AP4L is a 3-year program of interdisciplinary research, centring on the online privacy & vulnerability challenges that people face when going through major life transitions. Our central goal is to develop privacy-by-design technologies to protect & empower people during these transitions. Our work is driven by a narrative that will be familiar to most people. Life often "just happens", leading people to overlook their core privacy and online safety needs. For instance, somebody undergoing cancer treatment may be less likely to finesse their privacy setting on social media when discussing the topic. Similarly, an individual undergoing gender transition may be unaware of how their online activities in the past may shape the treatment into the future. This project will build the scientific and theoretical foundations to explore these challenges, as well as design and evaluate three core innovations that will address the identified challenges. AP4L will introduce a step-change, making online safety and privacy as painless and seamless as possible during life transitions To ensure a breadth of understanding, we will apply these concepts to four very different transitions through a series of carefully designed co-creation activities, devised as part of a stakeholder workshop held in Oct'21. These are relationship breakdowns; LBGT+ transitions or transitioning gender; entering/ leaving employment in the Armed Forces; and developing a serious illness or becoming terminally ill. Such transitions can significantly change privacy considerations in unanticipated or counter-intuitive ways. For example, previously enabled location-sharing with a partner may lead to stalking after a breakup; 'coming out' may need careful management across diverse audiences (e.g - friends, grandparents) on social media. We will study these transitions, following a creative security approach, bringing together interdisciplinary expertise in Computer Science, Law, Business, Psychology and Criminology. We will systematise this knowledge, and develop fundamental models of the nature of transitions and their interplay with online lives. These models will inform the development of a suite of technologies and solutions that will help people navigate significant life transitions through adaptive, personalised privacy-enhanced interventions that meet the needs of each individual and bolster their resilience, autonomy, competence and connection. The suite will comprise: (1) "Risk Playgrounds", which will build resilience by helping users to explore potentially risky interactions of life transitions with privacy settings across their digital footprint in safe ways (2) "Transition Guardians", which will provide real-time protection for users during life transitions. (3) "Security Bubbles", which will promote connection by bringing people together who can help each other (or who need to work together) during one person's life transition, whilst providing additional guarantees to safeguard everyone involved. In achieving this vision, and as evidenced by £686K of in-kind contributions, we will work with 26 core partners spanning legal enforcement agencies (e.g., Surrey Police), tech companies (e.g., Facebook, IBM), support networks (e.g., LGBT Foundation, Revenge Porn Helpline) and associated organisations (e.g., Ofcom, Mastercard, BBC). Impact will be delivered through various activities including a specially commissioned BBC series on online life transitions to share knowledge with the public; use of the outputs of our projects by companies & social platforms (e.g., by incorporating into their products, & by designing their products to take into consideration the findings of our project) & targeted workshops to enable knowledge exchange with partners & stakeholders.

This project addresses an urgent issue that has profound effects on humans, animals, and the wider environment, and in which there is high public interest in the UK. The raising of farmed animals is a major global enterprise with massive impacts on domestic and wild animals, human food and water security, human health, and the environment. In 2013, 77 billion birds and mammals and around 6 trillion fish were used for human food globally, using 78% of available agricultural land, consuming 35% of global cereal output, resulting in more greenhouse gas emissions than those from transport globally, and contributing to a wide range of human health problems including antibiotic resistance, zoonotic diseases such as bird and swine flu, and increased incidence of heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and stroke from the associated increase in meat consumption. The raising of farmed animals has grown markedly since the mid-20th century, primarily as a result of a revolutionary intensification of production methods. Poultry consumption has increased at three times that of human population growth in each of the past five decades and a 73% rise in demand for meat from 2010 levels is expected by 2050. Progressive intensification in the rearing of farmed animals, high and rising public concern about farmed animal welfare, and uncertainty about UK farmed animal welfare standards post-Brexit make this project timely. Churches and other Christian organizations in the UK have significant interests in and influence over animal farming in the UK, through ownership of agricultural land, investments in food producers and retailers, participation in policy debates, and consumption of animal products, and will therefore play an important role in public debates about farmed animal welfare. It is striking, therefore, that they currently have no policies concerning farmed animal welfare. This project will produce the first substantive academic discussion of the Christian ethics of farmed animal welfare and, by working with national churches and other organizational partners, will resource the development of new policy and influence institutional practice concerning the raising of farmed animals and consumption of products derived from them. It will also provide a new model of how to engage religious groups and other groups with particular commitments and concerns with the ethical implications of new scientific knowledge and its implications for practice. The project will use a collaborative research process between an interdisciplinary research team and institutional partners which will result in (1) a framework for institutional policy and practice; (2) a process for engaging institutions with that framework to enable development of policy and changes in practice; (3) the first academic monograph in the field and related journal outputs. The partners committed to this project are major Christian denominations representing the majority of the Christians in the UK (Church of England, Roman Catholic Church, Church of Scotland, Church in Wales, Methodist Church, and United Reformed Church), the globally leading charity addressing farmed animal welfare (Compassion in World Farming), groups representing farmers and veterinarians, and Christian animals organizations. The range of this collaboration and its potential influence to improve welfare outcomes is remarkable and unprecedented. The project will enable institutional changes in practice that will have substantial implications for farmed animal welfare and a resulting impact on human well-being and the environment. These changes will be enabled through a process that draws on graphic illustrators, a performance artist, and change facilitators, to help institutions appreciate the need for change and the route to achieve it. Beyond the funded period, new institutions will be engaged, and a planned successor project in the US will build on this one to generate even greater impacts.

This project will investigate the contrast between short term temporalities and the long run temporality of 'ancestral time' in order to understand and repair the failure of modern industrial societies to mitigate human climate impacts. When considering the future allocation of resources it is common practice for government and business to discount returns on investments both with respect to time and value. This produces a short-term temporal outlook in public life that trades future costs against present-day consumption. It also promotes a framework in which responsibility for climate and ecological costs is diffused or denied. By contrast secular environmentalism, such as the 'Transition Towns' movement, advocates for care in the light of dramatic future climate change. However 'climate apocalyptic' has catastrophist overtones and assumes a radical break between the present and the near future. Socio-psychological studies reveal that catastrophism can be demotivating to positive change. Climate apocalyptic may therefore be no more effective than economistic temporalities in sustaining a sense of legacy between present and future generations. Religious organisations, like cultural institutions concerned with heritage, think differently about time, community and responsibility. This is because their mission is to engage the weight of the past in the present. We call this awareness of past time in the present 'ancestral time' and this refers to a spiritual disposition in which debts to past and future generations of humans are honoured. Christian understanding of time is shaped by a conception of intergenerational community, known as the 'communion of saints'. In this idea present generations are conscious of the presence of the past and of their consequent debts both to the dead and of their legacy and responsibilities to future generations. Hence the earliest traces of the human built environment in Scotland are ancient memorials to the dead, such as the neolithic cairns on Orkney. The project team will explore the viability of ancestral time through research into the motives, practices and values of climate activists who are also members of religious communities. In this project we will seek to discover whether ancestral time can offer an alternative to both economistic and climate apocalyptic temporalities and sustain a greater sense of connection and responsibility between present and future generations. The project research will also seek to articulate a deeper conceptual frame for faith-based climate activism, which, as our practitioner partner notes, often manifests a passionate but 'ill-defined feeling of "care for creation" and can lack a sense of structure, legacy and impetus'. The project brings together the ecumenical charity, Eco-Congregation Scotland, consisting of over 280 churches across Scotland, with an interdisciplinary team from the University of Edinburgh. Drawing on insights from theology, environmental philosophy, economic history, geography, and political theory the project will enable eco-congregations to clarify and re-imagine their vision of the future. The moral tragedy of climate change is that its effects will be felt decades after the behaviours that cause it: this presents a cultural imperative to promote behaviours and practices that are responsive to a long term 'ancestral' chain of cause and effect. The Scottish government has recognised the potential offered by spiritual temporality by providing financial support to Eco-Congregation Scotland to embed sustainable and low carbon behaviours in local communities and households. The clearer articulation of a unique 'ancestral' temporal horizon may further invigorate religious climate activism, and provide important new resources for secular climate activism and policy makers as they seek to influence businesses, householders and local communities to act in ways that respect the ecological legacy of present generations in the future.