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Focusing on the period since 2007, this thesis aims to deepen understandings of how the contemporary professional UK outdoor arts sector operates, how audiences engage with outdoor arts and how they might contribute to the construction of public space. The research examines UK outdoor arts from two viewpoints: firstly, using [auto]ethnography to study the people who create and produce it; and secondly, adapting Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis to consider live outdoor arts events, how they are organised, experienced and perceived. The events studied all occurred in the summer of 2018 and the main analysis centres around three case studies which occurred in Greenwich (London), Luton and Doncaster. In order to study ephemeral, outdoor arts events I developed a new, efficient and replicable methodology, which responds to their unique features and can evaluate their ability to intervene in everyday life and produce festivalized space. This uses multiple time-lapse cameras and an embedded, expert researcher to make detailed observations of the triad of core categories identified: space/time, performance and audience. This approach generated both quantitative and qualitative datasets: on the one hand delivering, for the first time, accurate numbers for audience engagements and empirical evidence of audience flows, stay-lengths and proxemics; and on the other hand, documenting atmospheres, connections and identity shifts. The thesis contributes to knowledge about the inspirations, motivations and priorities of those who create and produce outdoor arts today and their relationships to public space. It develops theory around the tendency for outdoor arts events to become more homogenous and increasingly codified in recent years, questioning the validity of the strategies and structures driving this process. It identifies and analyses a range of behaviours and techniques exclusively used by organisers, artists and audiences of outdoor arts and in doing so makes a case for scholars, policy makers, and practitioners to consider them as a discrete artform.

We extend the 2-representation theory of finitary 2-categories in two separate fashions. For the first, we examine certain 2-categories with infinitely many objects, called locally finitary 2-categories, and for the second we examine certain 2-categories with infinitely many isomorphism classes of indecomposable 1-morphisms, called (locally) wide finitary 2-categories. In both cases, we extend various classification results relating to transitive and simple transitive 2-representations to the new setting, and provide examples where this new theory applies. Most prominently, we generalise the classification of simple transitive cell 2-representations of fiat 2-categories by cell 2-representations to the locally finitary setting (and further extend it to the weakly fiat case), and we generalise to both settings the classification of all transitive 2-representations of weakly fiat 2-categories as equivalent to 2-representations associated to coalgebra 1-morphisms.

Allostery is the regulation of protein function from a remote non-active binding site. Ligand binding incites a rapid process whereby information travels significant biomolecular distances to enact energetic changes to the the protein's functional centre. Despite the demonstrated importance of protein allostery in maintaining cellular homeostasis, investigating the mechanisms over the molecular temporal and spatial scales remains a challenge. Fructose 1,6-bisphosphate (FBP) activates pyruvate kinase M2 (PKM2) through a well-described feed-forward process in glycolysis. Less understood, however, is how allosteric regulation of PKM2 occurs on a molecular level. Moreover, as several amino acids can compete for an additional binding site, it has thus far been unclear how concurrently bound ligands control PKM2 catalysis. This thesis shows that, in a panel of cancer cell lines, the intracellular concentration of FBP exceeds that which is required to fully saturate binding to PKM2. Moreover, PKM2 is exposed to a dynamic concentration range of amino acids including the activator L-serine (Ser) and the inhibitor L-phenylalanine (Phe). When FBP is constitutively bound, Ser and Phe competitively regulate the maximal velocity of the PKM2-catalysed reaction, independent from changes to the protein's oligomeric state. To investigate the molecular determinants of multi-ligand regulation, a novel computational method AlloHubMat is developed and applied towards the analyses of molecular dynamics simulations of PKM2, identifying a number of 'allosteric hub' residues. A selection of the allosteric hub residues are mutated and an integrative approach is used to elucidate their impact on FBP- and Phe-mediated regulation of PKM2. The findings herein demonstrate a role for residues involved in FBP-induced allostery in enabling the integration of allosteric input from Phe and reveal a mechanism that underlies the co-ordinate regulation of PKM2 activity by multiple allosteric ligands.