Tagged / research

Media coverage BU’s kidney research in Nepal

This week Bournemouth University organised two dissemination events for our risk of kidney disease study in Nepalese migrant workers in the Middle East and Malaysia.  A previous blog reported on the first event in the capital Kathmandu (see details here!) .  These dissemination events have generated a loads of media coverage in Nepal, both in Nepali and in English. 

The study was led by Bournemouth University and a charity in Nepal which whom we have been collaborating for two decades, called Green Tara Nepal.  This important study, the first of its kind, was conducted among the Nepalese migrant workers and a comparison group of non-migrants from the same community.  This study was funded by The Colt Foundation, based in the UK. In the field it was supported by the Madhes Province Public Health Laboratory, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration and University College London (UCL).

Dr Pramod Raj Regmi (Principal Academic in International Health in Bournemouth University’s Department of Nursing Sciences) is the lead researcher and our team further comprises researchers Dr Nirmal Aryal and Prof Edwin van Teijlingen (both from BU’s Faculty of Health & Social Sciences), and in Nepal clinicians: Prof Dr Arun Sedhai, Dr Radheshyam KC and Dr Shrawan Kumar Mishra.

 

 

 

Prof Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

Principal Investigator – Post Award for RKE

Principal Investigator – Post Award for RKE session is aimed at any researcher who is, who plans to be, a Principal Investigator for an externally funded research or knowledge exchange project.

Topics covered include:

• What is post award?
• Roles and responsibilities
• Systems
• Key policies
• Starting your awarded project
• Making changes to your project and reporting
• Hints and tips

By the end of the session, attendees will have a strong foundation of what to expect when being responsible for their awarded projects.

This month’s session will be held on

Thursday 19th October from 14:00-15:00 at Lansdowne Campus

 

To book onto this session, please complete the Booking Form. 

For any further information please contact Alex Morrison, Post Award Programme Manager morrisona@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

 

Science, Health, and Research Communication: Speaker Series Autumn 2023-24

logo for the Centre for Science, Health, and Data Communication ResearchThe Centre for Science, Health, and Data Communications Research invites you to our Autumn 2023 speaker series. Featuring researchers from around the world, these online talks are open to the public and encompass topics on crisis communication, climate change and sustainability; media, data and AI literacy; social justice communication and how the arts and storytelling can help tackle global challenges.

All events take place on zoom – Thursdays 16:00-17:00 UK time                                  

Find out more and Register for events on EventBrite.

 

Uncovering a literacy for AI

Date: 12 October 2023
Speaker: Sarah Jones

Literacies have been well documented from media to the digital and more recently immersive. With an increase in the use of generative AI tools and the impact that this is having on an increasing number of sectors, this talk will argue for the need for an AI literacy. It will examine frameworks for understanding how to use artificial intelligence and the need to be constantly evolving our thinking when it comes to technology.

The limitations of #BlackLivesMatter for anti-racist activism in the global south

Date: 19 October 2023
Speaker: Suntosh Pillay
It is unlikely that you know the name Collins Khosa. However, you would know the name George Floyd.  This is no accident. The media, as a global epistemic authority, produces, polices and perpetuates a knowledge system that favours the Global North. I present a comparative analysis of the murders of Khosa in South Africa (April 2020) and Floyd in the U.S. (May 2020). Despite its quasi-universal appeal, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has an ironic proximity to whiteness within the United States that provide BLM with epistemic advantages not enjoyed elsewhere, especially in poor ‘township’ contexts of South Africa. I argue that anti-racist activism in global south contexts must guard against uncritically importing northern-centric forms of protest, such as #BlackLivesMatter. The US has particularities that distracts the media gaze, (mis)directing social justice activism away from black lived experiences in countries such as South Africa, reinforcing silences, epistemic injustices, and colonial continuities.

Media Literacy: A Strategy for Risk Management in an Uncertain World

Date: 26 October 2023
Speaker: Tessa Jolls

With new AI technologies, as well as the cacaphony of voices that have emerged through social media, it is clear that the call for a media ecosystem that only contains “the truth” or that contains little or no misinformation or disinformation is a utopian dream that only invites more discord and polarization, or worse, highly contestable labelling and censorship. Meaning lies in the minds and hearts of information users, and with this recognition, media literacy offers a pathway toward dialogue and risk management strategies that encompass both qualitative and quantitative analyses and reflection, based on a fundamental understanding of media as a global symbolic system. With this in mind, media literacy offers the questions — not “the answers” — for exploring and interrogating media in all its forms, individually and collectively. This empowerment enables wiser choices throughout life and societies.

Global South’s over-reliance on science news from Global North: causes, consequences and solutions

Date: 2 November 2023
Speaker: An Nguyen

Developing countries rely heavily on the developed world for not only scientific expertise but also science news output. From Africa and the Middle East to South America and developing parts of Asia, a large proportion of science news consumed in the Global South has been found to be translated or, at best, synthesised from foreign sources, especially global media outlets based in the Global North. Such reliance is a double-edged sword: while it helps to enhance general awareness and understanding of global science developments in the Global South, this double-layered structure of dependency bears many negative long-and short-term implications for local and global development. Drawing on recent content analyses and in-depth interviews with science journalists in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, this paper will address this critically important, but rarely studied, phenomenon. I will discuss the causes and impacts of such over-reliance on foreign sources and offers some thoughts on potential solutions to the problem. In general, this requires a holistic approach and international cooperation efforts to address the many traditional shortfalls of science and science news cultures in the Global South.

Transnational Assemblages: Social Justice and Communication During Disaster

Date: 9 November 2023
Speaker: Sweta Baniya

The Power of Podcasting: Audio Storytelling Beyond Entertainment

Date: 16 November 2023
Speaker: Kayla Jones

With the rise in popularity of audio listening, podcast studies is a growing field of research that is responding to podcasts that have gone mainstream, such as Serial. Audio storytelling podcasts can be a powerful tool to advocate for, connect with, and educate global audiences. Through creating her own podcast, Kayla explored the ways storytelling podcasts can tell multilayered narratives beyond the realm of entertainment and in non-fiction settings, like heritage and tourism.

Algorithms and the Climate Emergency: An Ecomedia Literacy Perspective

Date: 23 November 2023
Speaker: Antonio Lopez

Whether it’s blockchain technologies or disinformation, Big Tech algorithms have a significant environmental impact. The economic models of surveillance and carbon capitalism are both based on extractivism, so data harvesting and resources extraction practices mirror each other in Big Tech algorithms. To encourage a holistic environmental analysis of algorithms, ecomedia literacy’s four zone approach enables an investigation from the perspectives of ecoculture, political ecology, ecomateriality, and lifeworld. For media literacy educators and reformers, the challenge is to develop curricula and methods that address these different standpoints, which can include critical media literacy, design justice, civic media literacies, news and misinformation literacies, and ethical algorithm audits.

 The art of presence

Date: 30 November 2023
Speaker: Andrea Winkler-Vilhena

Throughout history the Arts have been used to address societal issues, to see and show the world in diverse ways, and to imagine and create new futures. Nowadays, every aspect of life has become so entangled with digital media that it is impossible to speak about the world without considering the effects they have on our lives. How do we relate to and interact with people when our attention is absorbed by digital gadgets? What does presence mean in a world in which a big part of human relationships and communication happens in virtual spaces? In this lecture we will explore how the Arts can be used to promote media literacy and how seeing, interacting with and making art can revive our sense of presence and promote care and imagination.

Youth digital activism and online media: from digital exclusion to the complexities of civic participation

Date: 7 December 2023
Speaker: Annamaria Neag

Since the second half of the 2000s, there has been an increasing interest in the relationship between internet use and civic participation. While initially this interest was geared towards the adult population, researchers have shifted their attention to young people and their activism in the digital sphere. In this talk, I will present the research findings of our ongoing project focusing on young people in the CEE region (namely, the Czech Republic and Hungary) and their (online) involvement in the Fridays for Future movement. We first mapped the online public discourse on youth civic participation in these two countries and then focused on young people’s views on activism and the digital skills needed to participate. Our results show that online commenters use specific strategies to exclude young people from the public sphere. When it comes to young people and their views on digital activism, we found that digital media plays a rather complex and contradictory role in their civic participation, with its affordances providing both opportunities and challenges in terms of mental well-being, non-formal education and community-building.

Shrinkage and Activist Affordances: How disabled people improvise more habitable worlds

Date: 14 December 2023
Speaker: Arseli Dokumaci

For people living with disability, everyday tasks like lifting a glass or taking off clothes can be daunting. As such, their undertakings may require ingenuity, effort and artfulness. In this talk, I draw on visual ethnographies with disabled people living in Turkey and Quebec, and trace the immense labour and creativity that it takes for them just to navigate the everyday. Bringing together theories of affordance, performance, and disability, I propose “activist affordances” as a way to name and recognize these extremely tiny and yet profoundly artistic choreographies that disabled people have to continually rehearse to make the world more habitable for themselves and others. Activist affordances, in the way I define them, are micro, often ephemeral acts of world-building, with which disabled people literally make up, and at the same time make up for, whatever affordances fail to materialize in their environments. Activist affordances are not like any other affordance in that their creation emerges from constraints, losses and precarity that I broadly conceptualize as “shrinkage”. It is within a shrinking world of possibilities, that it becomes necessary to create affordances in their physical absence, which is why I call them “activist”. Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance allows disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise through activist affordances, presenting the potential for a more livable and accessible world.

**The Centre for Science, Health, and Data Communications Research focuses on the urgent need for better science, health and data communication through ambitious cross-disciplinary collaborations. Bringing together experts from various disciplines – media and communication, computer and data sciences, health and medical sciences, environment sciences, business studies, psychology and sociology – we research and pioneer interdisciplinary solutions for contemporary communication challenges. From reporting statistics, to tackling disinformation, from health and wellness interventions to more efficient communication around environmental and humanitarian disasters, our members respond to real world issues—often in real time. For more about our centre or to get in touch, please visit https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/centre-science-health-data-communication-research

Checkout past events and subscribe to our YouTube channel (@SHDCresearch)  

Follow us on Instagram and X (Twitter) @SHDCresearch

New blog series: The Month in Research – celebrating our successes

We’re launching a new monthly blog series, The Month in Research – a round-up of some of our research and knowledge exchange successes from the previous month.

From successful funding bids to publications, events, and everything in between, we want to showcase and celebrate the amazing work taking place across BU.

The Month in Research will be published on the first Monday of every month, starting next month (November).

We want to hear from you – fill out our short form to share your achievements, or those of your colleagues, to be featured as part of the series. You can also find a link on the homepage of the research blog or scan the QR code below to be taken to the form.

If you have any questions, or would like to find out more about the series, please contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk

Principal Investigation – Post Award for RKE, 19th October

Post Award for RKE – Principal Investigation

 

This session is aimed at any researcher who is, who plans to be, a Principal Investigator for an externally funded research or knowledge exchange project.

Topics covered include:

• What is post award?

• Roles and responsibilities
• Systems
• Key policies
• Starting your awarded project
• Making changes to your project and reporting

• Hints and tip

By the end of the session, attendees will have a strong foundation of what to expect when being responsible for their awarded projects.

The month’s session is on  Lansdowne Campus

on Wednesday 19th October, 14:00-15:00

 

You can find a suitable date and book your space here: Booking Form

For any queries regarding this workshop, please contact Alex Morrison, Post Award Programme Manager morrisona@bournemouth.ac.uk

Parliamentary Committees online event, October 3rd

October 3rd, Cross-cutting policy and scrutiny challenges: Parliamentary committees

Find out about the work of the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee and the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, and how these Committees draw on evidence and expertise from academic researchers in science, technology, social science and beyond.

Come along with your questions and contribute to the discussion about cross-cutting and interdisciplinary policy and scrutiny challenges.

The speakers will be Yohanna Sallberg, Second Clerk and Katherine Woolf, Parliamentary Academic Fellow, House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee and Thomas Hornigold, Policy Analyst, House of Lords Science and Technology Committee. The webinar will be chaired by Nicky Buckley, Associate Director, Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge.

This is a free event, please register on Eventbrite.

Impact Essentials: Finding your stakeholders

This RKEDF session aimed at researchers at all career stages, and will give you the tools to help you entify the organisations, groups and people who could either benefit from your research, or be able to influence or facilitate impact arising from it.

In this session, we will cover stakeholder mapping, the types of organisations and people who could benefit from your research, those who could facilitate impact and the best routes to engage with them. We will give practical examples and allow time for questions and discussion of individual research projects.

Impact essentials: Finding your stakeholders

Tuesday 10th October

Online session from 10.00-11.00

To book on to a session, please complete the Booking Form. 

 

For queries regarding the content of this session, please contact Impact Advisors, RKEOKnowledgeExchangeImpactTeam@bournemouth.ac.uk

RKEDF training: Impact Essentials

Impact Essentials: From public engagement to impact

This session is aimed at researchers at all stages of their careers to find out how public engagement activity can help their research have an impact on the world.

Participants will explore the link between public engagement activity and measurable impact, reflect on their own impact goals, identify potential stakeholders and engagement activity, and learn from high-ranking impact case studies with a significant public engagement pathway.

By the end of the session they will have a better understanding of how impact can be developed from public engagement activity.

 

Impact Essentials: From public engagement to impact

Tuesday 3rd October

from 14:00 – 15:00 at Talbot Campus

To book your place fror the session, please complete the Booking Form.

For queries regarding the content of this session, please contact Amanda Edwards, Amanda Edwards aedwards@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

 

 

 

Proofreading your article accepted for publication

It is always a pleasure to see your own paper in print.  If all is properly organised at the publisher, the first time you see you paper as it will look in its final version when you receive the proof copy.  It is the authors’ task to proofread this final copy and pick up any mistakes you may have made or the journal has made putting your word file into the journal’s layout.  More and more journals now ask you to do the proofreading and editing online.  The first message here is that proofreading is exact business and most certainly time consuming.  Moreover, feeding back mistakes you may find in the proofs is not without its trials and tribulations.

Yesterday we received the proofs for a paper accepted by BMC Health Research Policy & Systems [1]. The BMC is part of the publisher Springer , and it uses an online proof system eProofing to which the authors get temporary access, to read and correct text.  This system looks good online, but beware the online version you get to edit does not look the same as the version that will appear in print.  The draft print version generated by eProofing has line numbers which don’t appear online when you are editing the proofs.  So we had to write on the online system separately that we found a set of quotes glued together, as the system does not allow authors to change the lay-out (for obvious reasons). In this case,  we had to write details like: “There needs to be a space after first quote line 421.”  What might look okay in the eProofing version didn’t do so  in the print version, where it was it is wrong.  This is illustrated in the example picture below.

 

Last month we battled with the proofs of another BU paper forthcoming in the journal Women and Birth [2], which is part of Elsevier.  Again, it has an online system for proofs.  This system does not allow the authors to correct mistakes in in the line spacing.  So we ended up writing to journal manager, not the editor, things like: “There is a very big gap between the end of section 3.7. and Overview of findings section – please could the text be rearranged to get rid of this big gap.”  We also asked for a summary section to be kept on one page, not having an orphan two words on the next page, but that appeared to be too difficult a request.  We think we a little flexibility, i.e. a human intervention the lay-out could have been improved.  See illustration below with text as it appears in the current online-first version.

We like to stress our advice to set plenty of time aside to read and edit the proofs, and to send details instructions to the journal manager or editor about what needs changing.  Changes include typos, grammar and style, but also lay-out of text and illustrations, boxes in the text, tables and figures.  “It is also important to check tables and figures during the proof-reading as the formatting can often go astray during the typesetting process” as we highlighted by Sheppard and colleagues [3].  Also double check correct spelling of names of co-authors and the final author order in the proofs.  Many years ago, I received the proof of pages of a midwifery article [4].

I dutifully read and edited  the proof of the actual text, but I never check the short introduction with the authors’ names which an editor had added to the final proofs.  When the paper came out in print to transpired that this editor has changed the author order, i.e. my name was first, probably because I had submitted the paper on behalf of my co-author.  This cause some problems with my co-author, made all the worse since I am married to her.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

References:

  1. Wasti, S.P., van Teijlingen, E., Rushton, S., Subedi, M., Simkhada, P., Balen, J., Nepal Federalisation of Health Team (2023)  Overcoming the challenges facing Nepal’s health system during federalisation: an analysis of health system building blocks. Journal of the Health Research Policy & Systems. (forthcoming).
  2. Arnold, R., Way, S., Mahato, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2023) “I might have cried in the changing room, but I still went to work”. Maternity staff managing roles, responsibilities, and emotions of work and home during COVID-19: an Appreciative InquiryWomen & Birth (online first) 
  3. Sheppard, Z., Hundley, V., Dahal, N.P., Paudyal, P. (2022) Writing a quantitative paper, In: Wasti, S.P., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P., Hundley, V. with Shreesh, K. (eds.) Writing and Publishing Academic Work, Kathmandu, Nepal: Himal Books, pp.78-87.
  4. van Teijlingen E., Ireland, J.C. (2014) Community midwives on the go. Midwives 1: 54-55.

Improving information for people taking part in clinical research

The Health Research Authority (HRA) has launched new Quality Standards to improve information given to people who are invited to take part in research. The Quality Standards have been launched alongside Design and Review Principles, which show researchers and Research Ethics Committees (REC) what the important ethical considerations are for participant information.

  • The new HRA Participant Information Quality Standards will help research organisations to understand what good participant information looks like, and will make clear to researchers what the Research Ethics Committees will consider as part of the ethics review, including the review of participant information. The REC will support researchers to create information that meets the Quality Standards.
  • The aim of the Quality Standards and Design and Review Principles is to make participant information better, and to make the way that RECs review that information more consistent. The documents set out the basic criteria that all participant information must meet, and covers language, accessibility, and mandatory content.

Next steps

The Quality Standards and Design and Review Principles will be phased in from autumn 2023. As study materials are prepared in advance, REC reviews of participant information will initially be presented to research organisations as recommendations as opposed to actions required for approval.

From December 2023, the Quality Standards and Design and Review principles will become mandatory and will be applied to all research applications submitted for review.

Changes to participant information are currently the most likely reason for ethics committees to give a provisional opinion. Using this guidance will increase the possibility of receiving a favourable opinion.

Available templates

Remember that BU has Participant Information Sheet templates that provide much of the required wording to ensure your participants are making a fully informed decision before agreeing to participate.

It is vital that when compiling your information sheets that you remember to include the HRA GDPR transparency wording.

Questions or concerns?

If you have any questions regarding these new standards or about clinical research in general, please email Suzy Wignall, Clinical Governance Advisor – swignall@bournemouth.ac.uk or clinicalresearch@bournemouth.ac.uk

NIHR Be Part of Research platform

The NIHR Be Part of Research platform is an online service that makes it easy for research participants to find and take part in health and social care research. Participants may search for trials and studies taking place looking at certain health conditions and in locations accessible to them.

Clinical researchers may also make use of the service to extend their recruitment and widen their recruitment methods, as the platform has been designed to make it easier for researchers and potential study participants to find each other.

Using Be Part of Research to recruit participants

To use the service for your recruitment, the study must meet the following requirements:

  • Be funded or supported by the NIHR. This includes studies on the NIHR Clinical Research Network Portfolio.
  • Have Research Ethics Committee approval to use the service as a recruitment tool.
  • Have a dedicated point of contact such as a pre-screener or website for interested volunteers to engage with your research team.

Getting your study onto the Be Part of Research platform

Once your study has been registered on either ISRCTNClinicalTrials.gov, or on the NIHR Clinical Research Network (CRN) Central Portfolio Management System (CPMS), your project will then appear on Be Part of Research. Given those visiting the site are mostly patients and members of the public, medical and scientific terminology should be omitted when writing your study summary, with plain English used to ensure the information is accessible to a broad audience. In order to do this, you should:
  • Keep it short – but don’t oversimplify it. The reader must understand what the study is trying to achieve.
  • Imagine you are talking to the reader.
  • Take out any jargon.
  • Make sure you cover the what, why, when, where and how so they have the basics of your study.

Additionally, to make sure that participants contact the appropriate person, the contact details provided on ISRCTN or ClinicalTrials.gov should be up to date and accurate. In general, the registry record should be monitored continuously so that any changes are reflected on Be Part of Research as soon as possible.

Further support/contact

If you have any questions regarding the platform or regarding clinical research in general, please email Suzy Wignall, Clinical Governance Advisor: swignall@bournemouth.ac.uk or clinicalresearch@bournemouth.ac.uk

Impact Essentials: Creating your impact development plan

Creating your impact development plan is a workshop for researchers at all career stages and at all stages of the project lifecycle – from formulating research questions and preparing grant applications to developing a potential impact case study.

This practical workshop provides the tools, advice and time to start putting together your own plan to achieve impact.

By the end of this session, you will have created a detailed impact development plan, tailored to your particular needs and stage of impact development.

Thursday 7th September     13.00-15.00      Talbot Campus

To book on to the session, please complete the Booking Form. 

For queries regarding the content of this session, please contact Amanda Lazar, Impact Adviser impact@bournemouth.ac.uk