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BU at The Freud Museum: ‘Powerplay: Psychoanalysis and Political Culture’

Special Day Conference, BU at the Freud Museum:

‘Powerplay: Psychoanalysis and Political Culture’

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We are surrounded by political culture as never before and yet, in some ways have never felt so powerless. The recent Brexit vote ( see: http://bit.ly/EUReferendumAnalysis2016_Jackson-Thorsen-and-Wring_v1) and the victory of Trump in the US Presidential election (US Election Analysis website) have foregrounded the significance of politics as a field of social and cultural contestation, shaped by the dynamics of power, history and material interest, but also by the irrational forces of emotion and processes of unconscious fantasy. In December 2016, the BU Centre for Politics and Media collaborated with the Freud Museum, and the Media and Inner World research network to host a special conference on different aspects of political culture today.

The conference was held at the Anna Freud Centre and the Freud Museum, London and it brought together some renowned figures to look at a broad idea of political culture and psychoanalysis, discussed as history, as a state of mind, as televisual culture and as being linked to political practice. Throughout the course of the day, the conference looked at these different areas, and how those spheres feed into the political imagination and the unconscious processes that shape it.

The day began with organizer, Professor Candida Yates (biog) who in her opening remarks, developed the themes of her recent book, The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan) by discussing the psychodynamics of political culture, focusing as a case study on the relationship between shame and the emotional appeal of Donald Trump for voters.

BU Professor Barry Richards (biog) then chaired the first full session of the day with the renowned cultural historian, Professor Eli Zaretsky (biog). He discussed ‘The Three Faces of Political Freud’ and the hisorical influences of psychoanalysis upon political social movements (abstract).

The second presentation was given by Psychoanalyst and Organisational Consultant, Philip Stokoe (biog), who presented a psychoanalytic approach to understanding the states of mind in societies that can produce Brexit and Trump (abstract)

In the afternoon, BU Professor, Iain MacRury (biog) interviewed the acclaimed TV screenplay writer, Andrew Davies (biog), who discussed the experience of writing TV drama House of Cards and its links to the theatre of politics in ‘real life’.

In the final session, Psychotherapist and TV and radio broadcaster, Professor Brett Kahr (biog) interviewed Baroness, Professor Sheila Hollins (biog) about the day to day culture of working as a female politician in the House of Lords. As an Independent member of the House of Lords, she speaks on mental health, disability and press regulation and she spoke in a highly compelling way about the experience of her work in those fields.

The conference was fully booked and the audience was made up of psychotherapists, analysts and academics and PhD students from the fields of politics, history, cultural studies and psychosocial studies. Students from the BU MA in International Political Communication also attended and contributed to the discussions that took place throughout the day.

The talks were recorded on podcast and so there will be an opportunity to catch up via the Freud Museum website: https://www.freud.org.uk/events/76650/power-play-psychoanalysis-and-political-culture/

Our thanks to the Centre for Politics and Media and the Freud Museum for hosting and partly funding this timely and enjoyable event.

How to Write a 4* Article

Prof. Mark Reed

A fortnight ago Prof Mark Reed, Professor of Socio-Technical Innovation at Newcastle University and the man behind Fast Track Impact, tweeted some thoughts on how to write a 4* paper for the REF. He went on to explain his thinking in more detail in a guest post on the Research Fundementals blog, the post is published here with the authors permission.

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How do you write a 4* paper for the Research Excellence Framework (REF)? It is a question I’ve asked myself with some urgency since the Stern Review shredded my REF submission by not allowing me to bring my papers with me this year to my new position at Newcastle University.

Obviously the answer is going to differ depending on your discipline, but I think there are a few simple things that everyone can do to maximize their chances of getting a top graded research output.

I’m going to start with the assumption that you’ve actually done original, significant and rigorous work – if you haven’t then there is no point in reading any further. However, as I am increasingly asked to pre-review papers for colleagues across a range of disciplines, I am seeing examples of people who write up work as a 2* or 3* paper that has the potential to get a better score. I should point out that I believe that there is an important role for 1* and 2* papers, and that I regularly write these on purpose to address a problem of national significance and frame it for the specific, narrow audience that is likely to be able to benefit most from my work. However, whether I like it or not, as a Professor in a research-intensive University, there is an expectation that I will be submitted as a 4* researcher, which means I need a few 4* papers as well.

You can see some more detailed thoughts on what I think makes 4* for different types of paper in this Tweet:

As you’ll see from the discussion under that tweet though, my more detailed thoughts probably only apply to Units of Assessment across panels A-C, and probably isn’t relevant to the arts and humanities.

Having said this, I think there are a number of things we can all do to maximize the chances of our work being viewed favourably by REF panelists.

  1. Write to the criteria: when I was learning to drive, my instructor told me that in the test I should make sure I moved my head when I was looking in the rear view mirror, to make sure the examiner noticed I was using my mirrors. We’re all used to writing to the criteria of funding calls, and in fact we are all perfectly used to writing papers to the criteria of our target journals. In the last REF, research outputs were judged against three criteria: originality, significance and rigour. Whatever the interpretation of these criteria in your discipline, have you made it explicit to REF panelists reading your work exactly what is original, and why it is so original? Have you explained and effectively justified the significance of your work? And have you included evidence that your methods, analysis and interpretation is rigorous, even if you have to use supplementary material to include extra detail about your methods and data to get around journal word limits?
  1. Get REF feedback before you submit your work for publication: find out who is going to be reviewing research outputs for REF internally within your Unit of Assessment at your institution and ask them to review your work before you submit it. They may be able to make recommendations about how you might improve the paper in light of the REF criteria. Sometimes a little bit of extra work on the framing of your research in relation to wider contexts and issues can help articulate the significance of your work, and with additional reading and thinking, you may be able to position your work more effectively in relation to previous work to demonstrate its originality more clearly. Adding a few extra details to your methods and results may re-assure readers and reviewers that your approach is indeed rigorous. This is not just about doing world-leading research; it is about demonstrating to the world that your work is indeed world-leading. For me, these criteria are nothing new and are worth paying attention to, whether or not we are interested in REF. Meeting these three criteria will increase the chances that you get through peer-review and will increase the likelihood that your work gets cited.
  1. Analyse and discuss good practice in your own area: the only way to really “get your eye in” for REF is to actually look at examples of good and poor practice in your own area. Below, I’ve described how you can design an exercise to do this with your colleagues. You can do it yourself and learn a lot, but from my own experience, you learn a lot more by doing this as a discussion exercise with colleagues who work in your area. If you can, take notes from your discussion and try and distill some of the key lessons, so you can learn collectively as a group and more effectively review and support each others’ work.

How to organize a discussion to work out what makes a 4* paper in your area:

  • Identify top scoring institutions for your Unit of Assessment (UOA): download the REF2014 results, filter for your UOA (columns E or F), then filter so it only shows you the outputs (column J), and then filter for 4* (column L), showing only the institutions from your UOA that had the highest percentage of 4* outputs. Now for those institutions, look across the table (columns L-P) to see which has the highest proportion of outputs at either 3* or 4*. For example, an institution may have 80% of its outputs graded at 4* and 15% graded at 3*, meaning that 95% of its outputs were graded at 3-4*
  • Download a selection of papers from the top scoring institutions: go to your UOA on the REF website, find and click on the institutions you’ve identified in step 1, under “view submission data”, click on “research outputs”, copy and paste output titles into Google Scholar (or your search engine of choice) and download the articles. You may want to select outputs randomly, or you may want to go through more selectively, identifying outputs that are close to the areas your group specialize in
  • Repeat for low scoring institutions so you can compare and contrast high and low scoring outputs
  • Discuss examples: print copies of the high and low scoring outputs, labeled clearly, and in your next UOA meeting, let everyone choose a high and a low-scoring example. Given them 10-15 minutes to quickly read the outputs (focusing on title, abstract, introduction, figures and conclusions so you’re not there all day) and then ask the group (or small groups if there are many of you) to discuss the key factors that they think distinguish between high and low scoring outputs. Get your group(s) to distill the key principles that they think are most useful and disseminate these more widely to the group, so that anyone who wasn’t present can benefit.

It would be great if I could tell you that these are my “three easy ways to get a 4* paper” but doing work that is genuinely original, significant and rigorous is far from easy. If you have done work that is of the highest quality though, I hope that the ideas I’ve suggested here will help you get the credit you deserve for the great research you’ve done.

Business Consultancy Pop-up store was a great success!

Business Consultancy pop-up store was a 1-day event, organised to aid SMEs in realising their potential and growing their businesses.

Morning sessions enabled individual attendees to have 1:1 consultancy with four academic experts:

  • Dr Parisa Gilani (leadership)
  • Dr Sara Hourani (dispute resolutions)

    Dr Parisa Gilani consulting businesses regarding the leadership agenda of SMEs

    Dr Parisa Gilani consulting businesses regarding the leadership agenda of SMEs

  • Dr Nasiru Taura (entrepreneurship)
  • Dr Elvira Bolat (digital marketing).

Afternoon sessions included quick-fire talks for all attendees:

  1. Maximising the impact of leadership development for your business – Dr Parisa Gilani
  2. Business failure: real options for finance and running your business – Dr Nasiru Taura
  3. Online dispute resolution: more efficient ways for resolving customer disputes – Dr Sara Hourani
  4. (Re)energising your business with digital: six essential tips – Dr Elvira Bolat.

Both parts of the event were well attended by students, staff and primary local businesses, among which are Creatful, Kindred, Eat Pho Ltd. BU academic experts are now in conversation with individual SME owners to see how BU can further support these businesses in desire to grow. Most businesses are now considering to work with BU’s Student Project Bank to allow students to work on individual assignments that will greatly benefit both businesses and students.

In addition, during the event we have organised tombola. The winning number is 2 and now local Vietnamese restaurant, Eat Pho Ltd, is going to receive 1 hour 1:1 consultancy with all four academic experts.

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Signature dish of Eat Pho, source: https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/08/36/07/20/highly-recommended-our.jpg

Signature dish of Eat Pho, source: https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/08/36/07/20/highly-recommended-our.jpg

Congratulations to Eat Pho Ltd and we are looking forward to making a difference for your truly amazing business.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We would like to thank BU Events and RKEO teams as well as BSc Marketing students (Molly Oven, Danielle Hearn, Annaik Mackel, Andrew Herschtal) for supporting the event and organising it to such high standard.

Most read article (Early Career Researcher)

The first article published by FOM academic Samreen Ashraf has become the ‘Most Read’ article on Research Gate compared to those published by other authors in her department.

The paper focuses on consumer trust in Islamic banks. The authors differentiate between the definitions of trust and confidence in the paper. Specifically, it addressed the questions: to what extent are trust and confidence active influencers in the decision-making process, are they differentiated or are they one of the same? Also how does the Pakistani collective cultural context further complicate the application of these concepts? These questions were addressed by using qualitative methods.
This study provided further insight into consumer behaviour within financial services and specifically Islamic banking and has contributed to the theoretical understanding of the concepts of trust and confidence.

For those interested in reading the paper the full reference is: Ashraf, S., Robson, J. and Sekhon, Y., 2015. Consumer trust and confidence in the compliance of Islamic banks. Journal of Financial Services Marketing, 20(2), pp.133-144.

Alternatively, the paper can be accessed via Research Gate!

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ESRC Festival of Social Sciences

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.

Open Access in Horizon 2020

horizon 2020Open access to peer reviewed publications has been anchored as an underlying principle in the Horizon 2020 and is explained in the Regulation and the Rules of Participation. If you are a beneficiary or hoping to be a beneficiary of a Horizon 2020 grant, you need to be aware of your obligations to publish open access. Below are some of the key points taken from Horizon 2020 guidance which can be accessed in full here.

Are you supposed to deposit?

All Horizon 2020 beneficiaries are required to deposit and ensure open access.

What to deposit

  • A machine-readable electronic copy of the published version publisher’s final version of the paper, including all modifications from the peer review process, copyediting and stylistic edits, and formatting changes (usually a PDF document)

OR

  • A final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication final manuscript of a peer-reviewed paper accepted for journal publication, including all modifications from the peer review process, but not yet formatted by the publisher (also referred to as “post-print” version).

Where to deposit

Researchers should deposit in a repository for publications of their choice. In order to manage and monitor open access compliance, BU request that all authors publish in our institutional repository (BURO) this can be done easily through BRIAN. Further information on how to do this can  be accessed here.

When to deposit

Each beneficiary must deposit as soon as possible. To comply with HEFCEs Open Access policy this should be on acceptance of the article.

Open-Access-logoWhen should Open Access be provided

Each beneficiary must ensure open access to the deposited publication — via the repository — at the latest: (i) on publication, if an electronic version is available for free via the publisher, or (ii) within six months of publication (twelve months for publications in the social sciences and humanities) in any other case.

For open access publishing, researchers can publish in open access journals, or in journals that sell subscriptions and also offer the possibility of making individual articles openly accessible (hybrid journals).  Where the case, the Author Processing Charges (APCs) incurred by beneficiaries are eligible for reimbursement during the duration of the action. For APCs incurred after the end of their grant agreement, a mechanism for paying some of these costs will be piloted. In the case of open access publishing open access must be granted at the latest on publication.

Beneficiaries must also ensure open access to the bibliographic metadata that identify the deposited publication. The bibliographic metadata must be in a standard format and must include all of the following:

  • the terms [“European Union (EU)” and “Horizon 2020”][“Euratom” and Euratom research and training programme 2014-2018″];
  • the name of the action, acronym and grant number;
  • the publication date, and length of embargo period if applicable, and
  • a persistent identifier.

In all cases, the Commission encourages authors to retain their copyright and grant adequate licences to publishers. Creative Commons offers useful licensing solutions in this regard (e.g. CC-BY, see Creative Commons Licenses).

In the context of the digital era, the notion of’ publication’ increasingly includes the data underpinning the publication and results presented, also referred to as ‘underlying’ data. Beneficiaries must aim to deposit at the same time the research data needed to validate the results presented in the deposited scientific publications, ideally into a data repository, and aim to make open access to this data. But there is no obligation to do so.

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Brexit and the implications for Open Access

Whilst it’s relatively early to predict what Brexit will mean for Open Access in the UK, JISC recently released a blog post outlining the main issues that will arise from the UK’s decision to leave the EU.

The blog post raises issues around the future of EU OA policy and also funding.

At the present time, it appears the main effect of Brexit will be to create greater reliance on Green OA (usually accepted, peer-reviewed versions of outputs) rather than gold paid open access owing to fluctuating financial markets and uncertainty surrounding future European funding.

Library and Learning Support have recently created a OA support video, looking at the benefits of OA and how you can make your research OA through engaging with BRIAN and BURO.

Please contact the BURO team with any queries you may have and we will be happy to help.

Don’t forget our guide Open Access and Depositing your research

BURO (your institutional repository): Huge increase in journal article deposits in 2016

There has been a 206% increase in journal article deposits in BURO (via BRIAN) from January-June 2016 compared with the same period last year, 469 deposits compared to 228.

Journal article deposits January – June 2016

Capture. 2016

Journal article deposits January – June 2015

Capture. 2015

Below is the breakdown by Faculty for January – June 2016:

Faculty of Science & Technology = 176
Faculty of Management = 122
Faculty of Health & Social Sciences = 90
Faculty of Media & Communication = 65

Remember, to be eligible for submission in the next REF, journal articles and conference proceedings (with an ISSN), accepted for publication after 1 April 2016, must be made open access.

In practice, this means the accepted version must be deposited in an institutional repository (BURO via BRIAN) or subject repository within a three-month period from the point of acceptance for publication. This generally means creating a brief manual entry rather than waiting for the data feed.

Do contact the BURO team if you need any help with uploading your publication details or files to BRIAN for BURO and remember our useful guide to open access and depositing your research

New HSS PhD paper!

SPSHSS PhD student Andrew Harding and fellow authors  Jonathan Parker, Sarah Hean and Ann Hemingway have recently had a paper accepted for publication in Social Policy & Society, the sister publication to the Journal of Social Policy and run by the Social Policy Association.

A critical yet under-researched area, the paper presents a comprehensive literature review that critiques current research on the outcome/impact of information and advice on welfare. A realist evaluation approach is then proposed as being capable to address critical weaknesses in existing research.

Among other areas that are covered, the paper provides an overview of the importance of information and advice in the context of the marketisation of UK welfare provision and a new ‘efficacy framework’ is developed which can be used to assess the scope of research.

A final draft post-refereeing version of the paper will be uploaded to BRIAN in due course.

Linking your BRIAN account with your ORCID account

OrcidA recent upgrade on BRIAN means that you are now able to link your ORCID ID with your BRIAN account. Click on this link to register for an ORCID account if you haven’t already got one.

Configuring ORCID is really easy. Go to your BRIAN homepage and scroll to the bottom of the page where you’ll find your ‘Data sources’. Simply click ‘configure’ next to the ORCID data source and you’ll be greeted with an authentication screen to either login or register with ORCID.

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Once the accounts have been linked, BRIAN will periodically search ORCID for your “works” containing a DOI, PubMed ID or Scopus ID. Using these identifiers, BRIAN will then collect trusted metadata from other data sources including PubMed, Scopus and CrossRef and automatically associate this harvested data with a your BRIAN account.

About ORCID

ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. ORCID is unique in its ability to reach across disciplines, research sectors, and national boundaries and its cooperation with other identifier systems. Find out more on their website.

Emotion, Power and Politics in Richard III, 8 July, 6.30pm, BU at the Freud Museum – Tickets now available

‘The Psycho-Cultural Dynamics of

Emotion, Power and Politics in

Richard III’

 

Friday 8th July 2016,

6.30-8pm

Venue:

The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX

Tickets:

https://freud.org.uk/events/76491/the-psycho-cultural-dynamics-of-emotion-power-and-politics-in-richard-iii/

Richard

The Freud Museum in association with Bournemouth University and the Media and Inner World research network present a special panel discussion on the themes of Shakespeare’s Richard III and the motivations of its characters and the play’s relevance for contemporary understandings of emotion and politics. The event includes the performance of some key speeches from the play as performed by actors from the award-winning theatre ensemble, The Faction.

Panel speakers include:

Michael Rustin (University of East London), Margaret Rustin (Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust), Rachel Valentine Smith and Mark Leipacher (The Faction) Chair: Candida Yates (Bournemouth University).

 

Followed by a drinks reception 8-9pm

& celebration of Candida Yates’ latest book,

The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity, Palgrave Macmillan