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In general, modern governments invest only a small portion of the national income to the generation of new knowledge. In the United Kingdom, the Department of Science and Industrial Research carried out this task until 1965. Then the Science and Technology Act changed responsibility for the curiosity-driven research to five Research Councils which are funded through the Department of Education and Science. In 1993, a White Paper, Realizing Our Potential called for the reorganization of the Research Councils. This chapter discusses the struggles of the establishment and recognition of the need for Council for Research in the Humanities. In 1961, the British Academy suggested for the creation of Council for Research in the Humanities, however it was not granted in the legislation made in 1965. Instead, a separate Research Council for social science was established, which opened up the possibility of creating a separate Research Council for Humanities. In 1990s, discussions on the reorganization of UK research funding reopened the question of how the government funds and supports research in humanities. It also opened talks for the establishment of a freestanding Humanities Research Council. Sometime in 1992, after deliberate considerations of the possible contributions of a separate research council on humanities, a recommendation for the establishment of Humanities Research Council was made. However, on the same year, the government decided not to set up an agency that would support humanities, and, in 1993, the government made a firm decision not to include humanities in any form to the circle of Research Councils — a decision which irked humanities scholars and academy members.

This chapter discusses the reintegration of the need for Humanities Research Council back onto the public agenda and into the policy stream of the UK government. The issue of the Research Council for the humanities came into public and governmental attention when it was fastened to the dilemmas of financing higher education, which itself was tied to the uncertainty of the UK economy. In May 1996, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment together with Secretaries of State for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland appointed Chairman Ron Dearing to create a body that would inquire into the higher education system of the UK. In 1997, the committee produced a report, Higher Education in a Learning Society, or the Dearing Report. The report charted a course for higher education in the UK for the next twenty years. This so-called intellectual capital called for a higher quality of teaching and the need for researchers and research facilities. It offered 93 specific recommendations, among which was a recommendation advocating the immediate establishment of a new Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In 1998, the government recognized the need for the establishment of a research council for humanities and announced the provision of £8M in 1998–1999 for arts and humanities research, albeit after lengthy considerations.

This chapter discusses how the government agreed to the commitment of establishing an Arts and Humanities Research Council. Following the achievement, aspiration, and resistance in the early years of the AHRB, Margaret Hodge, who was the Minister of Lifelong Learning and Higher Education in the UK Department of Education and Skills, formulated a Review of Arts and Humanities Research Funding. This review was carried out on behalf of the Ministers responsible for the higher education in England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. The review aimed to recommend how to enhance support for arts and humanities, including how to encourage government support on such relevant issues. Of the 117 responses from the formal consultations, 114 – 97 per cent – agreed to the need for an organisation dedicated to arts and humanities. The review was subjected to the deliberations and considerations of the Steering Group. The report made by the group was eventually given to the Education Ministers. The Report of the Steering Group lauded the AHRB which despite its provisional start and status made contributions to society and the sciences. Whilst the government made slow progress on the approval of the creation of the AHRB, in January 22, 2003 the government approved the establishment of an Arts and Humanities Research Council which according to the government should be a fully functioning and statutory research council by 2005.

This chapter examines the transition and alignments of communities through a consideration built around the changing role of the community in the photographic archive and the shift from subjecthood to agency. It also examines the use of the photographic archive as a means of exploring the new potentialities of the community archive. The chapter reflects on the sense of the community as pictured within the archive and the increasing potential of self-archiving and curation afforded by new digital technologies. It draws on recent projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connected Communities and Digital Transformations schemes. A model in which the disruptive can be privileged and the counterfactual become an essential component of the archivist's armoury is offered.

This volume is the third of a series of collections arising from an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project on criminalization. It contains revised versions of papers discussed at the project workshops in 2010–11. The book is concerned with three related sets of issues about criminalization that are captured by its title — The Constitution of the Criminal Law — and addressed by the authors of these papers. This introductory chapter provides a brief sketch of those issues along with an overview of the subsequent chapters.