BU Research Blog

16 November 2016

BU academic wins AHRC Research in Film Innovation 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

15 November 2016

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

Publishing jdknott

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.

15 November 2016

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

lesteves

neptune Have 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.

15 November 2016

FMC Associate Professor delivers plenary at Style and Response Conference

conferences bthomas

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.

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.

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.

15 November 2016

BU highly represented at the 4th international SIGNEC Conference in London

PG research, Public engagement, student research inessel

SIGNEC U.K. is a special interest group for NEC set up by Prof Minesh Khashu, Consultant in Neonatal Medicine, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Visiting Professor at Bournemouth University. NEC or Necrotising Enterocolitis is a major cause of mortality and morbidity in preterm newborns. We do not understand well what causes NEC and unfortunately there has not been much progress in this area of clinical care in the last couple of decades. This led Prof. Khashu to set up this group.

The aim of SIGNEC U.K. is to facilitate knowledge sharing, networking and collaboration to optimise research and improvements in practice.

SIGNEC U.K. includes neonatologists, paediatricians, surgeons, dieticians, transfusion medicine specialists, epidemiologists, basic science researchers, nurses, trainees and other healthcare professionals with an interest in NEC and health improvement.

The group and its conferences attract the best researchers in the field from all over the world to share recent advances and improvements in practice. The conferences are unique in terms of scientific meetings as they have very strong involvement from parents/families. The work of this group has been very well received by clinicians, researchers and parents and it has become an important part of the global academic neonatal/prematurity/NEC calendar.– Prof Minesh Khashu

Recently, the 4^th international SIGNEK UK conference in London brought together all these specialists in the field, as well as parents, to discuss the latest basic and clinical research findings and improvements in practice.

My supervisor Dr Simon Dyall and I were delighted to be invited to attend this event, since, together with Minesh, we are looking at the role of essential fatty acids in perinatal health. As stated above, NEC is a major health concern in the perinatal period, which potentially benefits from essential fatty acids. Furthermore, the event was a perfect opportunity to network with people working in the field of perinatal health and to get more ideas for future research.

One of my personal highlights was the panel discussion on laboratory models of NEC, which was the first in the world to happen at SIGNEC UK 2016. Furthermore, I was impressed by the active involvement of parents, some of them who have lost a child to NEC, in the conference.

One of the non-scientific/clinical highlights was of course the tour through Chelsea Football Stadium during the lunch break.

Many thanks to Prof Minesh Khashu for organising the event and for the invitation and to Bournemouth University for the funding which made my attendance possible.

If you would like to learn more about SIGNEC UK or attend next year’s conference, please contact Prof Minesh Khashu at mineshkhashu@gmail.com

If you would like to learn more about our research, please do not hesitate to contact me at inessel@bournemouth.ac.uk

Isabell

15 November 2016

BU’s Sascha Dov Bachmann appointed Reviewer to The Estonian Research Council (ETAg)

Fusion, Public engagement sbachmann

Dr Sascha Dov Bachmann, Associate Professor in International Law (BU) and War Studies (FHS), has been appointed as reviewer to The Estonian Research Council (ETAg) to contribute his expertise to the evaluation of Mobilitas Pluss top researcher grant applications.

ETAg is the sole provider of financing for basic research in Estonia, both for research teams and individual researchers, on the basis of open public competition.

Mobilitas Pluss is a researcher mobility programme co-funded from the European Regional Development Fund (http://www.etag.ee/en/funding/programmes/mobilitas-pluss/). The top researcher funding scheme seeks research applications of the highest international calibre.

15 November 2016

Latest Funding Opportunities

Funding opportunities eknight

The following is a snap-shot of funding opportunities that have been announced. Please follow the links for more information:

Academy of Medical Sciences

COMING SOON: Starter grants for clinical lecturers

The Academy of Medical Science will shortly be inviting applications for its starter grants for clinical lecturers. The next call is expected to open in January 2017. The following information is from the previous round and is subject to change. These grants enable research-active clinical lecturers to gather data in order to develop and strengthen their research careers and bids for longer-term fellowships and funding. Grants are worth up to £30,000 each over one to two years.

Maximum award: £30,000

Closing date: 05 Mar 17 (forecast, recurring)

Arts and Humanities Research Council

Collaborative research grants – São Paulo Research Foundation

These enable transnational British and Brazilian teams to carry out collaborative research projects. The overall proposal budget should not exceed £2m. Projects may last for up to 60 months.

Maximum award: £2,000,000

Closing date: None open call

GCRF area-focused network plus call

This supports multidisciplinary, internationally collaborative programmes of activity rooted in the arts and humanities that take a place-based approach to addressing global development challenges. Projects will focus on a cluster of countries, region, or ‘area’ otherwise defined as the basis for addressing a number of interconnected development challenges within the specific context of the area in question. Funding is worth between £1.5m and £2m per project over a period of four years.

Maximum award: £2,000,000

Closing date: 18 Jan 17

Highlight notice for international development – research networking scheme

This aims to encourage research networking proposals which explore the contribution that arts and humanities research can make to challenges, policy or practice relating to international development. Grants are worth up to £30,000 each. An additional £30,000 paid in full economic cost may be provided to cover the costs of any international participants or activities in addition to the scheme limit.

Maximum award: £60,000

Closing date: 28 Feb 17

British Academy

APEX awards

This offers established independent researchers, with a strong track record in their respective area, an opportunity to pursue genuine interdisciplinary and curiosity-driven research to benefit wider society. Projects may last for up to 24 months.

Maximum award: £100,000

Closing date: 13 Jan 17

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Feasibility studies – industrial systems in the digital age

These enable cross-disciplinary, foresight, speculative and risky early stage research in industry systems in the digital age or the building of a demonstrative prototype. The total budget for the programme is £600,000.

Maximum award: Not known

Closing date: 09 Dec 16

Environmental Change Challenge Fellowships

This aims to establish a research group to answer the question of how our cities, their hinterlands, linking infrastructure, rural surround and the regions they are in, be transformed to be resilient, sustainable, more economically viable and generally better places to live. The total budget is approximately £5 million.

Maximum award: Not known

Closing date: 05 Jan 17

If you are interested in submitting to any of the above calls you must contact your RKEO Funding Development Officer with adequate notice before the deadline.

For more funding opportunities that are most relevant to you, you can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.

15 November 2016

Dementia Institute at Alzheimer Europe in Copenhagen, Denmark

mheward

Prof Jane Murphy, Joanne Holmes, Dr Michelle Heward, Ben Hicks and Sophie Bushell attended the 26^th Annual Conference of Alzheimer Europe which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark from 31 October to 2 November 2016.

This years conference theme was ‘excellence in dementia research and care’, and addressed numerous aspects of developing a dementia-friendly society, exploring the challenges concerning excellence in diagnosis, medical treatment and research as well as innovative person-centered care related to the progress of the disease and living well with dementia in society. jane-and-joanne

Jane and Joanne presented a poster on their work on ‘Nutrition and dementia care: Developing an evidence-based model for delivering person-centred care in nursing homes. Michelle discussed the findings from a recent project focusing on hospital care in her paper on ‘Promoting excellence in hospital care for people with dementia: a UK case study’. Ben presented a poster on his recent project ‘How does Cage Cricket enhance the perceived life experience of people with dementia and their care partners?’. Sophie presented a paper showcasing her PhD research ‘Improving wellbeing for people with dementia living in a purpose built care environment by introducing self-chosen activities’.

15 November 2016

Call for expressions of interest: Thrivership UK 2017

csteele

Would you like to be a part of the largest collaborative event in 2017 to improve the quality of life for those who have been affected by cancer? Living Well Active and the Student Project Bank are inviting students and staff from across BU to register their interest in helping shape the Thrivership UK 2017 Four Nations Convention: From Survivor to Thriver.

On 13^th July 2017 Bournemouth University will bring together leading organisations from the four nations representing cancer related charities and survivorship projects, sport and physical activity, NHS and local governments to share best practice, research and innovative ideas to improve the services, experience and outcomes for people living with a cancer diagnosis. This event will also host a health and wellbeing clinic for 200 people living with cancer.

In order to make this event a success, Living Well needs support with:

Event development, management, marketing and administration
Branding and marketing materials design
Website development
Social media development and promotion
Media capture of event (film/photography)
Interviewing participants in the event
Event impact evaluation
Literature review around improving cancer survivorship
Event day support/management

Interested in taking part?

There will be a presentation and Q&A session with the founder of Living Well Agency on 6^th December at 11:00 in the Lawrence Lecture Theatre, Talbot Campus. Register your attendance here. Refreshments will be provided.

Taking part in this event is a great way for students to enhance their CV, gain real-world project experience and contribute to people’s potential to live active and happy lives with and beyond cancer.

15 November 2016

Faculty of Management academics are keynote speakers at MEAconf

conferences, international ebolat

Two Faculty of Management academics, Dr Mohamed Haffar and Dr Elvira Bolat, are selected as keynote speakers for the 6th International Conference on Modern Research in Management, Economics and Accounting, which is held on 15th November at London South Bank University.

Dr Haffar from the Department of Leadership, Strategy and Organisational Behaviour is presenting on the following topic, ‘Guidelines for organisational sustainability in an era of radical change: The vital role of employees readiness and commitment to change’. Dr Bolat from the Department of Marketing is talking about ‘Digital transformation and its implications for academia and practice’.

The MEAConference aims to pave an international way for leading academics, active researchers, experts, industry leaders and interested scholars to communicate and exchange their viewpoints on latest scientific findings and practical experiences in the fields of Management, Economics and Accounting. Besides, the Conference attempts to examine the scientific and practical challenges in their application process across all geographical regions as well as at diverse local, national, regional and international levels.

14 November 2016

BU’s Clinical Academic Doctorates; an example of good practice in new official guidance

Vanora Hundley

The Association of UK University Hospitals (AUKUH) has today released new guidance, Transforming healthcare through clinical academic roles in nursing, midwifery and allied health professions: A practical resource for healthcare provider organisations

The guide is aimed at NHS organisational leads with the responsibility for developing and embedding clinical academic roles for nursing, midwifery and allied health professions. Clinical academics serve as a crucial connection between the NHS and universities, working to train future generations of healthcare workers while engaging in research which can improve outcomes for patients and help increase efficiency.

The guide contains practical information, case studies and templates. One of the case studies highlighted is BU’s innovative clinical academic doctorates. The pragmatic four-year clinical doctorate model enables midwives and nurses to remain in practice while conducting a piece of research to meet clinical priorities. The four-year clinical doctorate is a joint development involving academics at Bournemouth University and clinical colleagues at NHS trusts. The doctorate is structured to enable students to spend two days a week in clinical practice and three days conducting research. All research projects are jointly developed to meet an identified clinical need.

The model originated for midwives in Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, where we have eight fellows, and has now been adopted by the Isle of Wight NHS Trust, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Poole Hospitals NHS Trust and Dorset County Hospitals NHS Trust (Way et al., 2016). The model is also being extended to other disciplines, with our first nurse fellow at Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Trust.

Professor Debbie Carrick-Sen, Co-Chair of the group which produced the guidance, says:

‘Creating this resource has required a significant amount of collaboration from colleagues across healthcare and we are truly grateful to them. The energy that has gone into it is a huge credit to the professions involved. Through this guidance they have the means to share their immense successes, learn from each other and ultimately work to the benefit of patient care.

‘The guidance will be the starting point. We have established a network of organisational leads with the responsibility for its development and for using it to implement clinical academic roles across the UK. This gives us a fantastic opportunity to begin a nationwide dialogue and to transform health and social care in the UK.’

Way S, van Teijlingen E, HundleyV, Westwood G, Walton G, Wiggins D, Colbourne D, Richardson C, Wixted D, Mylod D (2016) Dr Know. Midwives, 19, 66-67.

14 November 2016

Knowledge exchange framework portal – new HEFCE webpages

Knowledge Exchange Becca Edwards

HEFCE have launched a new portal which aims to support higher education institutions to continuously improve their practice in the areas of knowledge exchange.

This includes sections on:

HEFCE will continue to populate these pages are further information becomes available.

If you have any queries about the portal and its contents, or wish to discuss any elements of knowledge exchange, please do not hesitate to contact Rebecca Edwards.

14 November 2016

BU helps celebrate 30 years of World Heritage Sites in the UK

Public engagement, staff profile pages tdarvill

Following the government’s ratification of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention in 1984 the first clutch of sites in the UK were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1986. These comprised: the Castle and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd; Durham Castle and Cathedral; Ironbridge Gorge; Stonehenge and Avebury and associated sites; Studley Royal Park including the remains of Fountains Abbey; the Giant’s Causeway; and St Kilda. Celebrations are planned at many of these sites; that for Stonehenge and Avebury includes an international conference looking at how understandings of these iconic prehistoric monuments and their landscapes have changed over the last 30 years. It will be held in the Corn Exchange in Devizes, Wiltshire, on Saturday 19 November 2016, and contributions include a lecture by BU’s Professor Timothy Darvill entitled ‘Stonehenge: Beyond rock and roll’.

14 November 2016

ESRC Festival of Social Sciences

BRIAN, Business Engagement, innovation, Knowledge Transfer John Oliver

Dr John Oliver, from the Advances in Media Management research cluster, recently delivered a keynote lecture at the Open Innovation Design Jam competition at the University of Glasgow. The event formed part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Science programme of activities that ran from 5th-12th November across the UK.

The Design Jam also involved a number of short, intensive brainstorming sessions in which teams developed innovative solutions to challenges. This event was an opportunity for innovators and businesses to explore open, collective and user-led innovation.
Dr Oliver’s talk on media innovation strategies presented empirical data on how the innovation practices of UK media firms had transformed firm capabilities and corporate financial performance.

14 November 2016

New projects in the Student Project Bank

Student Engagement csteele

There are new projects in the Student Project Bank for the following subject areas:

Business, management and marketing
Health and social care
Media and communications
Computing and information technology

Projects are available to all undergraduate and postgraduate students at BU and can be used for their dissertation, assignment, unit or group work. Members of staff may also choose a project to set to their students. A complete list of projects is available here.

SPB025: Marketing strategy for Pause Cat Cafe