Since the 1950-60s, Africa has become a key site of humanitarian aid and developmental interventions. Children have been primary subjects of these actions, serving as universal icons of suffering across humanitarian campaigns. This project will establish an historical geneaology of ‘child-saving’ in Africa, from the first NGO child welfare clinic in 1935 in Addis Ababa to the 2014 #BringBackOurGirls campaign that spread globally from Nigeria. It will interrogate the political, cultural and emotional calculus of compassion that determines which children are adjudged befitting of concern and rescue. It asks how contemporary campaigns are shaped by legacies of (post-)colonial child-saving efforts, and by Western-originated, now globalized, notions of ‘childhood’ and racialized conceptions of ‘Africa’. It traces histories of Sustainable Development Goals custodian indicators on children. Such historical approaches will strengthen strategic thinking and effective practice within child-focused NGOs, delivering impact through helping organizations to better understand how context and temporality affect campaigning and how mis-readings of socio-political and cultural norms across Africa can inhibit effective interventions.

This project connects Exeter & Geneva researchers with archivists and practitioners from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (ICRC, National Red Cross, FICR, Geneva), Save the Children International (London, with archives in Birmingham), Save the Children Switzerland (Zurich), the archives of the Union Internationale de secours aux enfants (Geneva) and UNICEF (Geneva, New York) for three joint archival research sessions and academic-practitioner dialogues in Geneva, Birmingham and London culminating in a Geneva-based workshop to present pilot findings and develop future grant applications.

Understanding the characteristics of impaired walking, in comparison to that of healthy individuals, is the key to developing and prescribing effective and efficient gait retraining interventions. Improving walking performance and quality has a high impact on the quality of life of the patients. The current project leverages UniGe’s world class facilities for collecting gait data on clinical populations in a hospital environment, alongside Exeter’s expertise in the application of non-linear dynamics analysis of gait. Combining these attributes, the aim of this project is to analyse the gait of clinical populations (e.g. children with cerebral palsy) using nonlinear dynamics analysis. The purpose is to underpin the development of gait retraining interventions to improve walking in patients with impaired gait.

Funded by the Seed Corn round of the GenEx fund, our first collaboration in 2019 has led to the development of methods to assess the nonlinear dynamics of constrained healthy gait collected at the UniGe facility. With this Seed Award, we will apply the methods developed to analyse the walking pattern of patients with gait impairments. This new application will provide pilot data to support an application for Wellcome Trust funding to apply this knowledge to underpin the development of a contemporary gait retraining and assessment protocol.

This research is at the forefront of a step-change in the analysis and subsequent understanding of impaired gait. By bringing together our two universities and research groups, outputs will be of internationally excellent, and strengthen our applications for external funding.

Heating contributes to around 50% of the final energy consumption in Switzerland and in the UK. About 75% of the heat supply in both countries is from fossil fuels leading to large CO2 emissions. The UK’s net-zero GHG emissions target by 2050 and the Swiss target of lowering 50% emissions by 2030 (relative to 1990) mean that heating in both countries must be rapidly decarbonised. Although technical solutions exist, there are many hurdles in decarbonising residential heating. The required changes are transformative with improvements to buildings, replacement of existing heating technologies and addition of new infrastructure. Policy measures therefore have a very important role to play in overcoming these hurdles.

This project looks to increase research power and create impact by building on nationally recognised expertise around sustainable heating policy at both Exeter and Geneva in order to build a new research relationship based around teaching and knowledge exchange alongside collaborative policy workshops in each country.

The project will analyse the existing policy measures (financial, fiscal, legislative) for decarbonising residential heating. Uptake of these measures and their impact on decarbonisation will be examined. The project will involve key policy actors and institutions to identify the success factors, problems and the lessons learnt around heat policies in both countries.

The frontier encompassing Russia, China and the Korean peninsula is a region of political and economic competition, ethno-cultural diversity, mobile populations and shifting borders. Present-day narratives of cooperative development coexist with historical memories of imperial conflict. These states balance the rhetoric of regional integration to international audiences with the enhancement of domestic patriotism. Public history becomes a battleground where these tensions are played out.

This project analyses how public history is presented in frontier museums of the Russian Far East (RFE), Manchuria and South Korea, benefitting from the linguistic and fieldwork expertise of both researchers, who have considerable experience in the region. It examines how historical narratives of 17th to 20th-Century imperial competition are selectively packaged for domestic visitors or transborder tourists. Furthermore, it explores how conflict over territory and cultural inheritance is read back even into the pre-modern history of Goguryeo and Balhae. It therefore contributes significantly to geopolitical discussions on Sino-Russian relations as an “Axis of Convenience”.

Initial research was conducted in the RFE and Heilongjiang in 2019. It revealed deliberate ambiguity, even factual manipulation, in Russian state museum narratives of border demarcation and colonial settlement. Manchurian museums combined a celebration of Russian influence with anti-Russian, nationalist messages. Funding is sought to expand fieldwork into Jilin, Inner Mongolia and Korea. The Russian findings have been solicited by Eurasian Geography and Economics; Chinese and Korean material will yield at least two further publications. The project culminates in a joint Exeter-Geneva workshop on historical memory and public history.

Quantum mechanics has enabled fascinating advances in fundamental and applied science in the past decades, from quantum computation to the miniaturisation of technologies and the detection of gravitational waves. Within the research field of quantum thermodynamics, one main question is whether quantum mechanics clearly provides an advantage for operating nanoscale thermal machines.

With this collaborative research grant, we want to take a concrete step towards this goal by investigating the time-resolved dynamics of a thermal machine that generates quantum correlations. The model of the device comprises two artificial atoms placed within a cavity. Remarkably, this device is highly versatile, being a promising platform for quantum thermal machines but also a building block for quantum computation. By analysing the dynamics of the electro-magnetic field leaving the cavity within the framework of stochastic thermodynamics, we will determine 1) the energetic quantities associated with the functioning of this quantum machine, and 2) whether this field carries information about the presence of quantum correlations. The experimental feasibility of this device will be assessed based on these results, providing key insights about nanoscale heat managing and energetic costs of quantum computations.

The Exeter and Geneva lead applicants are internationally recognised specialists in quantum thermodynamics theory with a complementary expertise that will benefit this project. The project will involve two newly recruited members of staff and two existing PhD students from either side. The project will allow the two internationally visible groups to team up, establish collaborations and do ground work for lager future research projects.