Category / REF Subjects

Funding Success Stories: Sport Academic Group Strengthens Dutch-German-British Collaboration

Awarded & submitted bids, BU research, EU, Funding opportunities, Fusion, PG research, Publishing

Dr Tim Breitbarth (Sport Academic Group) has been successful with his recent bid for Fusion/EU funding for teaching exchange visits to partner institutions in Groningen, The Netherlands, and Cologne.

At German Sport University Cologne Tim – who is also Programme Leader MSc Sport Management and Coordinator Internationalisation Sport at BU – will teach at their high-profile Masters in Sport Management over four days. The Masters attracts about 200 applications per year from within and outside Germany, but only 30 students are allowed into the course. The visit to Sport’s Erasmus partner institution Hanzehogeschool Groningen will include tutoring of international groups of students who participate in a multi-day management game.

Besides teaching commitments, the trips will help to move along joint research and publication projects with his European colleagues, such as editing the Special Issue on sport and social responsibility of Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society. In addition, they have been cooperating on conference and workshop organization and will once again co-lead a track at this year’s European Association for Sport Management conference.

Also, Tim and his BU colleagues were successful in securing internal funding for the first time in order to take the Sport Management and Sport Management Golf final year cohorts to a four-day intense international student management game in Cologne in late March, which he co-organises.

Hence, collaboration with, arguably, the world’s largest and renown sport university, has been in full swing with also two BU students on study exchange in Germany in semester 2 and PhD student Emma Mosley receiving training at their specialised Institute for Sport Psychology thanks to a Santander award.

Neuroscience@BU seminars next week, Wednesday the 12th and Friday the 14th

BU research, Featured, Featured academics, Research themes, Uncategorized

Dear colleagues,
Next week we will have two thematic research seminars in neuroscience organized by Dr Julie Kirby and me.

-The first of the seminars of this series will take place next Wednesday the 12th of March, 15:00, P302 LT. The invited speaker is Dr Dimitris Pinotsis, http://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=DPINO08.
Dr Pintosis obtained his PhD in September 2006 from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) of the University of Cambridge. After an EPRSC Research Fellowship and lectureship in Reading University he moved to UCL where he is working at the Welcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging ; having secured funding from EPSRC and the Wellcome Trust.
Dr Pinotsis has a strong track record and a number of landmark publications in imaging neuroscience modelling; he is also the author of the most advanced versions of the state-of the art models for neuroimaging data, the dynamic causal models. I am familiar with Dimitris work and I very strongly encourage the attendance to researchers both in machine learning and in cognitive psychology.
The title of his exciting talk is “Electrophysiological Data and the Biophysical Modelling of Local Cortical Circuits”. “Dynamic Causal Modelling (DCM) is a general framework that allows for a formal (Bayesian) analysis of the properties of neuronal populations, based upon realistic biophysical models. In the past few years, a wide variety of such models has been implemented in the DCM framework. In this talk, I will first review some of these recent advances and then focus on models that allow one to infer spatial parameters of cortical infrastructures generating electrophysiological signals (like the extent of lateral connections and the intrinsic conduction speed of signal propagation on the cortex). I will try to highlight the links between different models and address how the experimental hypothesis or question asked might inform the choice of an appropriate model”.

-The second seminar of this series will take place on Friday the 14th of March, at 14:00 in K101. Our guest is Prof. Maria Victoria Sanchez-Vives, http://www.sanchez-vives.org/

Maria V. Victoria Sánchez-Vives, M.D., PhD in Neurosciences has been ICREA Research Professor at the IDIBAPS (Institut d’Investigacions Biomediques August Pi i Sunyer) in Barcelona since 2008, where she is the head of the Systems Neuroscience group. She is currently co-director of the Event Lab (Experimental Virtual Envir onments in Neuroscience and Technology).
After obtaining her PhD at the University of Alicante in Spain, MVSV was postdoctoral fellow/research associate at Rockefeller University (1993-1994) and Yale University (1995-2000). She next established her own laboratory at the Neuroscience Institute of Alicante (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) while being Associate Professor of Physiology. Her independent research has been supported by national and international agencies. She has been funded by Human Frontier Science Program and has been partner in six European Projects. She is currently coordinator of the FET EU project CORTICONIC.
Her main interests include how neuronal and synaptic properties as well as connectivity determine the emergent activity generated by neuronal networks. The integration of the cortical information giving rise to bodily representation and the combination of brain-computer interfaces and virtual reality for understanding these processes is another research line of her group.
She is currently Chief Editor of Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.
For information see www.sanchez-vives.org
Maria Victoria Sanchez-Vives is a renowned neuroscientist which has published a number of highly influential papers in journals like e.g. Science, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS or Journal of Neuroscience. I strongly encourage not missing the opportunity to attend to this seminar and to discuss perhaps potential synergies.
The title of her talk will be “Emergent oscillatory activity in the cerebral cortex”.
“Understanding complex systems like brain networks is a challenge. Cortical networks can perform computations of remarkable complexity, accounting for a large variety of behaviours and cognitive states. At the same time, the same networks can engage in stereotypical patterns of spatio-temporal activation, such as the ones that can be observed during sleep, anaesthesia and in cortical slice. Collective phenomena emerging from activity reverberation in cortical circuits at different spatio-temporal scales results in a rich variety of dynamical states. Slow (around or below 1 Hz) and fast (15-100 Hz) rhythms are spontaneously generated by the cortical network and propagate or synchronize populations across the cortex. This is the case even in isolated pieces of the cortical network, or in vitro maintained cortical slices, where both slow and fast oscillations are also spontaneously generated. The similarity between some of these patterns both in vivo and in vitro suggests that they are somehow a default activity from the cortical network. We understand that these emergent patterns provide information on the structure, dynamics and function of the underlying cortical network and their alterations in neurological diseases reveal the circuits dysfunction”.

If you would like to talk to the guests kindly let me know.
Best wishes, Emili

Emili Balaguer-Ballester, PhD
Faculty of Science and Technology , Bournemouth University
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of Heidelberg

Why English Football Player Fail in Penalty Shootouts: German Sport Psychology Researcher Visiting BU

BU research, PG research, Uncategorized

Recently, the Sport Academic Group hosted researcher Dr Philip Furley from its Erasmus partner institution German Sport University Cologne. Philip works for the Institute of Cognitive and Team/Racket Sport Research and has recently published studies in a number of fields like inattentional blindness and creativity, many of which funded by the prestigious German Research Foundation.

As part of his visit he discussed his work with a selected group of sport academics and postgraduate researchers in a workshop-style format. One of the studies looked into how non-verbal behaviour of athletes is a function of the current score, how this can be reliably interpreted by others – especially opponents who register this which in turn influences their confidence levels.

By extending this research into what Philip calls ‘pop science’, it can be explained why English footballers are more likely to fail in penalty shootouts based on empirical data. ‘Hastening and hiding’ behaviour as a consequence of psychological stress in the penalty situation leads, for example, to submissive non-verbal behaviour like turning your back to the goalkeeper after dropping the ball on the penalty spot and taking little time for the shot after the referee blows the whistle.

Further studies and discussions were around the dangers of coaching instructions to induce an attentional set that controls the focus of attention of athletes. It can lead to structured awareness not adaptive to dynamic situations – for example during on-field decision making which can lead to important information being overseen, like an opponent who ‘unexpectedly’ enters the space of a defender. It was discussed if there were parallels to the way university tutors may be used to structure and present material to students and how this forms their thinking.

“Bringing highly dedicated researchers from internationally leading institutions to BU is an important part of inspiring and guiding research at our university. Philip’s presentations were a fantastic example of work that is driven by deep academic curiosity and high process quality, and his visit has provoked much inspiration and discussion” says Dr Tim Breitbarth, Senior Lecturer and Coordinator Internationalisation in Sport.

Networking opportunity with expert in Behaviour Change

BU research, PG research, Research news

To remind, we have Dr Falko Sniehotta from Newcastle University visiting on Tuesday 4th March (http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/?s=falko).

There are spaces left on the workshop for those that would like to sign up for this free workshop (plus free lunch).

For those that cannot attend the workshop (10am – 12pm), but would like to informally talk with Falko during our networking lunch (12pm – 1pm), then you are most welcome to join us in PG146, Talbot campus (though lunch will only be provided for those on the workshop).

Falko is keen to discuss potential research collaborations with BU staff and so would welcome the opportunity to meet with colleagues.

Forthcoming Seminars Organised by Women’s Academic Network

Post-award, Research news, Women's Academic Network

I’d like to invite you to the forthcoming  seminars  organised by the Women’s Academic Network.

 

Dr Cynthia Carter

Venue: K101

Date and time: Friday, 28 Feb, 14:00-16:00

 

Biography (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/contactsandpeople/profiles/carter-cynthia.html):

Dr Cynthia Carter is a Senior Lecturer in the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University.

Her books include Current Perspectives in Feminist Media Studies (Routledge, 2013); Critical Readings: Violence and the Media (Open University Press, 2006); Critical Readings: Media and Gender (Open University Press, 2004), Violence and the Media (Open University Press, 2003), Environmental Risks and the Media Routledge, 2000) and News, Gender and Power (Routledge, 1998). She is currently co-editing a companion on media and gender.

She is Founding Co-Editor of the journal Feminist Media Studies (Routledge) and is editorial board member of Communication, Culture & Critique (Wiley-Blackwell), Communication Review (Taylor & Francis), Communication Theory (Wiley-Blackwell), Critical Studies in Media Communication (Taylor & Francis), Fifth Estate (online), Journal of Children and Media (Routledge), Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, Sociology Compass (Blackwell), and Studies on Women and Gender Abstracts (Routledge).

Cindy will discuss her work with the Global Media Monitoring Project (http://www.whomakesthenews.org), the largest longitudinal study on gender in the world’s media. She has been involved in the study since 2000.

 

Professor Catherine Cassell

Title of presentation: The state of qualitative management research and future challenges for qualitative researchers

Venue: EB206

Date and time: Thursday, 03 April, 2014, 14:00-16:00

 

Biography:

Catherine Cassell is Professor of Organisational Psychology. Previously she was Head of the School’s People, Management and Organisations Division and head of Postgraduate Research programmes. Before joining MBS she held appointments in the Management School at the University of Sheffield and at Sheffield Business School. She was the founding chair of British Academy of Management’s Special Interest group in Research Methodology – a group she is still heavily involved with – and is currently a member of the Association of Business School’s Research Policy Committee. Professor Cassell is an Associate Editor of the ‘British Journal of Management’, inaugural co-Editor of ‘Qualitative Research in Organisations and Management: an international journal’, and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of five other journals. She is a Fellow of the British Academy of Management and an Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Catherine’s research interests are in the area of organisational change and learning; and diversity and dignity in the workplace. She has a specific interest in the use of qualitative research techniques in both management and organisational research. Together with Gillian Symon from Birkbeck she has published a number of books and articles in this area, plus chaired and convened symposia at international conferences. She has also jointly edited special issues of a number of different journals all focused on the use of qualitative methods and alternative epistemological approaches in management and organizational research. Furthermore she has completed a two year ESRC funded project entitled ‘Benchmarking good practice in qualitative management research’ (with G. Symon and P. Johnson) where the team developed training materials aimed at enhancing good practice in the field. She has also received research grants from a number of organisations including ESRC, EPSRC, British Academy, ERDF and the EU and has supervised 15 doctoral students to completion.

For catering purpose, please book your place with Staff Development staffdevelopment@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

Christine Bosse

Venue: EB306

Date and time: Friday, 11 April, 2014, 15:00-17:00

 

She is widely known in the public for her direct and no-nonsense communication and is enthusiastically engaged in the societal debate for a better and safer world. She is a role model for many aspiring young people as the highest ranking female CEO in Denmark and was appointed the 22nd most influential business woman in the world in 2009 and 2010 by the Financial Times.

Stine Bosse serves as chairman of Flügger Denmark, The Royal Danish Theater, CONCITO, Børnefonden, and Copenhagen Art Festival. She serves as vice chairman of ChildFund Alliance and sits on the board of among others TDC, Allianz and Aker ASA. Additionally, Stine Bosse is the former chairman of the supervisory board of the Danish Insurance Association (Forsikring & Pension), and former board member of Grundfos, Nordea Bank A/S and Amlin plc. In the Spring 2010, Stine Bosse was appointed Advocate for the Millenium Development Goals by the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, to fight world hunger and poverty. Stine is also the founder of Women in Europe Network.

 

Cyber Security Seminar: Everyday Security for Everyday Lives (Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Royal Holloway)

BU research

Our next Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Seminar will take place on Tuesday, 4th March at 5pm.
The seminar will take place in EB202 in the Executive Business Centre, and will be free and open to all. If you would like to attend, please register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-seminar-in-cyber-security-tickets-10691914805

Our speaker will be Dr Lizzie Coles-Kemp. Lizzie is a qualitative researcher, interested in the everyday practices of information production, circulation, curation and consumption within a broad range of communities. She works in Possible Futures Lab within the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London. Her main focus is the interaction between people and security and privacy technologies, how each influences the other and the communities of practice that emerge. As part of this focus, she explores topics such as identity and technology use, gender and information management and information control as a means of power. Current interdisciplinary work includes: value sensitive design in public service delivery, cultural analysis in institutional security and the use of visual research methods in interdisciplinary research.

Abstract: Over the last five years at the Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, a research group called Possible Futures Lab has been working on projects that explore what notions of information control mean in the context of everyday lives. We have two primary objectives: to improve designs related to everyday information production and control and to influence thinking on topics of everyday information security. Each of our projects has started with ethnographic research that has enabled us to identify and observe the relevant spaces and places. From there we have co-designed with each community discovery tools for seeing, experiencing and exploring these spaces. These tools help us to better understand the community viewpoints on information and its control and to design/re-design services and technologies to better support this position. This talk gives examples of this approach in two of our projects that focus on cyber security decision making.

Congratulations to Anne Quinney

BU research, Featured academics, Publishing, Research assessment, Uncategorized

Anne Quinney, Senior Lecturer Social Work (HSC) who has been appointed to the Editorial Board of the highly esteemed British Journal of Social Work.

Anne recently stepped down as Editor and Co-Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Practice; social work in action.  Whilst she also recently completing her five-year term of office as Editorial Board member of the peer reviewed journal Social Work Education.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

NRG talk on the Novelization of Comics in the 1970s

BU research, Research news

The next in the series of Narrative Research Group talks will take place on Wednesday 26 February at 4 p.m in CAG06. Paul Williams, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Exeter, will examine the ways in which ‘the novel’ was used in the 1970s to conceptualise ambitious comic projects. Although Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978) is frequently hailed as the threshold text popularising the ‘graphic novel’, it was one of several projects whereby comics were published in book form for adult readers in the 1970s. The talk will establish the different modes of production open to creators aiming for long, complete narratives. By outlining the main publication routes available at the time, we can start to explain why 1978 saw an exponential growth in book-bound comics for adult readers, before numbers dropped in 1979 and 1980.

Paul Williams is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Exeter, where he has been working since 2008. He has written on a wide range of genres, texts and media, including Cold War literature, Vietnam War films, hip-hop music and 1970s psychotherapy; his main publications are The Rise of the American Comics Artist (2010; co-edited with James Lyons), Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War (2011) and Paul Gilroy (2012).

BU Social Science Input at Tasik Chini, Malaysia

BU research, Fusion, Uncategorized, Women's Academic Network

A very significant aspect of our Fusion Funded Study Leave has been our invitation to spend time as Visiting Professors at the Tasik Chini Research Centre, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.  This Research Centre is primarily a natural science-based one, which is now expanding its remit to embrace social science, and which focuses on Tasik (Lake) Chini in the State of Pahang, about 4 hours drive from Kuala Lumpur. This lake, one of only two freshwater lakes in Peninsular Malaysia, is composed of a very large area of 12,568 acres, and in terms of beauty and grandeur was not dissimilar to England’s Lake District.  Google the lake and a serene vision will appear of placid waters smothered in ravishing pink and white water-lilies in a valley of opulent, teeming rain forest and rimmed by green mountains. A veritable paradise, seemingly, and also the traditional ‘native’ lands of a community of indigenous, ‘first-people’, of Malaysia, the Jakun tribe of the Orang Asli (original people).

 

Hardly surprisingly maybe that this wonderful area received coveted UNESCO Biosphere Reserve status due to its lush diversity of flora and fauna. However, although once a popular eco-tourist destination, very few tourists are spotted now and the trade has virtually died off. The reason being that the lake itself is dying with total and irreversible collapse of the ecological system predicted by 2030.  Unrestrained mining of the mineral-rich soil in the area has led to mass deforestation, while logging, itself, and destruction of the colossal swathes of the forest has made way for Oil Palm plantations. Contaminants from mines in very close proximity to the lake have caused considerable pollution and the replacement of local flora with a pernicious species of aquatic weed and algae.  To add to a catalogue of disasters, and against the wishes of the those Orang Asli communities who managed to hear of it (as they were not formally consulted) and Malaysian environmentalists, an ill conceived dam was placed in 1994 at the juncture of the Tasik Chini and the great Pahang River. This served to prevent the annual ebb and flow of the lake that made boating of tourists difficult at times but was essential to the ecosystem of the area  The lake is now stagnant, polluted and  the fish, upon which the Jakun relied on as fisher folk, frequently unfit to eat, their flesh being tainted and their bodies invaded by parasites.

 

Our role as social scientists invited to work with the Tasik Chini Research Centre is to help to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge of the problems here and the local communities. Our work is to aid amplification of their voices in speaking of their experiences of trying to survive in traditional native lands that have been violated and usurped.  With our fourth intensive field trip to Tasik Chini coming up this week and a packed itinerary of interviews and focus group discussions planned with the local villagers, our ethnographies are rapidly developing. The Orang Asli people have much to be angry about and although too often treated as backward and uneducated in Malaysia itself, they have impressed us considerably with their passion for their lands, their rage and grief at the destruction, their eloquence, their gracious hospitality to us – and their ability to organise their communities and their protests up to the highest levels of Government. Truly they are a great if much abused people and we count it a pronounced honour to be so warmly welcomed by them, and regard this as some, and maybe, the most important work of our careers.

 

We hear much in the UK of the trite, overused and sometimes disingenuous phrase ‘making a difference’ when applied to higher educational endeavour and these experiences have brought into sharp relief the differences between its application to the banal and to the truly tragic. This area is part of the traditional land of the Jakun, and as such should be protected and preserved. But much more than this it is an international site for the earth’s future generations and we must, as academics, plough back what little knowledge we have into securing this heritage.

 

Sara Ashencaen Crabtree and Jonathan Parker

PR education history archive now online

BU research, Fusion, REF Subjects, Research news, Uncategorized

An insight into the first decade of PR education in the UK has just been posted online. It is the archive of the Public Relations Educators Forum (PREF) from 1994 to 1999, its most active years. It can be found at: http://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/historyofpr/files/2010/03/PREF-Archive-1994-1999.pdf

Catalogued by Professor Tom Watson of the Media School, it illustrates the growth of PR education which began in 1987 in Scotland and a year later in England. PREF was founded in 1990 to bring the new cohort of PR educators together and help negotiate the academia-industry connection. As Bournemouth University (then Dorset Institute of Higher Education) was one of the first two UK universities to launch undergraduate studies in PR, the PREF archive also adds to university history.

It wasn’t an easy relationship with particular tension in the mid-1990s over industry’s attitude to the quality of graduates and its desire to impose a skills-led training curriculum on universities. This was resisted by PREF, as correspondence and evidence of meetings shows.

“This archive shows the teething pains of new academic-led education faced with industry’s desired for trained technicians. The positive news is that PR was an academic area in which women took leading roles from the outset,” Prof Watson said. The online archive contains copies of PREF’s newsletters and membership lists which show the rapid expansion of PR education in the UK.

The PREF archive is one of several projects to advance scholarship in public relations history being developed by Prof Watson during his Fusion Investment Fund-supported Study Leave.

 

Congratulations to Jon Williams: Associate Editorship

BU research, Featured academics, Publishing

Dr Jonathan Williams have just been invited to become an Associate Editor for the journal BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation  (http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcsportsscimedrehabil/about/edboard).

 

Whilst last week Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen has been invited to join the editorial board of Health Prospect (http://nepjol.info/index.php/HPROSPECT)

New free e-guide to aid service improvement

Service Improvement E bookToday the National Centre for Post-Qualifying Social Work (NCPQSW) launches a new publication around the concept of service improvement. This short e-guide introduces the process and thinking behind BU’s Service Improvement Model. Aimed at practitioners and managers working in both social work and health environments it provides the knowledge to be able to ask precise questions of a potential or actual service improvement projects.

Written by the leaders of NCPQSW’s Service Improvement Programmes Dr’s Keen and Rutter agree that

“improving services for the benefit of the people we serve is central to the work of every committed professional. However, an in-depth understanding of any problem at the outset is necessary to avoid costly  ‘wrong’ solutions.  We need to understand what improvement is necessary, know that any planned change should result in an improvement and show that any outcome impacts services. Our units provide a unique opportunity to address these needs.”

Download the e-guide here.

To get in touch to discuss the contents of the e-guide, the service improvement units or your educational requirements, please contact:

Dr Steven Keen

Email: skeen@bournemouth.ac.uk
Direct line: 01202 962028

Dr Lynne Rutter
Email: lrutter@bournemouth.ac.uk
Direct line: 01202 962019

 

Health, Well-Being & Society: New Wordle

BU research, PG research, Research news

The members of the Health, Wellbeing & Society theme have responded enthusiastically to the call to provide the five keys word reflecting their research interests and expertise.  The new Wordle above was created Feb. 13th from all of those key words.  Apart from presenting a pretty picture of colourful words, the Wordle provides a quick overview of the kind of research conducted by BU staff and PhD students affiliated with the theme.

 

Prof. Heather Hartwell leading the Health, Wellbeing & Society theme highlighted: “Our theme welcomes new members from across BU. This Wordle is, of course, snapshot in time.  We shall up-date the Wordle regularly to accommodate new members joining and existing members developing new research interests!”

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health