Swarm Intelligence: insects, humans and information on the move

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This follow-on funding application is connected to The War of the Locust: science, politics, culture and collaboration in the Anti-Locust Research Centre, 1940-45, an AHRC Science in Culture ECR Developmental Award for 2016-17. Over the past year the team's four Investigators have generated new dialogues between history, entomology, ecology and art in examining the work of the British Empire's 'Anti-Locust Research Centre': a remarkable organisation that sought, across the twentieth-century, to counter one of mankind's oldest threats. The current follow-on funding application is to develop our engagement with new non-academic audiences and in more ambitious and creative ways than originally conceived. The records of the ALRC, housed in the Natural History Museum's offsite store in south west London, are unique, substantially uncatalogued, and prior to the commencement of our project were essentially unexplored. The time spent engaging closely with such a rich body of archival material has opened up exciting possibilities for collaboration which could not have been anticipated at the project's conception. The current application seeks funding to support two opportunities for collaboration, both of which have been the subject of preparatory discussion with relevant stakeholders. The first is with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (UNFAO) in Rome, whose 'Locust Group' is the contemporary equivalent (and the direct successor) of the ALRC today; here we seek funds to support two knowledge exchange seminars with this international policy organisation. The second collaboration is with the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, home to 80,000 locust specimens collected by the ALRC and unintentionally separated from the documentary material in London; here, we seek funds to develop a public installation in the Cardiff Museum which will present the complexities of interdisciplinary work, the puzzle of reassembling the disaggregated elements of this archive, and the ALRC's own efforts to gather and sort complex information in the pre-digital age. While the activities for which we seek support engage with different publics, all aim to bring the contents of this hidden archive, and our research reflections upon it, into wider view.