Have you just started your PhD?  The British Library hosts Doctoral Open Days enabling new PhD students to discover the British Library’s unique research materials. From newspapers to maps, datasets to manuscripts, ships’ logs to websites, our collections cover every format and language and span the last 3,000 years.

You will learn about their collections, find out how to access them, and meet our expert staff and other researchers in your field. The events are aimed at first year PhD students who are new to the Library.

• Asian & African Collections – 18 January 2016
• News & Media – 25 January 2016
• Pre 1600 Collections – 01 February 2016
• Music – 05 February 2016
• Social Sciences – 12 February 2016
• 17th & 18th Century Collections – 19 February 2016
• 19th Century Collections – 22 February 2016
• 20th & 21st Century Collections – 26 February 2016

Find out more here

Learning together to promote opportunity, equality and achievement

Bournemouth University’s pioneering Fair Access Research is a practice-led, collaborative research project which aims to develop and expand knowledge and expertise in the field fair access to higher education.

This large collaborative research study is being led by Dr Vanessa Heaslip and Dr Clive Hunt and forms part of the research being undertaken in the Centre for Excellence in Learning.

The Fair Access Research project seeks to understand more fully, the complex intersections that are at play when it comes to participation in higher education, and to develop ways to enhance positive student experiences.

Underpinned by an ethos of inclusive education, a commitment to student engagement and practice-led research, our Fair Access Research team will learn from the expertise and experiences of students and colleagues to understand what issues arise across the student journey for disadvantaged and marginalised learners.

We are undertaking research in the areas of admissions and enrolment, attainment, retention and student experiences, as well as developing innovative ways of doing research and evaluation in widening participation.

Student experiences:

One of our key areas of focus lies in understanding how students conceive of their experience and to analyse how students from different backgrounds experience being a student at BU differently. To find this out, we are going to use an institutional-wide survey that’s been developed in partnership with SUBU and pilot tested over the summer.

Key findings from the pilot study include:

• Factors influencing first in family to attend university are different from those in second or subsequent generation. Students who are first in family prioritised getting a good job whereas second generation students prioritised the more social side of higher education
• Whilst differences in attainment were small, first generation students achieved on average higher degree outcomes
• When we compared the experience of first and second generation students at BU, a stark difference in the key influencers for participation at university could be seen
• It is not yet known whether the key influence of parents experienced by second generation students follows through to increased external, emotional and financial support during university.

Findings from the pilot phase have been submitted to Studies in Higher Education and a paper based on the development of the questionnaire has been submitted to the international Open University Widening Participation biennial conference. Findings from the pilot have also been shared on the British Education Research Association blog.

At the heart of our Fair Access Research project is an awareness that it is through learning together – as students, practitioners, policy makers, academics and wider communities – that we can best achieve an HE culture that promotes opportunity, equality and achievement for all students. With this in mind we are always keen to hear from colleagues and develop collaborative ways of working. Some areas interest include:

• Developing effective and replicable models of WP evaluation and research
• Understanding the pedagogical implications of WP
• Surveying staff involved with admissions and enrolment
• Understanding staff perceptions’ of student support

If you want to know more about the project as a whole or any area of the research, feel free to email awardrop@bournemouth.ac.uk

Communicating Research: FMC Cross-Departmental Seminar Series 2015-16

Venue: The Screening Room W240, Weymouth House, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB  When: Wednesday 6 January, 4pm

A Narrative Research Group Guest Lecture

 Dr Francesco Buscemi, Bournemouth University

 ‘Passing on Recipes or Passing an Examination? Food and Foucauldian Power on Two Web Forums in Italy and Britain’

This paper analyses the representation of the social practice of passing on recipes on two popular Italian and British web forums, and the power relationships that they produce. It draws on Foucault’s category of examination; on Rosello’s links between Foucault’s examination and writing recipes; and on Appadurai theory that recipes are fundamental in the construction of national culture. Moreover, specific studies on Italian and British food culture highlight similarities and differences between the two countries.

Qualitative textual analysis is applied to the forums La Cucina Italiana and BBC Good Food. They have purposely been chosen because they represent two ‘food institutions’, and this research wants to analyse mainstream food media. The results show that the two forums generate different examples of Foucault’s examination. The Italian users (all women, or at least using female names) undergo their examination not on the forum, but at home or among friends, before or after writing the posts. The forum is seen either as a place of resistance, in which they ask help to the other users before being examined by relatives, or as a place in which they may show off that they have passed the exam. In Britain, the examination occurs within the forum, and users (man or woman hierarchically relating to each other) are both examiners and examined; the user is examined when posts a recipe, and examines the others when comments on the recipes of the others.

Francesco Buscemi is Lecturer in Creative Communications at Bournemouth University. Moreover, he teaches media studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at the Catholic University of Milan, where he also supervises degree theses. His PhD, gained at Queen Margaret University, is a Bourdieusian and semiotic analysis on how representations of food in the media support national ideologies in Italy and Britain. Another strand of research involves meat, cultured meat and their links to the living animal, death, religion, blood, gender and the relationships between Nature and Culture. 

About the series

This new seminar series showcases current research across different disciplines and approaches within the Faculty of Media and Communication at BU. The research seminars include invited speakers in the fields of journalism, politics, narrative studies, media, communication and marketing studies.  The aim is to celebrate the diversity of research across departments in the faculty and also generate dialogue and discussion between those areas of research.

Contributions include speakers on behalf of 

The Centre for Politics and Media Research

The Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community

Promotional Cultures Communication Centre

Public Relations Research Centre

Narrative Research Group

Journalism Research Group

Advances in Media Management Research Group