Yearly Archives / 2019

Congratulations to BU sociologist

international, Publishing, Research Integritiy, writing

Congratulations to Dr. Shovita Dhakal Adhikari on the publication of her paper ‘Understanding ‘trafficking vulnerabilities’ among children: the responses linking to child protection issues in Nepal’ [1].  This academic paper was published earlier this month in the journal Children’s Geographies.   Shovita and her co-author Dr. Jackie Turton discuss child trafficking in Nepal within the broader framework of child protection.

The paper examines both individual (gender, ethnicity and caste) and structural (their experiences in relation to work, migration, education and lack of birth registration) vulnerabilities and their links with child trafficking as a child protection concern. The authors suggest there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of trafficking vulnerabilities as part of a continuum, rather than a distinct event, to improve outcomes for children. They use the evidence presented here to call for a holistic approach. Policies and programmes in Nepal and across the globe must be integrated within the broader concerns of child protection, thus strengthening the system from local to national level, while recognising the importance of children’s rights to participate in any decision-making.

Well done.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

Reference:

  1. Adhikari, S.D. & Turton, J. (2019) Understanding ‘trafficking vulnerabilities’ among children: the responses linking to child protection issues in Nepal, Children’s Geographies (online first) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14733285.2019.1676398

 

A Talk Session ‘Playable City and Pokemon Go’ 😇 is on the way! 7th November 2019, 11:00-12:00. Venue: EB603

innovation, international, Knowledge Exchange

Invited Speaker: Dr Ema Tanaka (Meiji Unversity, Japan)

Method: Skype meeting

  • The concept of the ‘Playable city’ will be introduced in the community branding context by Dr Tanaka.
  • Dr Tanaka is an ECR who is specialised in the field of transformational future of organisations and human beings in the era of advanced technologies, and one of her main research areas is the well-being of the elderly citizens with Pokemon-Go games in Tokyo. From some empirical studies conducted by the University of Tokyo also suggest that Pokemon Go is contributing to the middle-aged citizens’ well-being.
  • During this talk session, we will discuss ‘a game and the health in the communities’, ‘the movement and the impact of  ‘Sport in life’, and ‘the possibility to support disaster victimised areas (e.g., Fukushima and Kumamoto)’.
  • This session will provide unique topics in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as ‘Goal 3: Good Health and well-being’,  ‘Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure’, ’Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities’, and ’Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals’.
  • This session also aligns with BU2025 strategic investment areas (SIAs), Animation, Simulation & Visualisation and Assistive Technology
  • The BU ECRs, PhD researchers, and MSc students are broadly invited to this session.
  • The session will be facilitated by Dr Hiroko Oe with a contributors, Mr. Gideon Adu-Gyamfi and Mr Adriano Manna (MSc International Management).

*For more details, please email to hoe@brounemouth.ac.uk

Leverhulme Trust – Visiting BU

The prestigious Leverhulme Trust are visiting on

Wednesday 20th November 11:00 – 14:00 in Bournemouth House (Lansdowne)

The Trust provide a range of research grants and fellowships for Humanities and Social Sciences. During this visit their representatives will provide an overview of the Trust, it’s remit, the types of funding offered, their decision-making processes and timeframes, and discuss the planning of a Leverhulme Trust application.

The presentation will be followed by Q& A and a networking lunch.

The intended learning outcomes of this session are:

  • To learn about the Leverhulme Trust, its remit and the type of funding offered
  • To be able to determine whether or not the Leverhulme Trust is an appropriate funder for your research project

To register your interest in this workshop please e-mail Organisational Development

Invisible barriers to policy and media impact

Last week we shared a blog exploring academic engagement with the media. It can serve as a vehicle to raising professional visibility and contribute to the national expertise in the specialist research area. We recognised that a media presence can be both essential and daunting. This week Wonkhe have another interesting blog – Invisible barriers keep many academics from the media – by Liz Gloyn from Royal Holloway. It’s another great (and quick read) highlighting how breaking into the media (or policy world) can seem an impossible task. It focuses on the difficulties in making connections and specifically getting on the journalist’s (or parliamentary staff’s) radar.

Excerpts:

There is a large group of early career academics and mid-career scholars who would love to be doing more media work and to be building better connections with journalists, particularly women and people of colour. Yet invisible barriers get in the way..

When journalists want a comment on a story, they often want it very quickly, and they need to know it will be fit for purpose. Their instinctive choice will be to look through their list of pre-existing contacts and reach out to somebody they already know – which is precisely how academics with a high profile in the media maintain it.

Media appearances also breed media appearances: previous engagements make it more likely for other journalists to add you to their list of contacts. Getting on the radar of media people working in your field, or becoming “discoverable”, is a common piece of advice to people wanting to engage with the media, but in practice it is incredibly difficult to do.

It doesn’t help that the focus of a lot of media training available to academics focuses on what to do once you are in the interview seat, not how to get there in the first place. An informal call for experiences on Twitter brought out lots of responses from people whose media training had focused on how to be interviewed and what pitfalls to avoid – there was very little evidence that people were being given guidance on how to be proactive about publicising their expertise.

Fortunately here at BU we do support colleagues and focus on how to build your external profile through a range of sources. If you are looking for your research to create a policy impact then get in touch. We’d love to hear about your work and support your journey to parliamentary influence.

NEW PAPER: Buhalis, D., Harwood, T., Bogicevic, V., Viglia, G., Beldona, S., Hofacker, C., 2019, Technological disruptions in Services: lessons from Tourism and Hospitality, Journal of Service Management,

NEW PAPER: Buhalis, D., Harwood, T., Bogicevic, V., Viglia, G., Beldona, S., Hofacker, C., 2019, Technological disruptions in Services: lessons from Tourism and Hospitality, Journal of Service Management, Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 484-506

https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-12-2018-0398

Purpose

Technological disruptions such as the Internet of Things and autonomous devices, enhanced analytical capabilities (artificial intelligence) and rich media (virtual and augmented reality) are creating smart environments that are transforming industry structures, processes and practices. The purpose of this paper is to explore critical technological advancements using a value co-creation lens to provide insights into service innovations that impact ecosystems. The paper provides examples from tourism and hospitality industries as an information dependent service management context.

Design/methodology/approach

The research synthesizes prevailing theories of co-creation, service ecosystems, networks and technology disruption with emerging technological developments.

Findings

Findings highlight the need for research into service innovations in the tourism and hospitality sector at both macro-market and micro-firm levels, emanating from the rapid and radical nature of technological advancements. Specifically, the paper identifies three areas of likely future disruption in service experiences that may benefit from immediate attention: extra-sensory experiences, hyper-personalized experiences and beyond-automation experiences.

Research limitations/implications

Tourism and hospitality services prevail under varying levels of infrastructure, organization and cultural constraints. This paper provides an overview of potential disruptions and developments and does not delve into individual destination types and settings. This will require future work that conceptualizes and examines how stakeholders may adapt within specific contexts.

Social implications

Technological disruptions impact all facets of life. A comprehensive picture of developments here provides policymakers with nuanced perspectives to better prepare for impending change.

Originality/value

Guest experiences in tourism and hospitality by definition take place in hostile environments that are outside the safety and familiarity of one’s own surroundings. The emergence of smart environments will redefine how customers navigate their experiences. At a conceptual level, this requires a complete rethink of how stakeholders should leverage technologies, engage and reengineer services to remain competitive. The paper illustrates how technology disrupts industry structures and stimulates value co-creation at the micro and macro-societal level.

BUCRU (Bournemouth University Clinical Research Unit) – Newsletter

NHS, Post-award

Please see the latest newsletter from the Bournemouth University Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU). We hope you find it interesting.  This is our ‘last’ newsletter and covers content from last year, we are shortly introducing new quarterly ‘BUCRU Bulletins’ with more recent content to be disseminated digitally.

BUCRU supports researchers to improve the quality, quantity, and efficiency of research locally by supporting grant applications and providing on-going support in funded projects, as well as developing our own programme of research.  2018 was an exciting year for BUCRU including being awarded a further 5 years of funding from National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) to continue our work as the RDS (Research Design Service) South West.  We’ve also submitted 14 grant applications, have 23 peer-reviewed publications and over £800,000 in grant involvement.

You can find out more within the newsletter, including news from our colleagues in the Centre of Postgraduate Medical Research and Education or visit: www.bournemouth.ac.uk/bucru

And don’t forget, your local branch of the NIHR RDS (Research Design Service) is based within the BU Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) on the 5th floor of Royal London House. Feel free to pop in and see us, call us on 61939 or send us an email.

HISTORIC LANDSCAPES AND MENTAL WELL-BEING

Celebrating World mental Health Day on the 10 October provides a very suitable occasion to promote the recently published volume of papers entitled Historic Landscapes and Mental Well-being. The result of a cross-faculty research programme, the editors include Timothy Darvill, Kerry Barrass, and Yvette Staelens from FST and Vanessa Heaslip from FHSS.

Contributions to the volume arise out of the public outreach work associated with the HLF-supported Human Henge project, including a session at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) meeting at the University of Cardiff in December 2017, and a whole-day multi-disciplinary conference held at Bournemouth University in April 2018. The aim of bringing these papers together was two-fold. First, is to illustrate how archaeological sites, ancient landscapes, and the historic environment more generally, are being used rather successfully as tools to enhance mental health well-being in a range of communities across Britain and beyond. The projects and approaches described deserve wide recognition for their international levels of originality in terms of the deployment of aspects of the historic environment in novel ways, the significance of what is being achieved in changing people’s lives for the better, and the rigour that has been applied in thinking through the underpinning logic and the practices themselves. Second, is to prompt further debate about the contribution that the historic environment can make to the attainment of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3 over the next decade or so, and to assess the contribution that this work can make to delivering public value from heritage assets.

Using archaeological sites and historic landscapes to promote mental health well-being represents one of the most significant advances in archaeological resource management for many years. Its potential contribution to health-care and wellness initiatives is boundless. Prompted by the Human Henge project working within the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, the papers in this volume provide an overview of work going on across Britain and the near Continent at many different scales. Contributors share experiences, and discuss the outcomes, implications, and theoretical underpinnings of heritage-based well-being projects.

Historic Landscapes and Mental Well-being (Archaeopress: 2019) is available in printed form and can be downloaded free as an open access publication by clicking here.

Research Leadership Training Programme – Open for nominations

Training

Following on from last year’s successful Research Leadership Programme, (consistently rated 4+ out of 5), we are running a similar programme in 2019-20. This programme supports the development of all academics including Early Career Researchers, Mid-Career Academics, Senior Research Leaders and Associate Professors.

Participants will :

  • Be helped to develop the necessary knowledge and skills to lead teams to successfully deliver funded research projects, in line with stakeholder and funder requirements.
  • Gain an understanding of effective team leadership and team working within a research context in order to be able to devise strategies to get the best out of teams in the challenging environment of research.
  • Be equipped with an understanding of their strengths and limitations in order to be confident in developing their leadership skills in line with their career stage and future aspirations and be more confident to expand their funded research activities.

Quotes from last year :

“Totally relevant to tasks we have to undertake and very enjoyable learning experience”, (Early Career);

“Excellent workshop, learned a lot of useful information I didn’t know”, (Mid-Career); and

“Fantastic tools were given for future leaders both in research and academic leadership”, (Senior Research Leader).

Full details including the timetable are available  – Research Leadership Programme Overview

Nominations will be required from Heads of Department in line with the training needs of the individual. No form is needed – an email will be fine, sent to  RKEDF@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Nominations need to be received by 30th November 2019. If you have any queries, please contact RKEDF@Bournemouth.ac.uk

(Please be aware that is NOT a course on bid writing.)

 

‘Home Sweet Home’ exhibition at The Royal Albert Memorial Museum (Dr Varuni Wimalasiri, FOM)

‘Home Sweet Home’ – Royal Albert Memorial Museum.

Dr Varuni Wimalasiri was invited by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter (RAMM) https://www.rammuseum.org.uk/ to be part of the hosting team of their ‘Home Sweet Home’ exhibition. This event was part of ‘RAMM’s lates’ and took place on the 4th of October 2019 at the RAMM museum in Exeter.  ‘Home Sweet Home’ is an exhibition showcasing things and ways people use to welcome guests into their homes. These included greetings, rituals inherited from our parents and cultures or unconsciously copied from friends. The exhibition showcased students, migrants, refugees and even North Londoners amongst it’s line up and was curated by Ruth Gidley of RAMM.

If you’re looking for a little more privacy from people in the street, the right Commercial Screens can shield the view from the outside and give you a better sense of privacy and comfort inside your home.

The image taken shows Souad Fadel (Refugee Support Devon) with a ‘Bhakhoor’ burner used to open and end social gatherings in her home and in homes throughout Arabic countries (Left), Ruth Gidley (Far right) with candlesticks that belonged to her Jewish grandparents and connected her to her ancestral roots and  Varuni (middle) contributed with Sri-Lankan serving spoon. In Sri-Lanka these spoons made from various parts of the coconut plant are used in almost all households. Those which are decorated (like the one Varuni is holding) are used for special occasions and to host guests.  Culinary traditions are important to Sri-Lankans and things like these spoons cut across race, religion, economic and social boundaries in SL.  The exhibition portrays how simple gestures and belongings can be great meaning makers and create a sense of home anywhere we are in the world.  We were some of the ‘live’ exhibits that accompanied the image exhibition curated by Ruth Gidley.

This collaboration came about through Dr Varuni Wimalasiri’s current research looking at work and employment of women refugees during resettlement in Devon in Partnership (BU GCRH funded) with one of the Devon County Council’s.  The early work for this project was funded by the Big Lottery (Project ‘Woman’s Work’).

CEMP awarded DCMS grant

CEMP are partners on a new research grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Julian McDougall, Isabella Rega and Richard Wallis will be working on GB-London: Online Safety – Media Literacy Strategy – Mapping Exercise and Literature Review. 

In April 2019 the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) and the Home Office jointly published the Online Harms White Paper (OHWP), which sets out government’s proposals for regulation and policies to tackle harms taking place online. The government is currently evaluating consultation responses to the proposals set out in the White Paper and is due to publish its response to the consultation by the end of 2019.

The DCMS have commissioned the project to:

a. undertake a mapping exercise of online media literacy initiatives, including any evaluation which accompanies them;

b. conduct a literature review of evidence on the levels of media literacy among online users and any barriers to media literacy; and

c. identify and review any existing evaluation of media literacy initiatives which were identified in the mapping exercise (part (a) above).

This research will feed into the government’s media literacy strategy.

The Conversation: British people hardly ever thought about the EU before Brexit, now it dominates their lives

The polling agency Ipsos MORI has, for many years, asked people in Britain every month what they think are the most important issues facing the country. In December 2015, only six months before the EU referendum and after nearly three years of anticipating it, just 1% of the sample cited Europe as the most important issue of the day. By April 2019 that figure had jumped to 59%.

If Brexit really is the issue which has riven the British public, dividing it into two irreconcilable blocs, why was it so low down the list of urgent concerns at the end of 2015? And not only then: the percentage of people rating it as a major issue had remained in the single digits for more than a decade.

This data does not support a view of Britain’s relationship with Europe as the cause of a longstanding and deep split within the British people. Instead it points to the referendum and the propaganda around it – before and since – as causing the split. Prior to 2016, although people differed in their views of Europe – sometimes strongly – it was never, for most, the overriding issue which it has become.

Much commentary has suggested that Brexit is a proxy issue, or the spark for an uprising of the “left-behind” against a self-serving elite. While inequality and immigration are important to understanding Brexit, this sort of analysis does not provide us with a full explanation for its current all-consuming primacy. It has been suggested that hostility to immigration has been in sharp decline since 2010, and so the referendum vote was not driven by an onrushing wave of such feeling. Nor can the theory of the Brexit vote as expressing the pain of those “left behind” by globalisation explain the Leave votes that came from people who lead comfortable and secure lives.

So how can we explain the sudden emergence, in all its breadth and fury, of both popular support for Brexit – previously a passion mainly of a europhobic, and sometimes xenophobic, fringe – and opposition to it?

According to British Social Attitudes data, between 1992 and 2015 there was a slow and unsteady growth in euroscepticism. We can attribute this, at least in part, to a background throb of anti-EU propaganda in sections of the British press. But then there was a huge leap in anti-EU feeling. In 2015, only 22% wanted to leave the EU yet, as we know, 52% voted to leave in the referendum held the following year. This inflation of europhobia, which provoked alarm among Remainers, was more or less simultaneous with the rapid installation, noted above, of Brexit as the major national issue.

Socio-political analysis stops short of a full understanding of these two big changes in public opinion. There were no events in the world to which people were responding as they coalesced into opposing camps – except the referendum itself, and the rhetoric which had crystallised around it. Brexit is a major example of a shift which took place almost entirely within what we can call the emotional public sphere, the mood and preoccupations of a national public, which is often heavily shaped by dominant media agendas and messages.

People who had previously felt either indifferent or mildly negative towards the EU were encouraged to feel outrage – first at the alleged drain of UK resources into the EU and the political suffocation it was claimed we were subjected to, then at the “treachery” of those politicians who would seek to thwart the popular vote.

Remainers, for their part, found a new focus for suspicion and negativity towards the culturally unwashed, as some tended to see the bulk of the Leave vote. Told that they were all in irreconcilable conflict with each other, many of the British people believed it and felt it.

However, media effects need psychological underpinning. Media content cannot shape our outlooks unless it speaks to some need already present in us. The referendum invited people to identify with one of two sides, to find a clear home in the bewildering flux of today’s complexities and uncertainties. On both sides, membership of a community of self-confidence and self-righteousness seemed to beckon, an antidote to the widespread sense of precarity and confusion. The Brexit question offered people the increasingly scarce experience of being sure, clear and together with others. In a world where it can be increasingly difficult to feel at home, and to know what we should be doing, this is a powerfully attractive experience – none the less so for being, in this case, illusory.

This regressive surge into tribalistic unity of purpose was led by the Brexiteers. But Remainers have subscribed all-too readily to the melodramatic, self-fulfilling headlines that say Britain has plunged into a civil war.

Of course, the UK’s relationship with the rest of Europe is a real and important issue, but behind all that there is a toxicity at work on both sides of the “Brexit divide”. A small anti-EU minority laid the fuse, but the rest of the public proved highly combustible. Getting to the bottom of how and why Brexit has blown up as it has will be essential to the work of repairing and improving British democracy.The Conversation

Barry Richards, Professor of Political Psychology, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Paper on Mixed Reality Accepted by Leading Computer Graphics Journal

Paper titled ” Context-aware Mixed Reality: A Learning-based Framework for Semantic-level Interaction” has been accepted for publication in the leading journal Computer Graphics Forum.

Dr Long Chen, the first author, was a matched-funded PhD student graduated in April 2019. He was under the supervision of Professor Wen Tang, Professor Jian Jun Zhang at BU, Dr Tao Ruan Wan at the University of Bradford and Professor Nigel John at the University of Chester as the matched-funder.

Mixed Reality is a powerful interactive technology for new types of user experience. This paper presents a semantic-based interactive
MR framework that is beyond the current geometry-based approaches, offering a step-change in generating high-level
context-aware interactions. The key insight described in this paper is that semantic understanding in Mixed Reality not only greatly enhances user experience through context-aware object behaviours, but also paves the way for solving complex interaction design challenges. The proposed computational framework generates semantic properties of the real-world environment for Mixed Reality, through a dense 3D scene reconstruction and deep image understanding scheme. A simple MR game has been developed to evaluate the proposed concept and the efficacy of the framework.

The team is invited to give an oral presentation at the premier conference Eurographics or Pacific Graphics, depending on presentation slot arrangement.

Photo of the week ‘Safe swim: Supporting physical activity and well being for transgender young people’

Telling a story of research through photography

The ‘photo of the week’ is a weekly series featuring photographs taken by BU academics and students for our Research Photography Competition which took place earlier this year.

These provide a snapshot into some of the incredible research taking place across the BU community. 

This week’s photo of the week was taken by Jayne Caudwell & Carly Stewart and is titled;

‘Safe swim: Supporting physical activity and well being for transgender young people’

This qualitative research project involves a local Bournemouth-based transgender group. It focuses on their swim-related activities to explore the benefits of water-based physical activity. Statistics demonstrate that LGBT+ have higher levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal feelings as a consequence of feeling isolated, and experiences of rejection and bullying. Transphobia and public scrutiny of transgender bodies negatively impacts the daily lives of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. There is evidence that swimming as a form of physical activity can enhance subjective well being. However, the places of sport and physical activity, specifically swimming pools are not always welcoming to transgender and gender non-conforming participants. Currently, the group privately hires a local pool and by invitation the researchers (Caudwell and Stewart) have attended on four occasions. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews have identified that group members look forward to and enjoy attending the sessions. The photograph celebrates members of the group being physically active and playful in the in-door place of a swimming pool. Aside: The group have given their consent for the photograph to be submitted to the Research Photography Competition.

(The researchers have obtained BU ethical clearance for the research project. The researchers completed the swimming pool’s required procedure to take photographs)

If you have any questions about the Photo of the Week series or the Research Photography Competition please email: research@bournemouth.ac.uk

Colloquium is on the Way! Discussion forum with Global Connections- 11th December 2019😇 From 10:00 –12:00 at EB602

innovation, international, Knowledge Exchange, PG research

This discussion forum is a ‘spin-out’ event following the Conference ‘Deep Transformations and the Future of Organisations’ (6-7 December). It would be the very first event aiming to bridge UK-Japan researchers who are specialised in the research field of the B2B and business transformation in the globalised era.

Two presenters are invited to this colloquial from Japan, Professor Takemoto (Innovation & Management Laboratory, Fukui University) and Mr Ikematsu, (Consultant/Researcher, ex strategist for Fujitsu).

Professor Takemoto will talk about the revitalisation projects with entrepreneurial movements in Fukui area, referring to the concepts of ‘Creative destruction’ and ‘Planned Happenstance Theory’.

Mr Ikematsu will talk about his experiences from the marketing and economical points of view, presenting the ‘straggles’ to change Fujitsu from the B2B model firm to the B2C model firm. His presentation will be also a good case of innovation dilemma and network externalities.

The colloquial will be carried out via the Skype conference method. Dr Hiroko Oe will act as a facilitator for this colloquial and Dr Kaouther Kooli will perform as a supervisor for this event who liaises the outcome from the main Conference the week before.

BU ECRs and the PG students will be invited to the colloquial, too. Dr. Ediz Akcay (Lecturer in Digital Marketing) and Dr Yan Liang (Lecturer in Strategy) will be there as discussants.

This colloquial will provide unique and interesting views from the different cultural context of Japanese cases, including some key topics of the UN SDGs (e.g., Goal 9 ‘Industry, innovation and infrastructure’, Goal 11 ‘Sustainable cities and communities’, and Goal 17 ‘Partnerships for the goals’).