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Learning together: widening participation with you

Centre for Excellence in Learning

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We’ve been finding out how people working in higher education learn, think and feel about and put into practice widening participation.

Exploring the idea of widening participation as a process of organisational learning aligns with the core strategy of BU’s innovative Fair Access Research project — through working and learning together we can make a difference for students, where we work, how we work, yourselves and society.

At a time of uncertainty and inequality  in society and great changes in the sector, finding ways for us all to learn together in kinder and more effective ways matters.

Over the summer we have been doing some fieldwork and collecting sector-wide survey data to establish how different people in different organisations learn about widening participation.

We want to know how you, here at BU, understand, learn about and practice widening participation. We’ve designed a survey to capture your voices and experiences. 

In July we had the privilege of meeting with colleagues from across the university to explore some of these issues – we want to open that invitation to more of you through this survey.

For more information about the organisational learning project, email Dr Maggie Hutchings on mhutchings@bournemouth.ac.uk

For more information about BU’s innovative Fair Access Research, email the Principal Investigators, Dr Vanessa Heaslip (vheaslip@bournemouth.ac.uk) and Dr Clive Hunt (chunt@bournemouth.ac.uk)

To complete and share the survey follow this link.

TV, Film and Photoshoot Networking Event

Business Engagement

events

When: Wednesday 21 September 2016

Time: 6.00pm – 9.00pm

Where: Aruba Beach Restaurant – Pier Approach, Bournemouth, BH2 5AA

Book your tickets here.

About:

Dorset Film Office aims to support, develop and build a strong creative community.  Don’t miss out on ethe Dorset Film Office launch.

  • Need to find out about more opportunities?
  • Want to find more work in your local area?
  • Looking to increase lead generation?
  • Looking to raise brand awareness?
  • Looking to grow your network and forge new relationships?
  • Want to create strategic alliances?

Click here fore more information or phone 01202 980000

Book your free ticket to secure your place: Dorset Film Office Launch

 

Friday 16th September: Professor Christoph Teller presents ‘Why consumers shop where they do’

Image result for christoph teller

Professor Christoph Teller, Chair in Retailing and Marketing at the University of Surrey, will discuss why shoppers shop where they do through a presentation of a meta-analyses study. The study he presents aims to identify the major antecedents of offline and online retail patronage. In his talk he will outline the retail patronage work of Pan and Zinkhan (2006) and discuss how he extends their view and develops conceptual models of offline and online retail patronage based on Sheth’s (1999) integrated theory of patronage behaviour and Finn and Louviere’s (1996) specification in a retail patronage context. The models he identifies proposes direct effects between antecedents (stimuli), i.e., mainly manageable attributes of retailers, and the retail patronage (response or shopping predisposition). The study is based upon a meta-analysis of more than 300 empirical studies and makes a theoretical as well as practical contribution to the topic area as it provides an overview on, and detailed insights into, patronage research in an offline as well as online context.

This free event, hosted by the Influences on Consumer Behaviour Research Cluster, will take place on Friday 16th September 2016, 2-3.30pm in the Inspire Lecture Theatre. Please book your place through Eventbrite: ‘Why consumers shop where they do’

AHRC Engaging with Government Programme

Training

The AHRC have launched the Engagement with Government Programme, a three day course taking plan in March 2017 to provide researchers with insights in the policy making process and develop appropriate skills.

It is open to ECRs working in any areas of the AHRC’s subject domain.

The course will be held in London, 7th-9th March 2017. The call for applications closes on 7th October.

This is a great opportunity to develop the skills to ensure your research is shaping policy. Further details can be found on the AHRC’s website.

Engaging the social sciences with business

innovation, Knowledge Exchange

esrc logo

A recent report published by the ESRC shows that social scientists are becoming increasingly engaged through their research. This is testament to how the knowledge exchange agenda has become embedded and been embraced. That said, what disciplines are involved varies, as does who they are engaging with. It is also striking, if not entirely unsurprising, that social scientists are more likely to engage with charitable and public sector organisations (49%) than with businesses (30%).

There are, of course, many reasons for this. However, it is important to emphasise that this is not for a lack of relevant insight! Indeed, this raises an important question about how the social sciences can and should engage with businesses to realise the impact of research-based insights. If opportunities for businesses engagement are in the eye of the beholder, then there is a need to make social scientists more aware about the possibilities. If we cannot identify our own value, we cannot expect others to see it.

Engaging with business is not the privileged domain of engineering and the sciences. The challenge, however, is ensuring that the value of the social sciences is not overlooked by businesses, or worse goes unrecognised. The onus, therefore, is on social scientists to demonstrate the relevance of their research to business,  just as they have to charitable and public sector organisations. This is about translation, making research insights accessible where the findings are non-obvious and engaging with businesses to co-produce new knowledge.

Click here to find out more about this research and the academics involved in this area of work.

BU Success in EU Horizon 2020 RISE Collaboration

A six nation collaborative EU bid, led by BU’s Sarah Hean and including Carol Bond, Jaqui Hewitt-Taylor, Sara Ashencaen Crabtree and Jonathan Parker has been successful in securing funding for a four-year project exploring meaningful, appropriate and effective ways of assisting the rehabilitation of people in prison with mental health problem. Sarah is currently completing her highly successful and prestigious Marie Curie-Sklodowska fellowship at the University of Stavangar, Norway, returning to BU in January 2017.

Reoffending is a problem in Europe and internationally. Offender rehabilitation strategies to reduce reoffending focus on limiting key risk factors (e.g. unemployment, substance misuse) which are so often mediated by the individual’s mental health. Levels of mental health are much higher in the prison population, which therefore limits the effectiveness of rehabilitation strategies.

Professionals in mental health and prison services constantly need to find new solutions to the bespoke needs of each individual offender with a mental health issue. Leaders in these services need to transform current working practices in a process of continuous quality improvement to keep up with the changing needs of the offender population, the development of new technologies and the changing landscape of service provision. However, people who have offended also need to take responsibility for their rehabilitation and play an active role in developing solutions to their own needs and challenges. In other words front line professionals, offenders and leaders need to be innovators.

This project therefore seeks collaborative and effective relational work and knowledge exchange between professionals from mental health, prison services and individual offenders. At present collaboration between prisons and mental health services is limited. New models of interagency working are required in which social innovation and collaboration processes are made explicit. In the fields of developmental work research, practice development and social innovation, there is a range of successful models of collaborative working and innovation that have had positive outcomes in other practice contexts. The methods include the ethnographic ‘change laboratory’ methods in development work research, the Ajkaer model of social innovation and collaboration based on a ‘diamond model’ of innovation already applied to working between prison officers and prisoners, Practice Development Units developed and extensively applied in the field of health and social care organizational change with a national reputation in the UK and competency based educational models focused on developing integration, collaboration and social innovation competences in the workforce. The academic members of the consortium have international reputations in the application of these models and will apply these to the rehabilitation of mentally ill offenders specifically and to the interagency working required between mental health services and prison services exploring which of these models might be most effective in transforming interagency working practices in offender rehabilitation or whether an amalgamation or hybrid model combining the strengths of these might be more appropriate.

Contesting corporate governance – research at BU

Research themes

Prime Minister Theresa May has recently mooted a Germanic-turn for corporate governance in the UK, an echo of a heated debate over the shape of boards of directors in listed companies raging over the past 25 years. By coincidence, BU’s Donald Nordberg, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Management, has been examining the controversies over board design since the Cadbury Code was written in 1992, as investors, corporate chairmen and others wrestled with whether to recommend continuing with unitary boards or follow the German model of dual boards with worker representation. His paper, “Contestation over board design and the development of UK corporate governance,” has just won the prize as Best Paper in Management and Business History at the British Academy of Management conference in Newcastle. Could history be about to repeat itself? The conference paper is at http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/23744/.

Public Health England Physical Activity Tool

downloadPublic Health England has launched a Physical Activity Tool which brings together data at the local level for the whole of England on physical activity, including walking and cycling, as well as data on related risk factors and conditions such as obesity and diabetes. The tool also presents trend data and enables easy comparison of local authority data, allowing users to compare regional neighbours and local authorities with similar characteristics. The tool aims to help promote physical activity, develop understanding, and support benchmarking, commissioning and service improvement.

The data is grouped into three domains:

  • Key indicators – a summary overview of physical activity including a number of key outcomes from the Public Health Outcomes Framework (PHOF).
  • Related conditions – such as cancers, diabetes, obesity, hypertension and depression. Regular physical activity can reduce the risk of these.
  • Supporting information – population demographics, life expectancy and deprivation.

In addition PHE has also published a data spreadsheet: Physical activity levels among adults in England 2015, available on the PHE Obesity website. It presents physical activity measures (inactive, low activity, some activity and active) and key demographics from the Active People Survey at national, regional, upper and lower tier local authority and County Sports Partnership level.

Read more at: http://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile/physical-activity

Changes to the Research Landscape

The upcoming changes to the research landscape have been in the limelight once again. The Higher Education and Research Bill had its second evidence session on Thursday 8th September which touched on the parts of the Bill that will have implications for research.

The session was joined by Phil Nelson, Research Councils UK; Dr Ruth McKernan CBE, Innovate UK and Professor Ottoline Leyser, The Royal Society. The following points were raised and discussed in the session.

  • UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) will allow for the research councils to be greater together than they are separately
  • It is important to ensure the individual identities of the different research councils are not lost under UKRI
  • How knowledge and research information transfers to government as a whole is crucial- aside from information exchange between research councils.
  • The UKRI is missing an executive committee, the Board will not be able to provide the correct oversight concerning detail and how the organisation will interact with government.  This should be included in the Bill
  • UKRI will help with the business view of research, it will help businesses use the latest knowledge and innovation
  • The Bill does a good job of offering assurances around dual support and the protection of it
  • The UKRI will help with disparities between councils that currently exist
  • The Bill should include more detail around how the Office for Students (OfS) and UKRI will work together, for example with the provision for PGR students. The Bill should precisely outline the involvement that research should have with teaching as a way to help the connection between the OfS and UKRI
  • The focus on interdisciplinary research will help with societal challenges
  • UKRI will also help with ensuring collaboration at a strategic level
  • There are concerns that Social Sciences and the Arts and Humanities may be at risk in UKRI. The Bill could do more to protect these areas.
  • If any changes to individual research councils are proposed, they should be consulted on

Additionally, Jo Johnson MP has written to Lord Selborne in response to the Future of Innovate UK inquiry by the Science and Technology Committee. The letter makes the following points

  • Bringing Innovate UK into UKRI will ensure we have the structures in place to exploit the knowledge and expertise we have for the benefit of the whole country
  • Collaborative projects, supported by Innovate UK, with two or more academic partners have twice the economic return compared to those with no academic partners
  • Innovate UK is not, and will not become, the commercialisation arm of the Research Councils
  • We have included multiple safeguards, such as specifying its business-focused mission on the face of the Bill, specifying a board which both balances both research and business interests and which will include a specific innovation champion.

FHSS Seminar Series in Conjunction with Social and Cultural Research Cluster, Bournemouth University

We are incredibly fortunate to have Professor Linda McKie visiting with the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences next week.  As part of her time with us she will present a lunchtime seminar on Wednesday 14th September. Please feel free to bring your lunch and hear from a fantastic speaker. Details for her seminar are outlined below.

Revitalising Spatial and Temporal Frameworks in the Analysis of Unpaid Care and Paid Work Professor Linda McKie Applied Social Sciences from Durham University

Taking place: at 1-2pm in Bournemouth House, Rm B407

 

From Professor Linda McKie,

As the summer of 2016 draws to a close published data has documented the persistence of the gender pay gap for all women with evidence of a deepening gap following maternity leave (Costa Dias et al., 2016). These data generated numerous analyses on segregation and discrimination in education and working life and the many ways in which unpaid care for children, family members and elders remains a dominant factor in everyday gendered inequalities. Little comment was made on women’s crucial role in reproducing generations many of whom will fund future pensions and services through their taxation. These intergenerational reciprocities are generally ignored in favour of the immediate time considerations for employers, workers and families with the need to generate profit, or income and resources for household or business survival.

In this seminar I revisit the analytical frameworks of caringscapes and carescapes. In earlier work, it was asserted that both offer analytical potential to enhance analyses of the temporal and spatial dynamics of caring and working over the lifecourse in different places. Caring, critical to human flourishing and evident in many aspects of women’s lives, is captured in caringscapes. The framework of carescapes explores the relationship between policies and services as determined by employers, the state and capital. Both frameworks are informed by feminist theorising and spatial and temporal perspectives on identifying and analysing how women perceive, engage with, and reflect on, the demands and pleasures of combining informal caring and paid work.

Following the financial crisis of 2008 we are in a long term period of austerity. In this context do these analytical frameworks stand up to further evaluation? As inequalities between regions, social classes, communities and workers deepen, can care ever be centre stage? Given the aims of the centre are to develop social and cultural research my goal is to offer frameworks and issues which colleagues are engaged with in varied ways and likely to develop.

Biography

Linda McKie is Professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University. She graduated from Durham with a Ph.D. in sociology in 1989 and returned in 2012. In the intervening years she has held academic posts at the universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian, researching and teaching in the sociologies of health and illness, gender and work, and research methods and management. In 2004 she was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS) and in 2010 appointed a member of the Research Excellence Framework 2014 (REF), Sub-panel 23: Sociology. From 2001 she has been an Associate Director at the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships and between 2004-2010 Senior Visiting Fellow, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki. She has undertaken grant assessment panel work for the Academy of Finland, Greek Government, Irish Research Council and Norwegian Research Council. Peer review work has also been undertaken for various EU panels; COST, Horizon 2020 and Marie Curie. Editorial board membership has included the journals Sociology, Sociology of Health and Illness, and Work, Employment and Society.

The Sensors and Their Applications 2016 conference

Business Engagement, conferences, innovation, Knowledge Exchange

events

The Sensors and Their Applications XVIII (2016) conference will be held on 12th-14th September in London. The Sensors & Applications series of conferences provides an excellent opportunity to bring together scientists and engineers from academia, research institutes and industrial establishments to present and discuss the latest results in the field of sensors, instrumentation and measurement.

ensors and Their Applications XVIII (2016) conference wiill be held on 12th -14th September in London.  The conference is orgnasied by the Institute of Physics Instrument Science and Technology Group. In this year, the Sensors and their Applications conference will also feature an industry session to enable the conference partcipants to showcase the industry and technology transfer activities in sensor related areas.

Invited speakers will give lectures on important recent advances within the symposium, in addition to contributed talks and poster sessions.

Conference Themes

• Optical sensors
• Chemical and gas sensors
• Sensors in biology and medicine
• Advances in sensing materials
• Nanotechnology for sensors and actuators
• Smart sensors and interface electronics
• MEMS and silicon fabrication techniques
• Imaging: integrated actuators
• Thick and thin film sensors
• Sensor modelling
• Sensor packaging and assemblies

For further details on the conference and to register, please go to the event website.