The UK heritage sector wants to offer all visitors memorable, inclusive, engaging and enjoyable experiences. Museums increasingly provide access to their exhibitions, narratives and artefacts for everyone, with their evolving practice including accessible offers (such as audio description and BSL, audio-guides, interactive content and a wide range of community and educational programming) for people who cannot experience the museum in traditional ways. Yet, this reliance on 'access' provision to support non-traditional visitors perpetuates a dichotomy between 'abled' and 'disabled' people that marginalises non-normative ways of experiencing the museum. When museums provide alternative ways of accessing content for specific audiences, they unwittingly exclude from mainstream provision those people who want or need to access museums through senses other than sight. Consequently, even as museums aim to create welcoming experiences for all visitors, their assumption that sight is a necessary part of the optimal museum experience, risks alienating people who prefer to access and process information in ways that are not only - or not entirely - visual. A challenge remains: how can museums create inclusive interventions (interventions accessible to everyone) without having to spend time and money on also creating 'accessible' programming for minority audiences. The Sensational Museum aims to address this systemic issue by rethinking the role and place of the senses in the museum. It declines the orthodox classical assumptions of the fixed array of 5 bodily senses (that have privileged sight, and reductively contained our other senses) in favour of a new sensory logic. It leverages the liberating notion of 'Sensory Gain' and the idea that everyone can benefit from the 'access' traditionally offered only to disabled visitors. Consequently, the research aims (ambitiously and audaciously) not only to articulate what such 'trans-sensory' thinking and practices might be, but to demonstrate and test this approach within the context of real-world museum collection and communication - evidencing its value for practitioners, policymakers and standards agencies. It leverages inter-disciplinary research by bringing together insights and methods from museum studies, critical disability studies, psychology and design and embraces a co-creation, inclusive methodology where disabled and non-disabled stakeholders are involved in every phase of research design and delivery. It brings together the UK's leading professional bodies and standards agencies (Museums Association and Collections Trust) along with a national network of disability organisations (including the Disability Collaborative Network, the Accentuate Programme and VocalEyes) and a collective of 20 collaborating museums and galleries committed to creative and profound transformation of museum practice (led by Accentuate's 'Curating for Change' network, supported by the NLHF) as well as one of the world's leading cultural consultancies (Barker Langham). This multi-partner project is not just a project about making museums accessible to disabled people. It is a project that uses what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone. This research will use a design logic to structure and drive its work. First, we will prepare a blueprint for a new sensory logic. We will then prototype an inclusive, co-creation toolkit and trans-sensory data model and interface, before piloting and evaluating these prototypes with museum professionals and visitors across the UK and finally refining and promoting the outputs in publications, conferences and at showcase events. By responding to this systemic sector issue, leveraging inter-disciplinary scholarship, activating this radical concept of the 'trans-sensory', and following a creative and practice-led line of enquiry TSM will produce a radically new way of thinking about museum experience for both practitioners and visitors.

The law relating to the museum sector is complex. This is due in part to the variety of governance structures; for example, amongst other possibilities, museums may exist as a company or charitable trust, or both, or may be under local authority control. Objects in the collection may be on loan, or they may be held on trust, or owned by a company, or by a local authority. Furthermore, whereas special legislation applies to national museums, different statutory sources need to be considered in relation to local authorities. Yet there is no book covering both law and museum ethics to help guide museums in relation to the management of their collections. Museums strive to maintain public trust and confidence in a challenging financial climate and the need for information to assist them in arriving at informed judgments has never been stronger. The results of this project will include, amongst other outputs, a book discussing how legal and ethical principles apply to museum collections, and a Report on the Legal Status of Museum Collections. The book will make a unique and scholarly contribution to the fields of law, museum studies and cultural studies. The book will provide information and practical advice for museums. A number of public bodies in the museum and charity sector have expressed strong support for this work and I will consult these bodies, and others, as this work progresses. I will provide opportunities for professionals to raise issues which concern them, such as by participating in the Museums Association's annual conference and at other national and regional conferences and workshops. This level of consultation will ensure that the contents of my outputs remain relevant. Museums currently have insufficient guidance on a number of topics. For example, many museums possess items which were collected in the past but where no record exists in relation to their acquisition. This is a problem which has created immense difficulties for museums. The book will address these pressing concerns, providing legal and ethical guidance for curators, managers and governing bodies. In this context, it will explore the possibilities for law reform, examining recommendations made by the Scottish Law Commission and considering the potential for a more limited legislative reform for all museums in the UK. In a fast-changing world, museums are expected to develop new strategies to enhance public access to their collections. This research will therefore cover legal and ethical issues relating to art loans, providing guidance and discussing pitfalls. It will also provide impartial information relating to legal structures. For example, charitable status may offer independence, financial advantages, and better protection to the collection. The recent court decision involving the Wedgwood Museum Collection has highlighted the risks involved where a public collection is affected by a company insolvency. The decision demonstrates how important it is to disseminate information about the law to ensure that there is responsible decision making. Although this project is ambitious in scope and addresses entirely underresearched areas, it is manageable because it builds upon my accumulated expertise. I acquired knowledge relating to deaccessioning and sale of objects from museum collections, together with experience of working with public sector bodies, during the course of a 50% AHRC Placement Fellowship. I have written on the law relating to acquisition of cultural items by museums in a book discussing strategic measures to combat the illicit trade in art and antiquities. Some matters, such as the law relating to insolvency and corporate governance, involve drawing on expertise gathered when I wrote a substantial book on the law of commercial fraud. However, the outputs from this new project will also involve a close examination of museum ethics and how these principles interact with the law.

The 'MARCH' Network proposes that Assets for Resilient Communities lie at the heart of Mental Health (M-ARC-H) and is dedicated to advancing research into the impact of these assets in enhancing public mental health and wellbeing, preventing mental illness and supporting those living with mental health conditions. Specifically, it will advance our understanding of the impact of social, cultural and community assets including the arts, culture, heritage, libraries, parks, community gardens, allotments, leisure centres, volunteer associations, social clubs and community groups, of which there are an anticipated 1 million in the UK. The network will bring together a Disciplinary Expert Group of researchers with a Policy Group of major national policy bodies, a Patient Public Involvement Group of national mental health charities, and a Community Engagement Group of national organisations. Across three years, our network will unite research with policy and practice to tackle critical questions of research priorities, methods, and implementation in this field; understand and resolve barriers to mobilising community assets; and provide training and support to the next generation of researchers. Specifically, our network will address questions organised in two core work streams (WS): WS1. Cross-disciplinary research and challenges: (a) What evidence is there, from a cross-disciplinary perspective, for how and why community assets impact on public health and wellbeing and the lives of those living with mental health problems, and where are the gaps for future research? (b) How can we use a cross-disciplinary approach to provide meaningful data to different stakeholders and users? WS2. Equity of engagement and access innovation: (a) Who amongst the UK population, demographically and geographically, currently engages with these programmes and how does participation vary dependent on mental health? (b) What are the current barriers and enablers to engagement at an individual, organisational and policy level and how can we develop innovative approaches to enhance engagement, especially amongst the vulnerable? This research work will be complemented by a rich portfolio of impact, engagement and training activities (see 'Impact Summary'). This network aligns with strategic priorities of the AHRC and ESRC as well as having a secondary relevance to the priorities of the MRC (through its consideration of the role of community assets and social prescribing to support medical approaches to mental health), NERC (through its exploration of the impact of green spaces) and EPSRC (through its focus on the opportunities provided by technology for driving research forwards). It has also been designed in response to the Network Plus Research Agenda. In addition to the objectives already discussed in the prior Je-S section, it is responsive to many of the mental health challenges cited in the agenda. For example, the call specification noted that only 25% of people with mental health problems receive ongoing treatment. Whilst there are recognised economic and resource constraints with delivering sufficient mental health services, this Network proposes to focus on the role that existing community assets could play in providing support to a much wider range of people in the UK including those on waiting lists. As another example, the call specification raised that 70% of children and adolescents with mental health problems have not had appropriate interventions at an earlier age. This Network will involve working with policy makers and community organisations to see how research could help overcome barriers to access with the aim of engaging more young people and those who are hard to reach. Overall, the network will seek to understand and support future research into how community assets could be mobilised to encourage more resilient individuals and communities with a greater understanding of and capacity for self-management of mental health.

The impact of digital media on museums has been pervasive and profound. The notions of visit and object, collection and exhibition, have all been recoded by the presence and influence of five decades of digital technology. Constructively disruptive, 'digital' has changed the idiom of 'museum' (Parry 2007, 2010). And yet, it is widely recognised that the digital literacy of the museum workforce remains one of the key challenges continuing to impede the adoption of technology within the sector (NMC, 2015; 2016). According to Nesta, the AHRC and Arts Council England (2014; 2015), over a third of museums in the UK still feel that they do not have the in-house skills to meet their digital aspirations, and rather than improving, some digital skills areas have decreased. Addressing this pressing issue, the aim of the 'One by One' project is to leverage interdisciplinary scholarship to understand how to deliver a transformative framework for museum workforce digital literacy. Our project builds upon two years of foundation research and international collaboration, and a call by the international community of digital heritage researchers, enshrined in the 'Baltimore Principles' (NMC 2016), for a shift in the way we think about digital training in museums. Our response is to use the idea of the 'postdigital museum' (Parry 2013) as a conceptual framework in which to use humanities scholarship to design, empirically test and propose an alternative training and development provision. A form of practice-led research, 'One by One' uses the protocols and sequencing of Design Thinking to organise and drive its activities, with Action Research as the method to carry out a series of design experiments (interventions) in an array of localised museum settings across the UK. Having used a series of case studies to review the skills ecosystem for digital skills in the UK museums sector, our project uses a set of 'Literacy Labs' with museum professionals to help generate typologies of museum digital literacy to identify relevant 'activations' for developing each of these digital literacies. Led by our network of six 'Digital Fellows', these typologies of digital literacies and activation are then tested through a series of action research interventions situated in Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, National Museums Scotland, The National Army Museum, The Royal Pavilion & Museums Brighton and Hove, Derby Museums Trust, and The Museum of London. 'One by One' will synthesise the findings of this test phase of the project into a refined 'Framework of Museum Digital Literacy', which it will then share at a major national Skills Summit co-hosted with Arts Council England, as well as in a single open online professional development resource, hosted by FutureLearn, free and accessible for the whole museum sector. We aim to produce measurable changes in the confidence and competence of the museums workforce to use technology in their practice, as well as the awareness and understanding of policy makers surrounding the use of digital in museums. This is research that will benefit not just the museum workforce in the UK, but policy makers working in the fields of cultural policy, heritage and creative economy. 'One by One' is an ambitious collaboration between academics, museums and national cultural agencies: the Museums Association; the Association of Independent Museums; the Museum Development Network; Arts Council England; Culture24; the Heritage Lottery Fund; Nesta; the Collections Trust; and the National Museums Directors' Conference. And, as such, our project responds directly to the new Minister of State for Digital and Culture, who in his first major speech on museums, 22 Sept. 2016), called for museums to harness 'academic collaboration', to 'work better together in the digital age'.

It is people who drive digital change in the museum. Irrespective of the focus on 'technology' (on hardware and software, standards and systems, products and platforms), it will, in fact, always be the leaders and curators, partners and stakeholders, who enable the digital capability of museums. And yet, the lived professional experience of individuals inside the organisation, in the workforce, around digital change is little understood, much overlooked, and frequently generalised upon. Plainly put: the very dimension that we now know is fundamental to digital change in the museum, is that about which - in our scholarship and practice - we know the least. Moreover, at a time when museums are not only attempting to understand new forms of visitor participation and digital experience, but are doing so within a moment of both institutional and individual precarity, this need to understand the human (and not just the technical) dimension of museum digital change, becomes crucial. And so, it is to this issue - and this gap in our knowledge of museum digital maturity - that this project looks. '3 by 3' is an 18-month, multi-partner, transatlantic research collaboration, bringing together cultural institutions, academics and professional bodies to open new directions for leading empathetic and equitable digital change in museums at a time of institutional and individual precarity. The project asks what new models of 'empathic leadership' might be needed to enable the holistic institutional adoption of (and adaption to) digital, as well as which inequalities exist in the landscape of digital change in museums, and how can these be confronted. In doing so, '3 by 3' attempts to initiate a retelling of what successful digital leadership in museums looks like - in human and not just business and technological terms. This research confronts and articulates a new set of questions on equity, inclusion and diversity within the digital workforce, workplace and culture of museum digital change, re-locating museum technology as a socially purposeful subject and set of practices. In this way, the project is leading an 'emotional turn' in museum computing and digital heritage, characterised by a new sensibility to the emotional labour, affective practices and personal storytelling underpinning digital work in museums. Led by the University of Leicester and Southern University New Orleans (and supported by Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University), '3 by 3' is a unique research collaboration, bringing together the leading sector bodies in the UK and US: the American Alliance of Museums with the UK's Museums Association, and the Museum Computer Network (US) with the Museums Computer Group (UK). At the core of the project is a transatlantic partnership of cultural organisations, with digital leads across the Smithsonian Institution partnering with their counterparts in the Science Museum Group, Victoria and Albert Museum, Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, and National Museums Scotland. Driving this practice-based research of '3 by 3', are '3' researchers following '3' key themes (on 'empathy', 'precarity', 'equity'), through a series of live interventions within the working environments of the partner museums. Real-world tests of new approaches to leading digital change. As well as producing a series of practitioner-facing resources, a new reflective podcast series for the sector, and the synthesis of its findings into a cohesive 'Framework for New Digital Leadership in Museums', '3 by 3' will also partner with its policy-making and industry collaborators (that include Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Culture24) to produce a 'Sector White Paper', setting out the challenges and opportunities for UK and US organisations as they lead digital change (empathetically and equitably) in these times of individual and institutional precarity.