Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Congratulations to Prof. Ann Brooks in FHSS on the publication of her latest book Genealogies of Emotions, Intimacies and Desire: Theories of Changes in Emotional Regimes from Medieval Society to Late Modernity. The book has a Foreword by David Konstan (NYU) and it is published by Routledge.
Prof. Linda McKie who is professor of Sociology at Durham University gave an excellent paper today in FHSS on Revitalising Spatial and Temporal Frameworks in the Analysis of Unpaid Care and Paid Work. Her paper highlighted that published data have documented the persistence of the gender pay gap for all women with evidence of a deepening gap following maternity leave. 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. Often 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 her seminar Prof. McKie revisited 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. 
Yesterday Prof. McKie led a well-attended workshop for FHSS staff on preparing for the REF. She offered insight into various REF processes as well advise on strategic planning and the importance of networking. Prof. McKie has been a sub-panel member of the Research Excellence Framework 2014 (REF) Sub-panel 23: Sociology for the period 2010-2014.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Mr. Jib Acharya presented at The Nutrition Society Student Conference in Chester last week. He presented from his PhD work Healthy eating among mothers in Nepal: A qualitative exploration, which is supervised by Dr. Jane Murphy, Dr. Martin Hind and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. His thesis found that mothers in Nepal misunderstand the role of healthy eating to combat nutritional problems in their children. Often their beliefs and attitudes can result in the improper feeding of young children which can lead to several complications, particularly in pre-school-aged children. There is a growing quantitative research on nutrition in Nepal but very little qualitative research. Therefore, as part of his mixed-methods study Jib explored food knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, and behaviour of mothers related to feeding preschool aged children and their perceptions of key barriers to healthier eating.
Using seven focus groups with four pharmacists, seven policy-makers, eleven health workers, five spiritual healers, seven Auxiliary Nurse midwives, seven mothers participating in a mothers’ group, and nine social workers. A thematic approach was performed for data analysis. Relevant quotes are presented. His qualitative thematic analysis revealed the following themes: poverty, education level, strong cultural beliefs, family size, household income, time and a growing preference for fast food. This particular presentation at the University of Chester highlighted the themes related to culture and societal behaviour.
Well done!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Public 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:
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
Women Academics Centre Stage in Presidential Roles in Major International Professional Bodies and Conference Organisation
3rd International Sociological Association Forum of Sociology
10-14 July2016, University of Vienna, Austria
Professor Ann Brooks
Bournemouth University
This year’s Third ISA was held at the University of Vienna and shortly after Brexit, so I braced myself to face a barrage of jokes and recriminations about the UK vote. Well there was some gentle humour in the plenaries but the response was mainly one of pity. The conference was based in the opulence of the University of Vienna… . With its historical and contemporary position in relation to both European and global sociology this conference attracted 4,000 sociologists from across the globe. I usually find the ISA a somewhat unwieldy conference compared to the BSA and ASA but Research Committtee (RC) 32 Women in Society, has a wonderfully inclusive feel and gave coherence to the entire conference for me (see below). Increasingly some of the best conferences have women centre stage, including the ASA 2015 Conference in Chicago, with the then ASA President, Paula England, and the current ASA President and Chair of the 2016 Program Committee, Ruth Milkman (CUNY –Graduate Centre). The ASA Conference was held in Seattle in August 2016. The current ISA President is Margaret Abraham (Hofstra University, USA) who together with a team at the University of Vienna delivered a conference which did not disappoint.
A series of important and thoughtful plenaries addressed the global dimensions of the conference with the University of Vienna organising team providing an interesting European dimension addressing the Brexit issue. A generally favourable balance was achieved between global and European dimensions. The Opening Plenary featured a number of academics from the University of Vienna and they were clearly delighted at attracting over 5,000 sociologists to this impressive university as the conference base. The Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna, Ulrike Felt, provided an uplifting and impressive summary of the social sciences at the University Vienna and I can see the number of applicants for positions there escalating as a result. It was also great to see governmental support for the social sciences, with Barbara Weitgruber, Director General, Austrian Ministry of Science delivering a very positive statement in support of the social sciences. Margaret Abraham’s ISA Presidential Address, found here:
http://www.isa-sociology.org/forum-2016/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW44_sW4Jmc
was an important statement in equity and intersectionality and made an important contribution to this lively opening Plenary. Margaret is also an important contributor to the ASA Conference, particularly in terms of the International aspects of both conferences.
While the conference lacked the celebrity appeal of the ASA, it certainly did not lack in the seriousness of the debates. One of the most interesting debates came from the closing plenary chaired by Marcus Schultz (New School for Social Research, New York), with Asef Bayat (University of Illinois) ‘Imagining a Post-Islamist Democracy’, Akosua Adomako Ampofo (University of Ghana) ‘Black Lives Matter and the Status of the African World’, Todd Gatlin (Columbia) ‘What Kind of a World Can Weather Climate Change?’ and Alain Touraine (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, France), as discussant.
Research Committee (RC) 32 Women in Society
The size of the conference meant that affiliation to specific programs proved a favoured response. I am a member of RC32 Women in Society and the program was widely regarded as one of the best at the conference. The Program Coordinators for RC32, Akosua Adomako Ampofo and Josephine Beoku-Betts (Florida Atlantic) had worked to organise an extensive range of panels and roundtables including: ‘Human Trafficking: The Labour and Sexual Exploitation of Women and Children’; ‘Twenty Years after Beijing: A Cross-National Approach to Feminist Movements and the Implementation of the Platform for Action’; ‘Global Sociology and Feminist Perspectives on Care, Care Work and the Struggle for a Careful World’; ‘Knowledge Production: Feminist Perspectives in the 21st Century’; ‘Gender, Law and the Courts: Local and Global Struggles Against Violence’; ‘ Intersectionalities of Power in Research: Strategies for Action and Justice’; ‘Gender, Culture and Technologies in the Knowledge Economy’; ‘Muslim Women’s Struggles for a Better World through Promoting Gender Equality’; and ‘The Cities We Want: Using Visionary Methodologies to Create Feminist Alternatives to Urban Planning’. My paper was in the ‘Precarity and Gender in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization’ and I focused on relational precarity as highlighted in the work of Lauren Berlant entitled: ‘Gender, Precarity and Sexuality: The Intersection of Gender, Ethnicity, Sexuality and Class in Relational Precarity in Neoliberal Society–the Influence of Lauren Berlant’. .
The double badging of sessions with RC32 with other RCs was a really valuable dimension of the conference, this was particularly the case for the RC02 Economy and Society led by the Program Coordinator, Heidi Gottfried, which included some excellent sessions including: ‘Gender Regimes or Gendered Institutions’ organised by Sylvia Walby. A particularly interesting session was the ‘Author Meets Critics: Crisis by Sylvia Walby’. Chaired by Heidi Gottfried and with discussants Stephanie Woehl (Vienna) and Christopher Chase-Dunn (California-Riverside). This proved to be one of the most coherent and intense social and political analyses including the focus on the EU and had anticipated Brexit. Sylvia’s response to criticism was powerful and wide-ranging and pointed to the next political crisis being in the EU not the UK. She also calls for a ‘regendering of the political project’.
This was a really fascinating conference, serious in its debates and commemorating the work and loss of John Urry.
Professor Ann Brooks
August 2016
The Centre for Qualitative Research is kicking off its new seminar series on Wednesday 7 September at 1 pm in Royal London House RLH 201 Masterclass Suite.Because CQR is keen to make information available to students and staff about qualitative METHODS, the seminars will be arranged somewhat differently than the typical lunchtime seminar.
We are asking TWO (or more) presenters to agree to present each research method as a CONVERSATION…first, between each other, and then with the audience. We are also asking that no PowerPoint be used in order that it is truly a conversation and NOT a lecture. The conversations will be about a particular research method and its pros and cons, NOT research projects or outcomes.
The “In Conversation with …” Seminar Series will be held on the FIRST WED of each month for nine months beginning in September. They will run from 1 pm until 1:50.
We are then hoping that many will join us for a CQR ‘KoffeeKlatch’ following at Naked Cafe next to RLH after the seminar.
We anticipate that by making the CQR Seminar Series really unique and exciting that they will inspire students and academics alike to investigate the wide range of qualitative methods and expertise available at CQR, and enrich their research projects by doing so.
See the list of all nine CQR Seminars over the Academic Year.
Congratulations to FHSS Prof. Ann Brooks on her latest academic article in the July issue of Cultural Politics. The article ‘The Cultural Production of Consumption as Achievement’ is co-authored with Lionel Wee.
The Cultural Production of Consumption as Achievement Cultural PoliticsCultural Politics (2016) 12 (2): 217-232
doi 10:10.1215/17432197-3592112
BU’s Fair Access Research project concentrates on the idea of learning and working together to transform higher education. We are interested in how widening participation works differently in different institutions.
With this in mind, Maggie Hutchings and Alex Wardrop have been doing some fieldwork with colleagues in the north of England.
Widening participation is emerging as emotional work. It is an emotional labour which sees personal stories intersect with and sometimes rub up against complex economic and political landscapes.
You can join us in this collective reflection and learning exercise by contributing to our survey. For more information about the organisational learning project, email Maggie 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)
Congratulations to FHSS’s Dr. Pramod Regmi on the publication of his latest paper in the SAARC Journal of Tuberculosis, Lung Diseases and HIV/AIDS under the title ‘Knowing is not enough: Migrant workers’ spouses vulnerability to HIV’ [1]. The paper was specifically highlighted in the editorial of the journal’s latest edition.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Reference
We have written in many previous BU blogs about progress of our THET-funded project in southern Nepal (e.g. here AND here ). Today’s blog reflects on the use on BU’s unique FUSION approach in our project ‘Mental Health Training for Maternity Care Providers in Nepal‘.
Our BU-led project brings highly experienced health professionals, such as midwives, health visitors or mental health nurses, to Nepal to work as volunteer trainers. The training is aimed at community-based maternity care practitioners and addresses key mental health issues relevant to pregnancy and for new mothers and offers the required communication skills. These health professionals will bring their experience as health care providers as well as trainers in the field of mental health and maternity care/midwifery, mental ill-health prevention and health promotion. They volunteer for two to three weeks at a time to design and deliver training in southern Nepal.
The Centre for Midwifery & Maternal Health (CMMPH) collaborates in this project with Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), the Department of Health, and Physical & Population Education at Nepal’s oldest university Tribhuvan University’s (TU). The project is supported in the field by a local charity called Green Tara Nepal. Our project is part of the Health Partnership such as Nepal. HPS itself is funded by the UK Department for International Development and managed by THET (Tropical and Health Education Trust).
Our maternal mental health project is a good example of BU’s FUSION approach as it combines EDUCATION (through the training of Auxiliary Nurse-Midwives in Nepal) by UK volunteers (representing PRACTICE) through an intervention which is properly evaluated (representing RESEARCH) is a perfect example of BU’s FUSION in action. Moreover, the project will be partly evaluated by FHSS’s Preeti Mahato as part of her PhD thesis research. This PhD project is supervised by Dr. Catherine Angell (CEL & CMMPH), BU Visiting Professor Padam Simkhada (based at LJMU) and CMMPH’s Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.BU’s focus on the FUSION of research, education and professional practice is a unique variant of the way UK universities (and many abroad) blend academic teaching, research and scholarship. FUSION is a key concept derived from BU’s strategic Vision & Values).
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Congratulations to Dr. Pramod Regmi as the lead author of the paper ‘Informed consent in health research: challenges and barriers in low-and middle-income countries with specific reference to Nepal‘ [1]. Informed consent is a process whereby potential participants are genuinely informed about their role, risk and rights before they are enrolled in the study. Thus, ethics committees in most countries require ‘informed consent form’ as part of an ethics application which is reviewed before granting research ethics approval. Despite a significant increase in health research activity in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) in recent years, only limited work has been done to address ethical concerns.
Most ethics committees in LMICs lack the authority and/or the capacity to monitor research in the field. This is important since not all research, particularly in LMICs region, complies with ethical principles, sometimes this is inadvertently or due to a lack of awareness of their importance in assuring proper research governance. With several examples from Nepal, this paper reflects on the steps required to obtain informed consents and highlights some of the major challenges and barriers to seeking informed consent from research participants. The authors offer some recommendations around how can we can promote and implement optimal informed consent taking process.
The paper will appear later this year in the international journal Developing World Bioethics (publisher: Wiley). Finally, just out of interest five out of six of the authors are graduates of the University of Aberdeen!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Reference:
At the National Workshop on Mental Health Education & Research in Kathmandu organised by Tribhuvan University, Bournemouth University and Liverpool John Moores University last week we had quite a few television camera crews and journalists present. Sabitri Dhakal, one of the journalists from The Himalayan Times an English-language daily newspaper in Nepal, wrote a nice feature length article. This piece was based on interviews with BU Visiting Faculty Padam Simkhada and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen conducted at our workshop. Her article with the title ‘Understanding Mental Health’ is available online.
Mental health in pregnant women and new mothers is increasing recognised on the global health agenda. In Nepal mental health is generally a difficult to topic to discuss. THET, a London-based organisation, funded Bournemouth University, and Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and Tribhuvan University in Nepal to train community-based maternity 
workers on issues around mental health. Thus far three groups of UK health and education experts have gone out to Nepal to train these communit maternity care providers, called Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs). ANMs, who are the key maternity service providers in rural birthing centres of Nepal, have received only 18 months of training and the training curriculum does not refer to dealing with mental health issues. The next group of volunteers is due to travel in September.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
At a television interview this morning in Kathmandu I was asked how many papers I had published on health and health-related issues in Nepal. I told the interviewer from BTV Business that it was around 90 to a hundred. Coming back to Green Tara Nepal office I decide to update the list of papers on Nepal to make sure I had not lied too much on TV.
Adding up the papers, editorials and, to a lesser extent, book chapters I was pleasantly surprised that there were 25 on maternity care & midwifery, 18 on sexual & reproductive health, nine on infectious diseases, five on non-communicable diseases, six on nutrition & child health, three on mental health, two on migration and a further mixture of 38 on topics such as health systems, research methods, or health & education capacity building. If I have not double counted any of the papers that a grand total of 106. Most are co-authored with BU Visiting Faculty Prof.Padam Simkhada (from Liverpool John Moores University), many with PhD students conducting projects in Nepal and, more recently with BU post-doctoral fellow Dr. Pramod Regmi.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Reference (by topic)
Maternal & Neonatal Health & Midwifery
Sexual & Reproductive Health
Infectious diseases
Non-Communicable Diseases
Nutrition & Child Development
Mental Health
Migration / Occupational Health
Other (including: health systems, research methods, capacity building)
Today we completed the second day of training of health teachers, lecturers in nursng, public health and the like in Kathmandu. We called it the National Workshop on Mental Health Education & Research and this two-day workshop was held in a hotel in Kathmandu. It was organised by Tribhuvan University in collaboration with Bournemouth University and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). Mental health is high on the global agenda and want to raise the issue more in Nepal. The three universities are working together on an education intervention training Auxiliary Nurse Midwives in Nawalparasi on mental health issues and mental health promotion. The project is funded under the Health Partnership Scheme (HPS) from DfID and managed by THET (Tropical Health & Education Trust).
Key speakers on the first day of the workshop included: the VC of Tribhuvan University, Dr Gangalal Tuladhar MP and former Education Minister of Nepal, Dr Khem Karki (head of the Nepal Health Research Council), Dr Chandra Kala Sharma, Prof Shyam Krishna Maharjan and Prof Krishna Acharya.
This workshop is part of this capacity building process and the audience of largely university and college lecturers will take some of the learning back with them to improve the education of health workers in Nepal.
The second day of the workshop concentrateed on research methods for community-based projects such as this our THET funded one in the mental health field. Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen reminded the audience that it is important that novel mental health interventions like ours are properly evaluated, and that the people doing the evaluations have the appropriate rese
arch skills. The next group of UK volunteers are due to travel to Nepal in September.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
This week we published an editorial in the Journal of Biomedical Sciences on the question: “Is early diagnose for Vitamin A deficiency better than the current supplementation programme of Nepal?”
The editorial concludes that prevention is still better than cure, but instead of a mass Vitamin A supplementation in Nepal, we need a health promotion intervention aiming to increase the intake of relatively cheap vegetables and fruit (containing β carotene). In addition we need better surveillance and help to identify children with Vitamin A Deficiency and provide them with Vitamin A supplements. The primary focus should be on adopting sustainable food based approaches to combat vitamin A deficiency. In Public Health terms: rather than a blanket coverage of Vitamin A supplementation to whole population we should consider a targeted intervention aimed at those who need it most.
Reference:
Simkhada P, Sathian B, Adhikari S, van Teijlingen E, Roy B. (2015) Is early diagnose for Vitamin A deficiency better than the current supplementation programme of Nepal?. J Biomed Sci. 2(4):28-30.
http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/JBS/index
The Harding and Pritchard paper titled ‘UK and Twenty Comparable Countries GDP-Expenditure on Health 1980-2013: The Historic and Continued Low Priority of UK Health-Related Expenditure’, and published in the International Journal of Health Policy and Management, has had over 1,000 views in the first month it has been openly available.
For the majority of that time it has been made available in press, and only in the last few days has it been assigned to an issue. The paper illustrates the UK’s low proportional spend in relation to health related services:
It is well-established that for a considerable period the United Kingdom has spent proportionally less of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health-related services than almost any other comparable country. Average European spending on health (as a % of GDP) in the period 1980 to 2013 has been 19% higher than the United Kingdom, indicating that comparable countries give far greater fiscal priority to its health services, irrespective of its actual fiscal value or configuration. While the UK National Health Service (NHS) is a comparatively lean healthcare system, it is often regarded to be at a ‘crisis’ point on account of low levels of funding. Indeed, many state that currently the NHS has a sizeable funding gap, in part due to its recently reduced GDP devoted to health but mainly the challenges around increases in longevity, expectation and new medical costs. The right level of health funding is a political value judgement. As the data in this paper outline, if the UK ‘afforded’ the same proportional level of funding as the mean averageEuropean country, total expenditure would currently increase by one-fifth.
Today and yesterday Green Tara Nepal (GTN) staff spent discussing and planning their health promotion intervention in the district of Dhading. The sessions included feedback by the GTN on progress to-date as well as a discussion of their perceptions of the various relevant health needs in the community. BU has been working with GTN for over seven years. [1] Yesterday BU professor Edwin van Teijlingen gave an interactive workshop on communication skills. This morning BU’s Visiting Professor Padam Simkhada from Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) outlined key health promotion concepts and theories to the fieldworkers.
This particular post-disaster health promotion project grew out of years of research-based interventions run by GTN and the needs seen in areas affected by last years’ serious earthquakes in Nepal. The project has received support from various funding agencies, including Green Tara Trust, a London-based Buddhist charity. The training is being held in Dhadingbesi, about four hours drive away from the capital Kathmandu. The various photos with this blog show the results of a social mapping exercise. These included some beautifully hand-drawn maps of the individual wards in the area, indicating where the health post is situated, but more importantly the house of currently pregnant women.
Several GTN project have been, or ar currently, evaluated by FHSS Ph.D. students. The GTN project in Pharping has been evaluated by Sheetal Sharma, who has published several papers from this research.[2-4] The GTN project in Nawalparasi is currently being studied by Preeti Mahato, who has also already published from her thesis research despite being less than halfway through. [5] Prof. Padam Simkhada is external supervisor for both these BU Ph.D students.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
References:
This week we had our latest planning meeting for the BU-led and THET-funded project in Nepal. The project has been running for over a year (following a six-month delay due to the terrible 2015 earthquake in Nepal). The project brings highly experienced UK health volunteers to train local community-based maternity care practitioners about the key mental health issues in pregnancy and after birth. The Centre for Midwifery & Maternal Health (CMMPH) works in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), the Department of Health, Physical and Population Education at Nepal’s largest university Tribhuvan University’s (TU). Our project is part of the Health Partnership Scheme (HPS), which funds health partnerships to carry out capacity-building projects in low-income countries, including Nepal. HPS itself is funded by the UK Department for International Development and managed by THET.
Halfway through the project we had an update meeting at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu to discuss and plan the second half of the project which runs until the spring in 2017. The maternal mental health project is a good example of BU’s FUSION approach as it combines Education (through the training of Auxiliary Nurse-Midwives) by UK volunteers (representing the Practice-element of FUSION) in an intervention that is Research-based in both its design and evaluation. The next group of UK volunteers is due to go out to southern Nepal in September 2016. The photo on the top shows one of the UK volunteers (a midwife from Aberdeen) in action with the aid of a Nepali translator during the latest training session in Nawalparasi in May 2016.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (CMMPH) and Prof. Padam Simkhada (LJMU & BU Visiting Faculty)
BU staff can login below:
Fourth INRC Symposium: From Clinical Applications to Neuro-Inspired Computation
Writing policy briefs
Upholding Excellence: The Concordat to Support Research Integrity
Today’s Documentation Will Serve Tomorrow’s Justice
ECR Funding Open Call: Research Culture & Community Grant – Application Deadline Friday 12 December ECR Funding Open Call: Research Culture & Community Grant – Apply Now
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 Call
ERC Advanced Grant 2025 Webinar
Horizon Europe Work Programme 2025 Published
Horizon Europe 2025 Work Programme pre-Published MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 Call ERC Advanced Grant 2025 Webinar MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025
Update on UKRO services
European research project exploring use of ‘virtual twins’ to better manage metabolic associated fatty liver disease
Research Information Network