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HE policy update

Higher Education and Research Bill – The bill will reach the report stage on Monday 21st November, and a long list of new amendments have been proposed.   The amended version of the bill following the committee stage is here.  The list of amendments is here (although it is being updated daily so best to look here)

The government’s own amendments were described by Jo Johnson in a blog on Wonkhe – an unusual and interesting step.

  • At least one member will be added to the OfS board who has experience of representing the interests of students – which has been welcomed especially by the NUS, who ran a high profile campaign on this issue
  • The OfS would have a new duty to monitor the financial sustainability of the sector.
  • Amendments to restrict the ability of the Secretary of State to frame guidance etc  in relation to particular course of study that would lead to the OfS to perform a function in a way which prohibits or requires the provision of a particular course of study.
  • The requirement for all registered providers to publish student protection plans and bring them to students’ attention. How this develops is likely to be linked to the separate consultation on credit transfer  – we are expecting a response on this soon
  • Changes relating to UKRI including the addition of postgraduate training in UKRI’s functions.

The other amendments proposed are also interesting – including amendments relating to Brexit and immigration issues, and student loans, rather than matters directly covered by the Bill, but which show the direction that the debate may be going to take – e.g. on student loans, using TEF as a measure of quality for immigration controls on student numbers,  monitoring international staff and student numbers and requiring Parliamentary approval for the TEF.  See our summary on the intranet pages here

The House of Commons library produced a useful briefing on the committee stage of the HERB on 16th November 2016.  The written evidence and transcripts of the Committee’s sittings are available on the Higher Education and Research Bill 2016-17 page of the Parliament website.  This includes BU’s submission – we were one of only 11 HE institutions to submit individual responses (out of 63 sets of evidence).

Separately, the government published guidance on how UKRI and the OfS would work together.

Teaching Excellence Framework  – The HEA have published their literature review on “defining and demonstrating quality teaching and impact in HE” – which was announced in March when we were all grappling with the TEF year 2 technical consultation.  It notes “the lack of robust empirical evidence found by this review”  “with the literature dominated by opinion pieces based on secondary, documentary analysis rather than rigorous comparison group studies.”  The review therefore points for a need for more implementation research but also a shared understanding on what “quality teaching” in HE is and why it matters, and then on how to measure it.  With that caveat in mind, it sets out what the indicators are, from the literature, showing an interesting correlation with TEF criteria. I’ve put the list of criteria on the TEF pages on the intranet.  The review looks at student/alumni feedback as measure of quality and refers to a number of publications that question whether student satisfaction is a good proxy for quality, although it may support quality in institutions as a robust mechanism for feedback.

Brexit – The House of Commons Science and Technology committee’s report into leaving the EU has been published.  Read my seperate blog on the BU research blog here – it calls for more reassurance on staff mobility and funding and a Chief Scientific Adviser in the Department for Exiting the EU.

International Students – There has been much activity this week – some of it is reflected in the amendments to the HE and Research Bill as noted above – many of those filing amendments to the Bill spoke in the Westminster Hall debate

  • The House of Lords discussed overseas students on 17th November (see Hansard here).  The discussion included a great deal of support for allowing international students to come to the UK, support for removing them from the migration statistics, and criticism of suggestions that quality measures (including the TEF) should be used as a mechanism to determine policy.  A better measure of actual overstayers (rather than the current estimates) would be helpful.  There was much concern about the UK sending unfriendly messages to the rest of the world.
  • There was a Westminster Hall debate on 16th November – you can read the House of Commons briefing paper on international students prepared for that debate.  During that debate (see Hansard here):
    • Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott confirmed Labour policy was to remove international students from Home Office migration statistics, saying not only would this make the statistics more accurate in relation to people who were subject to immigration legislation but it would also “contribute to the detoxification of this area of British society and political life”.
    • Stuart C McDonald (SNP, Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) He thought the Government’s official ambition for education exports to be worth £30bn by 2020 was unlikely to be met, and questioned the accuracy of the international passenger survey statistics that 90,000 students were not leaving when their courses ended
    • There were comments criticising the negative rhetoric around immigration generally

University finance – UUK have launched an interactive tool looking at University spending – responding to  the HEPI student experience survey last year that reported that 75% of students did not feel that they have enough information on where their fees are spent – something that is of concern when so many students also have concerns about value for money (only a third said that they are receiving good or very good value for money) – something that is cited by the government regularly.  It is worth noting that BU has a very clear explanation of our own finances on the website that was developed alongside SUBU last year to make sure that we are presenting helpful information in a clear way.

Social mobility and widening participation – A report by the Social Mobility Commission was issued this week.  The report includes a series of conclusions and recommendations.  Specifically relevant to universities, it recommended introducing an annual social mobility league table for universities, and ensuring that there is HE local provision in all areas of the country.  The prior attainment issue (at GCSE) affecting HE access is one that has been highlighted a lot recently – and is one of the factors behind the schools policy that is currently out for consultation.  HE “cold spots” have also been identified as an issue, and the focus on local geography is consistent with the approach that is being taken by the government, most recently with the National Collaborative Outreach Programme, targeting specific post-codes and linked to measureable outcomes, and Justine Greening’s announcement of new “opportunity areas” at the Conservative Party conference, so it will be interesting to see what the reaction is.

Student Finance – consultations

The government consulted in 2015 about extending loans to PGR students on means-tested basis and announced with the 2016 budget that they would launch a technical consultation on the detail, which has been launched with a closing date of 16th December 2016 (Consultation on postgraduate doctoral loans).  BU is preparing a response to this consultation –  please contact policy@bournemouth.ac.uk if you would like to be involved and read the summary here.

In the Autumn Statement in 2015 the Government announced it would introduce new undergraduate part-time maintenance loans to support the cost of living while studying.  The Part-time Maintenance Loans Consultation seeks views and evidence on the introduction of the part-time maintenance loan.  Please contact policy@bournemouth.ac.uk if you would like to contribute and read the summary here.  The consultation closes on 16th December 2016.

Science and Technology Committee – Leaving the EU report

Funding opportunities

The House of Commons Science and Technology committee’s report into leaving the EU has been published.

To quote the main points from the summary:

  • “The Government has provided some helpful and welcome short-term reassurances in relation to underwriting EU funding for research and maintaining access to student loans, but the Government’s strategy for communicating these recent announcements is insufficient.”
  • “we are not convinced that the needs of science and research are at the heart of the Department for Exiting the European Union’s (DExEU) thinking and planning for Brexit. Science should have a strong voice as part of the negotiations. DExEU needs a Chief Scientific Adviser urgently. The Government should also involve the interim Chair of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)”
  • “the Government should now act to reduce uncertainty by setting out a vision for science. This should include commitments to raise science expenditure as a percentage of GDP (as we have previously urged).  It should also include measures to attract skilled researchers and students, to be taken forward in Brexit negotiations separately from immigration controls more broadly, and should include an immediate commitment to exempt EU researchers already working here from any wider potential immigration controls.”
  • “The Government must also seek to capitalise on the opportunities of Brexit, including in terms of setting regulations to facilitate accessing markets and research collaborations beyond the EU.”

On the EU funding guarantee, the report concludes that this is helpful to provide reassurance but that it doesn’t go very far, because it would be strange if the EU were not required to honour its contractual commitments under awards made before the UK leaves the EU and so it is unlikely that there will ever be a call under the guarantee.  However, given that there was widespread concern – whether justified or not – in the summer, the guarantee has been given in order to encourage people to keep bidding and to provide reassurance of the government’s commitment to mitigating these potential direct negative effects of Brexit.  However, if this is its main purpose, the report notes that it hasn’t really been communicated very well – hence the high level point noted in the report’s summary.

What matters to science and research?  The report highlights 5 main issues:

  • Funding – e.g. on-going participation in H2020 after Brexit or a UK replacement for it
  • People – guarantees for those already here and attracting EU researchers after Brexit, and Erasmus
  • Collaboration – being able to participate in international projects and influence the EU research agenda
  • Regulation – influencing EU regulation which might otherwise stifle innovation
  • Facilities – access for UK researchers to EU facilities

Note on people that the Education Committee are running a separate inquiry into the impact of Brexit on staff and students, and we have just submitted evidence – read it here.  The report notes that it is not clear whether Brexit will mean that EU staff become subject to the same controls as international staff – and of course there is about to be a new consultation on what the controls for international employees are going to be.

The report calls for a specific guarantee for staff already in post.  Note that Jo Johnson made helpful noises about this in the House of Commons this week – he “expects” that this assurance will be given but it depends on reciprocity (so it will come later in the negotitations?).

Student Research Assistants – awarded projects

Fusion Investment Fund, Student Engagement, student research

All assessments are now in and the awarded Student Research Assistantships (SRA) are as follows:

Prof Adele Ladkin –  Exploring Work-life Balance in the Hospitality Industry 

Prof Alan Breen –  Spinal image Processing Assistant

Prof Alison McConnell –  Modelling the effect of slow breathing on the human cardiovascular system

Dr Anita Diaz – Enhancing public engagement with co-creating science through our science co-creation website

Dr Ann Luce – Student Research Assistant

Dr Anna Feigenbaum –  Data Journalism, Policing and Human Rights

Dr Ben Thomas –  Hydropower Test Rig Student Research Assistant

Dr Caroline Jackson –  Professionalisation of Events Researcher

Dr David John –  3D developer: Reconstruction of Skorba Prehistoric Temple, Malta

Dr Elena Cantarello –  Engaging staff and students in pro-environmental behaviours in the UK higher education sector

Dr Emma Jenkins –  Research Assistant: Understanding Early Communities in the Near East

Prof Genoveva F. Esteban –  Student Research Assistant

Dr Isabella Rega –  Mobile Technologies and Telecentres in Latin America: Investigating Synergies and Convergence

Dr Ishmael Tingbani & Dr David Botchie –  Student Research Assistant

Dr James Gavin –  Daily Activities as Training Exercises for Orthopaedic Patients

Dr Jamie Matthews/ Dr Nael Jebril –  Societies in Flux

Joyce Costello –  Investigating Pro-Social Behavior of Media Employees

Dr Karina Gerdau-Radonic –  Identifying individual and group identities through mortuary treatment

Prof Kerstin Stutterheim –  Media history research & Assistance for curating a scientific film program + publication

Dr Lee-Ann Fenge –  Collecting stories about health and well-being

Dr Luciana S. Esteves – Coastal Sediment Database

Dr Mel Hughes –  Older male carers research assistant 

Dr Melanie Klinkner –  Between Science and Human Rights: forensic excavation and their value for Truth Commissions

Dr Nigel Williams – Network Analysis of Destination discourse

Dr Peter Hills –  Development of the Facespan

Dr Richard Wallis – Becoming A Media Worker 

Dr Rosie Read –  Creating online resources to showcase BU students’ ethnographic research

Dr Salvatore Scifo – Delivering Community Radio

Dr Samuel Nyman – NHS Quality Improvement

Dr Shamal Faily – CAIRIS

Dr Sue Sudbury – Participatory Filmmaking

Dr Tim Breitbarth –  Sport and Society: Public Perceptions and Social Media Conversations about the Social Value of Sport

Dr Viachaslau Filimonau –  Food donations in the UK grocery retail sector – The role of local charities

Prof Wen Tang –  Data Game – Location-based Story Generation and Guidance

 

Please promote these vacancies to students where applicable.  All jobs are live on MyCareerHub, our Careers & Employability online careers tool.  You will need to use your staff/student credentials to login.

 

There will be another round of applications for academics to apply for funding for an SRA in February.  Please do look out for updates on the BU Research Blog.

If you have any questions about this scheme, please contact Rachel Clarke, KE Adviser (KTP and Student Projects) on 61347 or email sra@bournemouth.ac.uk

Successful HEA Reaccreditation

Centre for Excellence in Learning, Training

The Higher Education Academy (HEA) has reaccredited TeachBU and the PG Certificate in Education Practice until 2020 as routes to gaining national recognition as HEA Fellows. HEA Fellowship is an international recognition of a commitment to professionalism in teaching and learning in higher education and demonstrates that education practice is aligned with the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF). To date over 75,000 individuals have become Fellows of the HEA.

The Accreditation Panel commended Bournemouth University on its commitment to the professional development and recognition of all staff that teach and support learning and the Academic Career Matrix, which further embeds the UK Professional Standards Framework within HR policies and processes.

They commented that the Centre for Excellence in Learning (CEL) is a driver of significant change and improvement across the institution and promotes research-engaged teaching which is aligned with the UKPSF.
They also felt that there is an impressive infrastructure in place to support and develop the TeachBU provision and that participants are well supported by the clear guidance provided in the handbook which explains the requirements of each descriptor very well. Processes are well defined and the templates provided support applicants to structure their application to present the evidence of practice required.

We now have over 60% of BU academic staff with either HEA Fellowship and/or a recognized teaching qualification, with the ambition of raising this to 100% by 2018. Further details about TeachBU are available online here (via the ‘Working at BU’ tag on the staff intranet), together with details about upcoming introductory sessions and submission deadlines.

Dr Sue Eccles
November 2016

Dr Pawel Surowiec Elected to the ECREA’s Executive Board

Bournemouth University’s media and communication studies co-exist thanks to multiple international links. Among them are links with learned societies, one of which is the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

The election of the new ECREA’s Executive Board took place during the General Assembly held in Prague on the last day of the 6th European Communication Conference (12th November, 2016). Among the elected members of the board is academic from BU’s the Faculty of Media and Communication.

The Board have elected among themselves the President, Vice-President, General Secretary and Treasurer.

Ilija Tomanić Trivundža was elected as the President of ECREA, John Downey as Vice-President, Irena Reifová as the General Secretary and Paweł Surowiec as the Treasurer.

The Executive Board consists of the following colleagues:
President:
Ilija Tomanić Trivundža, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Vice-President:
John Downey, Loughborough University, UK

General Secretary:
Irena Reifová, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Treasurer:
Paweł Surowiec, Bournemouth University, UK

Members of the Board:
Ali Murat Akser, Ulster University, UK
Christina Holtz-Bacha, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Galina Miazhevich, University of Leicester, UK
Miguel Vicente-Mariño, University of Valladolid, Spain

KRUKing good day!!!

Representatives from Kidney Research UK conducted a site visit to Bournemouth on Monday hosted by the Department of Life and Environmental Science (Dr. Paul Hartley and Shruthi Sivakumar) as well as Prof. John Fletcher. The event was attended by clinician-researchers from Bristol and Brighton Universities and was intended as a ‘meet and greet’ between the charity and its funded researchers. The day was highly productive and KRUK’s representatives were very impressed by BU’s research labs, projects and learning environment (especially the spanking new Leica SP8 confocal microscope).

BU currently holds an Innovation Award from KRUK for the use of fruit flies to study the genetics of kidney failure in diabetes. This work is important because kidney disease is a common condition and major contributing factor to cardiovascular disease worldwide. Astonishingly, there are still very few treatments beyond dialysis and a very poor life expectancy (3 years) when diagnosed with kidney disease in your 40’s.

The charity stressed that they are highly receptive to new applications that tackle this problem. Funding is not restricted to basic science or clinical research…so if you have any good ideas…let them know and get an application started!!

http://www.kidneyresearchuk.org/research

An informative powerpoint by KRUK is available as pdf format – let me know if you’re interested in having a copy (phartley@bournemouth.ac.uk)

 

British Conference of Undergraduate Research – encouraging students to apply

Student Engagement, student research

Next spring, Bournemouth University (BU) will be welcoming undergraduates from all over the country to present their research as part of the British Conference of Undergraduate Research (BCUR).  The prestigious annual conference is a chance to celebrate the valuable contribution of research from undergraduate students across a vast array of disciplines and subject areas.

Undergraduates from all disciplines will be invited to submit papers, posters, workshops and performances as part of the conference.  Abstracts will be peer-reviewed and those accepted will be invited to attend the conference, which is taking place in Bournemouth 25 – 26 April 2017.

Abstract submission is currently open and we’d like to see plenty of entries from BU students – it’s a great opportunity for them to share their work and develop confidence in their presentation skills.  Please do encourage your students to submit an abstract.  The deadline is 10 December.

Guidance about abstract submission can be found here and a drop session will take place in PG30a on Monday 5 December 1pm – 2pm for any students who want to talk through their ideas with someone from BU’s BCUR organising committee.

For more information about the conference and details of how to submit abstracts, please visit www.bournemouth.ac.uk/bcur17 or email bcur17@bournemouth.ac.uk.

ESRC – UK in a Changing Europe – Brexit Priority Grants

Funding opportunities

ESRC logoPre-call announcement

The ESRC will shortly be launching a call under the UK in a Changing Europe initiative for Brexit Priority Grants. These are to support additional activity (including research synthesis and potential new short-term research activity) related to the process of the UK leaving the European Union.

The grants will be between £100,000 and £300,000 (100 per cent fEC, with the ESRC contributing 80 per cent fEC) and for a duration of up to 18 months. The ESRC expects grants to commence on 1 April 2017.

Whilst grants under the call will be able to support new research, grant holders will be expected to undertake stakeholder and public engagement activity throughout the grant’s duration. Grant holders will also be expected to work closely with the initiative, led by Director Professor Anand Menon in communicating the research.

The ESRC intends to launch the call at the beginning of December 2016, and it is expected to close at 16.00 on 25 January 2017.

The following initial themes have been identified as potential priorities:

  • Key policy areas and their impact on the UK: the single market and its implications for trade, labour market dynamics, and internal migration (within Europe); financial services regulation, monetary policy, and the future of the eurozone; the EU’s external relations; policies relating to internal security and justice; energy and environmental policy.
  • The UK and the workings of European institutions: European institutions, democracy, governance, regulation; the influence of member states and sub-national regions on EU decision making; the implications of multi speed integration, including of further eurozone integration on non euro members; legal aspects of membership and non-membership.
  • Attitudes towards the EU: Social and political attitudes; the nature of euroscepticism; the role of the media in shaping public and political attitudes.
  • A Changing UK: The impact of legal, constitutional, policy and political change in the UK on the relationship.

If you are interested in applying then please contact your RKEO Funding Development Officer in the first instance.

14:Live with Dr Ashley Woodfall returns on Thursday!

Student Engagement

Do you want to get creative for an hour? Do you have an interest in creative research methods?

14:Live is back tomorrow on Thursday 17 November with Dr Ashley Woodfall!8115-rkeo-14live-digital-signage-v3-0

Join us as we get creative and discuss Mess and Mayhem: Creative/Reflective Methods at Play. This mess and discussion led session will be a space to discuss the use (and abuse) of creative research methods. How can they help trigger meaningful research interactions, and how the outcomes might be understood?

This session will be exploring research in a creative environment from drawing, to molding, to improv’ and beyond. We ask if creative reflective methods can share something of your own life world and whether these methods can help unlock metaphorical insights that are missed through more traditional approaches.

Come along on at 14:00-15:00 on Floor 5 of the Student Centre for an hour of mess and mayhem. There will be free drinks and snacks!

If you have any questions then please contact Hannah Jones

BU academic wins AHRC Research in Film Innovation Award

AHRC film award

Bournemouth University’s Sue Sudbury has been named a winner at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research in Film Awards.

Sue, a Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Production, received the Innovation Award for her short film Village Tales.

It is a participatory film made by four young women in rural India, who use handheld cameras to film their lives and interview friends and family about child marriage, as well as sharing their own experiences of being beaten by husbands, infant mortality, and harassment inflicted by in-laws.

“The stories and experiences of these women told first hand are shocking. However this film is a film of hope,” said Sue.

Launched in 2015 the Research in Film Awards celebrate short films, up to 30 minutes long, that have been made about the arts and humanities and their influence on our lives.

Entries for the awards this year hit a record high, with hundreds of submissions. The awards ceremony took place at BAFTA, London and the overall winner for each category will receive £2,000 towards their filmmaking.

BU Principal Academic Roman Gerodimos was also shortlisted in the AHRC Research in Film Awards, in the Utopia Award: Imagining our Future category, for his film At the Edge of the Present, which explores urban coexistence.

Jan Dalley, Arts Editor of the Financial Times and Chair of the Judging Panel, said, “The second year of AHRC’s Research in Film Awards has brought a fantastic range of powerful short documentary films of the highest quality and the judges had a really tough job to make their choices.

“Each of the winning films, which tell such amazing stories so well, beautifully illustrate the power of film-making as a medium to capture the importance and impact of research.”

Watch Sue Sudbury’s winning film Village Tales 

New research on interactivity in advertising published by Dr. Chris Miles

Publishing

We are constantly told how enabling and empowering new interactive digital technologies are. How they free us to talk back to and build relationships with brands, allow us to organise ourselves as consumers, and stimulate marketers to find more relevant and less manipulative ways of communicating with us.  Yet, how true is this really?

A chapter written by Dr. Chris Miles and published in a new Routledge collection, Explorations in Critical Studies in Advertising, investigates the optimistic claims for interactive advertising as a liberating platform for dialogue and co-creation and concludes that they are largely rhetorical strategies designed to persuade decision-makers of the terrifying prospects of losing brand control to consumers. As Dr. Miles concludes, “powerful keywords such as ’empowerment’, ‘interactivity’, and ‘dialogue’ act as discursive grounds for a fearful rededication to the goal of control”. Carefully analysing the ways in which both academic researchers in advertising and practitioner pundits talk about interactive strategies, Dr. Miles found a curious mixture of ostensibly celebratory language alongside terms and comparisons designed to unnerve and threaten marketers and management. The result, argues Dr. Miles, is both an understanding and practice of interactivity which largely serve to consolidate advertising’s traditional control orientation.
Dr. Miles’ chapter is part of the collection Exploration in Critical Studies of Advertising, edited by James Hamilton, Robert Bodle and Ezequiel Korin, and published by Routledge. A full chapter list and outline can be found at the publishers’ site here (link: https://www.routledge.com/Explorations-in-Critical-Studies-of-Advertising/Hamilton-Bodle-Korin/p/book/9781138649521)​.
Dr. Chris Miles is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing & Communication in the Department of Corporate and Marketing Communication. He is a member of the PCCC Research Centre and Head of the BU Advertising Research Group. His research focuses on the discursive construction of marketing theory and practice, particularly as it relates to communication and control. His book, Interactive Marketing: Revolution or Rhetoric?, was published by Routledge in 2010. He is currently working on another monograph for Routledge exploring the relationship between marketing, rhetoric and magic.

Royal Geographical Society-BU joint event at the EBC -17th Nov

neptuneHave you thought about how much our landscapes have changed in the last 50 years?

The National Trust owns 775 miles of our coastline and you can hear about the changes they have mapped between 1965 and 2015 on a seminar organised by the Royal Geographical Society, this Thu 17th Nov, 7.00-8.30pm at the Executive Business Centre (room EB708).

50 years of the National Trust Neptune Project: coastal land use and maps

Karin Taylor (Head of Land Use Planning, National Trust) and Huw Davies (Head of Conservation Information, National Trust) present an overview of the coastal land use changes mapped during the 50 years of the Neptune Project. The lecture will discuss the fascinating impacts of town and country planning, the National Trust ownership, and the difference in survey techniques used between 1965 and 2015.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Enterprise Neptune (a major appeal to fund the acquisition of pristine coastal land) the National Trust commissioned a re-survey of a coastal land use survey that was completed of the English, Welsh and Northern Irish coastlines in 1965.  Comparative analysis of the two surveys provide insightful evidence of the changes in land use that have occurred between 1965 and 2015, and the impacts of both the advent of town and country planning and the consequences of national Trust ownership. The lecture will also show differences in the survey techniques between then (geography students armed with maps, pencils, walking boots and tents) and now (GIS and other desk-based techniques).

For more information and tickets, please click here (free for RGS-IBG members, students and university staff, others £5):

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/50-years-of-the-national-trust-neptune-project-coastal-land-use-and-maps-tickets-25784848175.

FMC Associate Professor delivers plenary at Style and Response Conference

conferences

It was my great pleasure to take part last week in a conference organised by the Stylistics Research Group at Sheffield Hallam Style and Response. My paper reported on the activities of our two BU based AHRC funded projects, and on the ethical and methodological challenges of researching readers and reading online.  The conference was an important opportunity to disseminate the work of the existing projects and to further extend our network of scholars researching reading in the digital age. It was also an opportunity to discuss what will hopefully be the next stage of this research, as our application for Follow on Funding to the AHRC is currently being finalised….

 

The first day included a fascinating panel on Digital Fiction, particularly focusing on immersion and showcasing different methodologies including the Think Aloud protocol and participant interviews. The case studies discussed in this session included Dreaming Methods’ Wallpaper (Alice Bell), videogame Zero Time Dilemma (Jess Norledge and Richard Finn) and The Princess Murderer (Isabelle Van der Bom). After lunch, I switched between panels to catch Sam Browse’s entertaining paper presenting an ethnographic study of a group of local Labour party activists, followed by Lyle Skains’ paper reporting on how her creative writing students responded to reading digital or ‘ergodic’ fiction, and how they felt this influenced their own creative practice.

 

It was great to see diversity throughout the programme both in terms of methods and case studies.  One of the takeaways from day one was a strong preference for mixed methods, and there was a very lively discussion following the closing plenary (presented in absentia by Ranjana Das) about the extent to which exploring new approaches and methods from different disciplines can be managed without diluting or compromising the skills and expertise that we have as researchers primarily trained in critical analysis and close reading.

 

I delivered the opening plenary on day 2, followed by a fascinating panel on Attention, with an insightful paper on cognitive approaches to re-reading from Chloe Harrison and Louise Nuttall, and a very informative and interesting paper on eyetracking and onomatopoeia in manga from Olivia Dohan.

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The afternoon sessions provided further innovative approaches to media and new media texts and cultures.  Isabelle van der Bom and Laura Paterson reported on a corpus linguistic study of live tweeting of Benefits Street, which provided depressing but fascinating evidence of the ways in which the ‘echo chamber’ of social media is nevertheless shaped in interaction with other media (tv, the tabloid press).  It also raised questions about the extent to which empirical and particularly quantitative approaches can tell the ‘whole story’ when it comes to a discourse where there may be just as many silent witnesses as participants.

sheff

Alison Gibbons’ paper on JJ Abrams’ S offered a fascinating account of the novel as part of a transmedia universe, and reported on her attempts to get ‘real readers’ to create and insert their own marginalia alongside that provided by the novel’s creators.  The closing plenary was an energetic and engaging discussion of persuasion and transportation by Melanie Green.  As well as transporting us to another world by reading us a story, Melanie’s paper left us with some important insights into the power of stories to change minds for good and ill.

Many congratulations to the organisers of this event for producing such a stimulating couple of days. It was wonderful to see that the study of readers and reading is attracting some innovative work from within the field of stylistics, drawing on a long tradition of focusing on the empirical, but also demonstrating breadth of engagement with terms and methods from multiple disciplines.