This project seeks to develop collaborative research, exchange, and educational opportunities between Exeter (Archaeology, PI Marisa Lazzari; co-I Gill Juleff) and Geneva (Environmental Governance and Territorial Development Hub/Institute, GEDT/Department of Sociology, PI Peter Larsen) to investigate the intersections of cultural heritage and landscape sustainability within a global arena. Fostering a comparative outlook stemming from the experiences of indigenous and minority communities around the globe, the project will focus on (but not limited to) the Americas and the Asia-Pacific. The main goal is bridging academic interests into a coherent research design that contributes to the evelopment of decolonial approaches and the promotion of collaborative and cross-cultural methodologies. Building upon the applicants’ earlier roundwork, the project will cement and expand the network of collaborators and research partners including NGO and non-HEI bodies, through a portfolio of activities and outputs aimed at policy-oriented action research and high-impact outreach in line with the UN Sustainable evelopment Goals, therefore boosting the reputation of both institutions as international hubs for innovative and impactful research.

The partnership provides an innovative interdisciplinary outlook to the long-term configurations of people, land, and heritage. Of particular interest is how indigenous socio-material configurations meet new challenges in the heritage sphere and the accompanying national and transnational regulatory regimes claiming as ‘resources’ those substances, materials, and places, which have bred life into communities over centuries. We define these new spaces of encounters as ‘resource landscapes’, delineated by the entanglements between place-based long-term practices and knowledges with the transnational practices, valuations and expectations underpinning models of development based on resources extraction. The activation of the partnership will bring existing educational and research expertise at Exeter and Geneva together, paving the ground for increasing the exchange of know-how and staff and student mobility. One PDRA at Exeter (Francesco Orlandi Barbano, hD candidate, Archaeology) will contribute to the project as liaison between the principal applicants, information gathering, content creation nd dissemination, while gaining valuable specific and transferable skills. A student assistant will support the coordination and organisation of the workshop at UGE. The project workshops will be open to invited post-doctoral researcher and doctoral students. Student-facing activities will include postgraduate students undertaking relevant programmes, such as UoE’s MA in International Heritage Management & Consultancy and UNIGEs STAREG and MUSE programmes.

Aims and objectives:
The project’s general aim is to foster a transdisciplinary approach to heritage in resource landscapes, with a particular emphasis on the role of the past in imagining more inclusive futures. The project will compare and assess a portfolio of approaches and case studies that can inform current research and teaching practice and enable new collaborative pathways.

The specific objectives are:

• Facilitate academic exchange and opportunities for sustainable, long-term research and teaching collaboration between Geneva and Exeter.
• Recognise common themes and divergences in approaches and experiences, acting as a sandbox for collaborative new initiatives.
• Define and prioritise areas of focus for targeted funding programmes (AHRC, GCRF; see below)
• Explore potential for staff and student exchanges for teaching and research collaboration, particularly connected to a collaborative summer chool in critical approaches and decolonial heritage management.
• Identify new NGOs and non-HEI potential partners and integrate this information within a shared database.

Inactivity and poor self-care predispose older adults undergoing surgical interventions to decrease their long-term health and life quality outcomes. Currently, assessment of patients' physical and psychological states (e.g., activity) for a given short-term period (e.g., week) is conducted via momentary Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs). PROs suffer from reporting biases, ceiling, floor effects, and no sensitivity to change at their scale's extremes. Conversely, personal smartphones, and wearables are increasingly accurate in long-term behavioral Technology-Reported Outcomes (TechROs). However, the extent to which TechROs provide clinically useful information in the context of surgical interventions is unknown. We involve patients and clinicians in designing a replicable research protocol coQoL@hip2neck for the co-calibration of the pre-and postoperative PRO and TechRO for hip arthroplasty and cervical myelopathy. |Via an interactive additive approach, aspects of human factors, including the data quality, the methods' feasibility, reliability, and validity, are scrutinized. Our team of experts in psychometrics, quality of life assessment, behavioral modeling, and clinical pathways for the two surgical interventions jointly informs designs of longitudinal quality of life assessments, progressing clinical decision-making in this field at the worldwide level. The results acquired in this initial project will strengthen our application for the Horizon Europe 2022 call.

This project seeks to get a better understanding of preferences for different types of leaders in crisis contexts, in particular, in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. More specifically, we seek to examine how the framing of a crisis in terms of economic, health, or social priorities may impact on preferences for leaders from certain social groups (based on gender and ethnic, racial and immigration [ERI] groups), and the role of stereotypical expectations of leadership and group memberships.
A vast literature on the socio-demographics of those who hold leadership positions show that leadership ideals are closely aligned with a male, White prototype in Western societies (Koenig et al., 2011). However, these tendencies are highly context-dependent and research on the “glass cliff” demonstrates that crisis contexts may give rise to the appointment of women or members of ERI minority groups to positions of power (Morgenroth et al., 2020; Ryan et al., 2016).
As a declared pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis has not only led to substantial strains of the health system (Hogan et al., 2020) but also to significant economy consequences and the increases in social inequalities in almost every region of the globe (Cerami et al., 2020; Guest et al., 2020).
In this context, leaders’ actions had an immediate and restrictive impact on almost all people’s personal lives. Thus, political leadership has been closely monitored by the public. In a correlational study with citizens of five countries (N = 1,259), we collected preliminary data on how peoples’ perceptions of the crisis affected their leadership preference (Takizawa et al., in prep). Findings suggest that people’s framing of the crisis as being understood as primarily economic, social, or health related, was associated with different expectations of a leader. More specifically, an ERI minority leader was preferred by female participants who thought that the leader should focus on the health or social aspect of the crisis over the economic aspect. However, preference for a female political leader was not contingent on the crisis type. The present project seeks to refine these findings by conducting experimental research to establish causalities and to better understand their underpinnings.
This context allows for a real-life test of research into the glass cliff in a new and previously untested crisis context, COVID-19. MR coined the term and delivered initial illustrations of the phenomenon for women in organizational settings (Ryan & Haslam, 2005). CK started her work on the phenomenon in Exeter (e.g., Ryan et al., 2010; Kulich et al., 2014) and then moved to the University of Geneva, where she has been working with VI and RT on explanations of the glass cliff looking at gender and ERI groups and the political context (e.g., Aelenei et al., 2020; Robinson et al., in press). This Seed Funding will allow us to reconnect and develop new projects that focus on leadership emergence amongst underrepresented social groups, starting with the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

International courts and tribunals (ICTs) play a pivotal role in the international legal order. They provide a peaceful alternative for the settlement of disputes, and they interpret and uphold the law. However, the political and legal landscape has evolved drastically since their creation—especially in the last thirty years. Notably, the participation of members of the civil society in international cooperation, law-making and monitoring has become one of the basic features of modern international relations. Many ‘non-State actors’ have taken a growing interest in responding to international issues such as climate change, grave human rights violations or one-sided foreign direct investment by pursuing litigation on the state-centric international stage, upon the grounds that such matters are of public interest. This has led to demands for procedural inclusion and transparency before ICTs.

One of the current and underexplored challenges faced by ICTs is their adaptation and response to such demands, which are increasing alongside growing global crises. Indeed, many ICTs were initially designed to settle bilateral disputes between states, with defined standing and in states’ interests. But this traditional understanding of international disputes is procedurally limited and leaves out disputes over global commons (such as the deep seabed and space), global goods (such as health), and disputes where the harm is suffered not by a single state, but the international community at large (such as climate change).

Against this background, at the heart of this project lie the following questions: to what degree can ICTs respond to new procedural and substantive developments in international society to successfully address disputes based on the public interest? Can public interest litigation before ICTs be a solution for today’s global problems? Is there a potential for public interest litigation before such fora to be developed?

By bringing experts in this area together, and led by Dr Justine Bendel (University of Exeter) and Dr Yusra Suedi (University of Geneva), this project aims to make a novel contribution to the understanding of international adjudication in settling disputes in the public interest. It will do so by asking the following theoretical and normative questions: Does public interest litigation before ICTs even exist? If so, what does it entail? If not, should it exist?

Following this, this project will turn towards more doctrinal questions in specific areas of international law, chosen on the basis of their contemporary relevance:
• How can public interest litigation be applied to climate change issues, in the context of scientific uncertainty?
• How can areas that are considered as common goods, such as space or the deep seabed, lead to international adjudication?
• What role does public interest litigation play in investment arbitration? What are the challenges in this area?
• Why is the adjudication of cases involving violations of fundamental customary rules such as the prohibition of genocide established as public interest litigation? Why those types of rules and not others?
• How can threats to global health be litigated before international courts and tribunals in the name of the public interest?