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This submission comprises six works made between 2015 and 2022 including: Four concert works for instruments, voice, and electroacoustic resources that explore different relationships between the live musicians and the electroacoustic parts projected by loudspeakers. The process in making these works examines levels of engagement experienced by the performers, which was foregrounded through a collaborative composition process; One interactive, kinetic sound installation exploring the engagement between the participants and the installation; One site-responsive work, made in collaboration with Laura Bissell (writer), exploring engagement with place; This critical commentary that outlines the creative process undertaken in the works, focussing on engagement, collaboration and my compositional practice which is rooted in the electroacoustic studio.

This thesis develops an interdisciplinary approach to the technical and social grounds of media circulation, through the study of the reproduction of secular and religious film and media in conditions hostile to their spread. While I set out to explore the forms of guardianship and mediation fostered by media informality in Pakistan, the research came to focus on the relationship between audio-visual media, popular piety, and community ethics that became entangled in the marketplace trade in Pakistani film. Through a repertoire that includes film as well as other kinds of religious media, this thesis attempts to understand the relationship between ethical interdiction and marketplace reproduction. Through ethnographic study among independent traders on Lahore’s Hall Road, a vast and diverse electronics and media marketplace, and among religious media traders in denominationally homogenous communities, this thesis tells the story of the marketplace circulation of Pakistani media and the associated moral atmospheres and ethical characteristics of social life that film and media have the power to shape. The conditions of māḥaul are central to this intimate ethnography of the relationship between public morality and the circulation of media. While the word has come to be used in ways akin to the English word for environment, in its usage it is closer to the idea of a moral atmosphere. Each of Pakistan’s religiously diverse communities and denominational schools of thought have their own nuanced take on the appropriate place of media in the enactment and endurance of faith. To such orthodoxies, the elemental conditions of media, as well as mediums through which popular culture transmits and transforms itself, proffer an expanded environmental space riven with challenges and possibilities for action with little clear precedent in received rules governing moral conduct. Through ethnographic research into the contours of media and moral ecology in Lahore this thesis provides insights into the ambient ethics of communal practice, and how these can be shaped or broken by the circulation of media.

In order for a species to engage in and reap the evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction, a subset of cells in each individual must undergo a complex ordeal known as meiosis—a specialised cell division. By halving the genome content and “shuffling the deck”, meiosis generates genetically diverse haploid gametes (eggs, sperm) or spores from diploid cells. Such a monumental task is by no means easy or risk free: during the meiotic programme, cells intentionally damage their own genomes through widespread induction of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) in order to initiate homologous recombination—a DNA-repair process—and subsequent crossover (CO) formation. The success of meiosis is, however, not left up to chance. Rather, a complicated web of regulation acts at multiple stages to ensure this dangerous tradeoff pays dividends. Notably, the spatial pattern of meiotic recombination across the genome is complex and non-random. Whilst ultimately stochastic in nature, recombination events within any given meiotic cell display relatively even distributions along each chromosome—a phenomenon mediate by processes of “interference” acting at two key stages in meiosis: DSB and CO formation. Despite wide ranging historical observation, relatively little is known about how either form of interference is accomplished. Genome-wide mapping of recombination within S. cerevisiae has, however, provided a unique opportunity to investigate the underlying mechanisms. By computationally and mathematically analysing genome-wide data, work presented throughout this thesis seeks to: (i) investigate CO distribution and CO interference within various DNA damage response and DNA repair mutants (Tel1ATM, Mec1ATR, Rad24, Msh2) (Chapter 2) (ii) develop novel approaches to DSB mapping (Chapter 3) (iii) characterise the hyperlocal regulation of DSB formation (Chapter 3) and (iv) examine the mechanics of DSB interference (Chapter 4). Moreover, widely applicable simulation platforms for investigating DSB and CO formation have been developed (Chapter 2, 4). Collectively, this thesis further elucidates the mechanisms that underpin the spatial regulation of meiotic recombination in S. cerevisiae.

This study investigates the relations between Britain and the United States with regard to East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century with a view to establishing how far these conformed in practice to the ideal of the ‘great rapprochement’. It makes the case that interaction between the two powers, while generally cordial, was not characterised by cooperation or collaboration on a practical level. Through discussion of the issues of foreign investment and encroachment in China, the Boxer Rising, the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese immigration to the Pacific Coast of North America and the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the study considers why Britain and the United States failed to cooperate despite an apparent basis for joint action in both shared interests and ideological motivations. It argues that the community of interest of the two powers was generally nullified by the broader concerns of each power, principally the dictates of domestic politics for the United States and the global policy needs of an already overstretched British Empire. With regards to ideology, the study demonstrates that in spite of a significant body of shared ideas regarding race and civilisation, specifically the ideologies of Anglo-Saxonism and the Yellow Peril, British and American policymakers did not often employ such ideas or make use of ideological language in their interactions. It suggests that policymakers deliberately avoided or downplayed ideological considerations, apparently believing that these had the potential to be counterproductive. The key findings of the study are therefore that British and American policymakers were surprisingly sensitive and careful in their handling of ideas relating to race and civilisation and that very similar, if not identical, interests in a given region were not sufficient to overcome the wider limitations on British-American cooperation, bringing into question the notion that the ‘great rapprochement’ was effective beyond the level of rhetoric and friendly relations.

Much importance has been ascribed by historians from a number of traditions to co-operation between academic scientists and their counterparts in industry. However, while some knowledge of the extent of this 'science-industry relationship' in Britain has been gained, little of the historical work done so far has been sufficiently detailed to bring out the nature of this link - especially in the period after industrial research began to be formalised in separate departments dedicated to scientific research and development. Though a general overview of the situation nationwide has been gained, we have little evidence of how firms and universities cooperated in concrete instances in the changing context of post-WWI Britain. The present thesis aims to help £ill this gap by concentrating on Manchester, Britain's largest industrial region in the period from WWI to the 1960s, and investigating one of the two large sciencebased firms in the area to have had extensive contacts with the local university science departments. The thesis adopts an approach which focuses on the wide variety of cooperative ventures which were undertaken by local actors, in terms of the importance which they themselves attributed to them. This methodology underlines the multi-faceted nature of the 'science-industry relationship' which, in the case of Manchester, ranged from the scientific and educational, to the institutional and political. A number of new archival sources are used including the research department reports of Metropolitan Vickers Co. Ltd. and the personal papers of the scientists, industrialists and university managers who collaborated in furthering cooperation in scientific research in Manchester. It is demonstrated that a university-industrygovernment relationship existed from the very beginning of the period considered, but that it was initially largely informal, depending on individuals and the networks they formed, was varied, that it grew and developed only as and when concrete needs and opportunities arose and, far from being determined by government policy, was actually fundamental in shaping it.