The UK’s incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham, has a special relationship with Manchester’s music and culture. But it goes beyond quoting The Smiths and The Stone Roses on Instagram (although he does that too); culture informs the way Burnham does politics.

For our new series examining “Manchesterism”, we spoke to a wide range of academics from the city. In our latest article, Kirsty Fairclough, a professor of screen studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and expert on this city’s culture, analyses Burnham’s cultural legacy. She says Manchesterism is not a political ideology – rather a “civic philosophy” that treats culture as infrastructure to underpin economic renewal, public wellbeing and collective identity.

We also have a behind-the-scenes look at the upgrades to Cern’s Large Hadron Collider, and examine the environmental realities of building huge data centres in space.