock Orchard Project to research the role of orchards in the local landscape; Walking Militarized Landscapes to devise walks around military training estates; a public lecture series on ‘Environmental Visions’ at Wicken Fen. These projects develop existing partner relationships (National Trust, AONB service and Northumbrian Water) and formalize links with the Forestry Commission and the Royal Geographical Society (With Institute of British Geographers). We bring the two Networks’ research directly together by investigating local co-production and reception of climate change adaptation strategies adopted by environmental managers. Potential applications and benefits The potential research applications include informing decisions by professionals who manage sites and address environmental ch

The discipline of geography has a long tradition of pioneering research and teaching in quantitative methodologies. It has high-end expertise in areas such as GIS, geostatistics, spatial statistics, spatial econometrics and the use of geoinformation in scientific visualizations. It retains the belief that there are common patterns of behaviour, the understanding of which is critical to appreciating society. It is the ability to extract knowledge from geographical data that feeds into evidence-based public policy (including crime or disease mapping) and also to private sector strategies (e.g. locational decision-making supported by large firms such as ESRI or Experian). Nevertheless it, like many allied subjects, has faced a general deskilling in, abandonment of and suspicion towards quantitative methods in social scientific research. Misunderstanding and under-appreciation of these methods is a vicious circle that gets transmitted from one generation of learners to the next. Our response to this situation is to strengthen the connections between schools, universities and workplaces. What is important is continuity in the learning experience, and for pupils and students to appreciate at an early stage that quantitative methods are both an essential part of what it means to do geography and a vital transferable skill that will assist in future career choices. To that end this research, with the backing of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), adopts a strategy targeted specifically at assisting researchers and teachers of quantitative methods to engage pupils and students with those methods, and to offer peer networks of learning, support and of knowledge exchange. It will do so by: (1) Undertaking a scoping study of teachers' experience, familiarity and understanding of quantitative methods, of the importance given to them in upper secondary school and early years undergraduate curricula, what the barriers to learning are, and what might be done to overcome them. (2) Producing a range of web-enabled case studies and vignettes for teachers of quantitative methods (at University and in schools) demonstrating the importance of quantitative methods in geographical research and in the sorts of jobs geography students might go into. (3) Cataloguing the resources available to support teachers of quantitative methods, especially within higher education, and to provide a simple website as a point-of-entry to those resources. (4) Developing a peer network to support the teachers and teaching of quantitative methods in geography, meeting face-to-face and with special sessions at the RGS-IBG annual conference. Whilst the project will have obvious benefits to the discipline of geography, its impact will be more widely felt. That is because almost one third of the more than 20 000 full-time undergraduate students in the UK go on to further study in a wide range of subjects not solely limited to geography, and because geography students go into a wide range of jobs including retail, business, finance, government and public service, conservation and environment, IT, health, media, teaching and research. The project is timely: it has the opportunity to inform discussions about the geography curriculum with information on what is being studied and what could be done to support quantitative methods teaching beginning at A-level. It has the opportunity to direct future updating of the QAA benchmark statements for geography and related social sciences, emphasising the importance of quantitative methodologies such as descriptive, inferential and relational statistics, numerical modelling, remote sensing, geocomputation and geospatial analysis explicitly. In summary, the projects aims to support change in the quality of quantitative methods teaching within geography, knowing that to do so will diffuse into the social sciences and into industrial sectors more widely.

The Hero Project (THP) aims to initiate a national conversation about the figure of the hero. Using a widely disseminated web-mounted survey to take the temperature of the nation, we will ask the British public: who are our heroes today? Who were our heroes? Our intentions are four-fold. First, to establish the features or achievements of a person that contribute to their status as 'hero.' Second, to examine whether or not hero status is historically contingent. Third, to explore the way in which the historical selection of heroes can be seen to have assisted in the formation of ideas of national and community identity. And finally, to pose the further question: are heroes found or made, the latter leading to the fascinating issues: (how) can we build a hero? And how might hero-creation help to shape our futures? Working with two prestigious partner organisations, in the form of the Royal Geographical Society (London) and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh), our cross-disciplinary team based at Newcastle, Aberdeen and Birmingham universities will undertake an integrated programme of research and dissemination activities to explore and analyse the hero figure past, present and future. The Hero Conference - a major international, cross-sector conference, to be held at the RGS in Summer 2015 - will bring together academic, public sector, charity, military and commercial participants to debate the hero figure, and its relevance to today's organisations and audiences. The accompanying 'Heroes of Exploration' exhibition will draw attention to the RGS's holdings, and the role of that organisation in shaping and archiving exploration heroics across the decades. At the SNPG, we will complete archival research and provide a new path through the collections via 'The Hero Trail' - a leaflet aimed at engaging the strategically important 16-24 age group. The research team will also complete journal articles on hero topics in our own areas of research, and mentor a Research Associate in doing likewise. Gathering further collaborators and interested parties across the year of the award, we aim to consolidate 'hero studies' as an important and engaging new field of research, with enormous potential for follow-on and spin-off projects.