BU Research Blog

Rejection is a key part of an academic’s life.  Typically, your scientific paper gets rejected at least one before getting accepted for publication.  Whilst it is common knowledge among academics is that your average grant application has a chance of about one in eight, and Innovate UK Smart grants have a “public” success rate of just 5%.  As academics we all have to learn to live with ‘failure’ .  However, when we received a rejection this week to be part of  the ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council) Festival of Social Science 2024 for our research project Preventing drowning of children under two in Bangladesh: An interdisciplinary approach, it was a first!

We thought we had a decent chance as (1) our interdisciplinary team includes an anthropologist, an economist and a sociologist. (2)  This year the call for Festival of Social Science was for a joint Bournemouth University and the University of Southampton programme, and our NIHR (National Institute for Health Research)-funded Sonamoni project is an international joint project between Bournemouth University and the University of Southampton, working with the University of the West of England, the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute), CIPRB in Bangladesh and Design Without Borders in Uganda.  (3) We had included an element of Virtual reality as this year’s festival theme will be  ‘Our Digital Lives’.  Finally, (4) I have been successful before in the past applying for inclusion into the ESRC Festival of Learning, for example highlight our research in Nepal and India in 2018 or our Breastfeeding Debate in the 2017 Festival of Learning.  Obviously past success is no guarantee for future success!  Hopefully, we have better luck next year when we have more results to present in a knowledge exchange event like this.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)