The second meeting of the new ARK Advisory Board was held on 10 October. The main function of the Board is to provide strategic advice to inform our work.

The members of the Board reflect the diversity of ARK users, funders and collaborators, and the Chair is Peter Osborne. We are looking forward to many stimulating meetings with the Board in the future.

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The Research Update Our future - no vote: Attitudes to Brexit among children and young people, focuses on data from the 2018 Young Life & Times and Kids' Life & Times surveys. Written by Dirk Schubotz, Katrina Lloyd, Martina McKnight and Paula Devine, this report provides an opportunity for the voices of children and young people to be heard on an issue which has dominated the political debate for three years.

ARK produces a range of publications for public, policy and academic audiences. These are all available on the ARK website.

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The CAIN (Conflict Archive on the INternet) website is a vital source of information and material on 'the Troubles' and politics in Northern Ireland from 1968 to the present.

New material is added to the CAIN site on a regular basis. While it has not been possible to record every change to the content on CAIN, there is a listing which highlights Recent Additions to the website. Some of the most recent items include the protocols and political declarations related to Brexit. In the CAIN Bibliography there is also a fuller listing of Brexit documents, speeches, and statements specifically referring to the impact on Northern Ireland.

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The ARK Ageing Programme is building a national and international reputation for cutting-edge inter-disciplinary studies of ageing. Gemma Carney is part of a network of leading scholars in ageing that has been recently been awarded funding from the Wellcome Trust. Framing Ageing is an initiative of University College Dublin Humanities Institute and Medical Gerontologist, Professor Des O'Neill at Trinity College Dublin.

The network will engage in a programme of collaborative writing and research which is promotes a dialogue between medical/social scientists and humanities scholars around the themes of ageing bodies and identities; mobility and technologies; subjectivity, agency and relationships and memories and feelings. Gemma will participate in both workshops to be held in Dublin in March and June 2020.  

Goretti Horgan and Ann Marie Gray, along with Linda Moore (Ulster University) received funding in 2016 from the Economic and Social Research Council to provide a new framing of the debate around social harm and the criminalisation of abortion in the United Kingdom. As part of this project, public attitudes to abortion legislation were included in the 2016 and 2018 Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) Survey.

In the light of new legislation around abortion in Northern Ireland, two new publications were released:

• Northern Ireland supports abortion law reform, by Ann Marie Gray and Goretti Horgan (ARK Feature 13) focuses on NILT public attitudes data
• Developing policy for a full reproductive health service in NI, by Goretti Horgan, Ann Marie Gray and Leanne Morgan (ARK Policy Brief 12), is based on a policy roundtable held in September 2019 exploring how abortion policy in Northern Ireland should be shaped.

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We are very pleased to announce the publication of a new book by Dirk Schubotz (Director of the Young Life and Times survey).

Published by SAGE publications, Participatory Research: Why and How to Involve People in Research takes an accessible approach to explaining the theory that grounds participatory research and offers students practical strategies for how and when to choose and apply a wide range of these methods.

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Katrina Lloyd (Director of Kids' Life and Times survey) is a member of the Participation for Protection project project funded by the European Commission. The Centre for Children's Rights at Queen's University Belfast and Include Youth, in collaboration with seven partners across Europe, have worked with over 1300 children and young people to design training resources aimed at enhancing child-centred responses to victims of violence.

Children and Violence: Showcasing Resources Co-designed with Children and Young People is a showcase event on 11 November in Belfast, attended by the Children's Commissioner and some of the children involved in the process, introducing the resources grounded in the voices and experiences of children and young people. Copies of the resources will be available. Details of how to book a place are available on Eventbrite.

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ARK is Northern Ireland's social policy hub. Established in 2000 by researchers at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University, its primary goal is to increase the accessibility and use of academic data and research. Most of our dissemination is via our website at www.ark.ac.uk, which is divided into five main areas:

• Surveys
• Projects
• Resources
• Publications
• Events