BU Research Blog | Sociology & Social Policy

Category / Sociology & Social Policy

12 July 2015

Reminder: Monday 13th July seminar by Prof. John Holmwood

Festival of Learning, Public engagement Edwin van Teijlingen

Tomorrow Prof. John Holmwood (University of Nottingham) will be the first speaker in the Distinguished Social Scientists Public Lectures Series at Bournemouth University. The topic of his presentation tomorrow at 18.00 at Talbot Campus will be ‘The University, Democracy and the Public Interest’. The Distinguished Social Scientists Public Lectures Series was idea of Prof. Ann Brooks. There are still places left for Monday 13th, click and book here!

#BUfest15 @bournemouthuni

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

FHSS

Twitter @EvanTeijlingen

10 July 2015

UK Nepali Community Equality in Health & Social Care Study

Public engagement, Publishing Edwin van Teijlingen

Yesterday (July 9th) saw the launch of the report based on a study of the Nepali Community in the UK on Equality in Health & Social Care. The joint project between the UKNFS (UK-Nepal Friendship Society) and Bournemouth University was funded by the National Lottery and supported by The Embassy of Nepal in London, the Non Residential Nepali Association [NRNA UK], and NHS England. The presentation of the report ook place at the NRNA UK head office in Woolwich.

The Chief Guest of Honour at our launch was Mr Sushil Thapa from the Embassy of Nepal, representing His Excellency Mr Tej Bahadur Chhetri, Acting Ambassador of Nepal to the UK. The chief guest speaker was Dr. Habib Naqvi, NHS England Head of Equality, who highlighted the Report and its recommendations. The Principal Investigator Dr. Bibha Simkhada, who is also Visiting Faculty in BU’s Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, presented the key findings to the audience. Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen gave a short presentation settign this report in the wider portfolio of resarch related to Nepal conducted at BU. Mr. Alan Mercel-Sanca, Chairperson of UKNFS commented:

‘We particularly appreciate Dr Bibha Simkhada and Dr Rajeeb Kumar Sah’s dedication and high quality research in the Nepali community. We would also like to thank the Big Lottery Fund for making this ground-breaking piece of work possible, and the NHS England Equality and Health Inequalities team for their great interest in the value of the research. The Report offers a unique opportunity for our evolving NHS and the Ministry of Health to better understand and more effectively meet the needs and hear the Voice of the Nepali community – it clearly has direct relevance to other South Asian and broader Black & Minority Ethnic communities using and seeking to access an NHS that is equitable and effective.’

The Report’s Executive Summary can be found here!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

6 July 2015

Phone scams and ‘vishing’ on the rise – how to protect vulnerable older people

Public engagement swincewicz

Dr Lee-Ann Fenge

Following our blog last week on the work the NCPQSW is undertaking with staff from the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) to respond to the risks posed by financial scams, the Financial Ombudsman Service has released a report to-day detailing the risks posed by phone scams and ‘vishing’.

Vishing is the way that criminals use the phone to defraud or mislead someone, and a particular threat identified by the Financial Ombudsman Service is the “no hang-up” scam. In this type of scam fraudsters pose as the police or a bank and then persuade individuals that their account is at immediate risk. Individuals may then be tricked into giving away their account and PIN details over the phone.

This study found that older people are disproportionately represented in those reporting phone scams to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), and 80% of those affected were aged over 55.

Many of those contacting the FOS had lost substantial sums of money, and the 185 complaints reviewed involved losses of up to £4.3 million.

It is important that those agencies and professionals working with vulnerable adults are alert to the risks posed by such scams, and that they are able to provide information and advice to those most at risk. Age UK provide useful advice about avoiding the risks posed by financial scams

This includes:

Never give out personal or banking information when answering an incoming call
Be wary of calls from companies you haven’t dealt with before. This is cold calling and it should always ring alarm bells. Don’t be afraid to hang up or end the call with a brief ‘no’
Avoid calling numbers that begin ‘09’ as these are charged are premium rates, costing up to £2 per minute
If you are in doubt about the identity of a caller claiming to be from the police or your bank, ring the number on your statement using a different phone, or wait at least five minutes before making the call to make sure you are not still speaking to the fraudsters
Remember that banks will never ask for your PIN or passwords in full on the phone or via email, or send someone to your home to collect bank cards, etc

It is important that older people are made aware of the risks posed by phone scams, and that professional remain vigilant to the signs so that appropriate support and help can be offered.

4 July 2015

Paper published based on prestigious scholarship

Awarded & submitted bids, Publishing Edwin van Teijlingen

BU academics Ms. Lesley Milne, Prof. Vanora Hundley and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in collaboration with BU Visiting Faculty Prof. Padam Simkhada (Liverpool John Moores University) and Ms. Jillian Ireland (Community midwife NHS Poole) published there latest paper yesterday in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth. The paper ‘Staff perspectives of barriers to women accessing birthing services in Nepal: a qualitative study’ originated from research conducted in small maternity hospitals in Nepal.

The project was funded in 2013 through the first ever WellBeing of Women-Royal College of Midwives International Fellowship Award. This Fellowship was the first of its kind. It was established to enable midwives to further develop research interests in midwifery, maternity services, pregnancy, childbirth and women’s health from an international perspective.

The Scholarship competition was open to RCM midwives undertaking research in the UK or abroad which would address Millennium Development Goals 4 (Reduce Child Mortality) and 5 (Improve Maternal Health). Lesley Milne in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Heealth (CMMPH) was the first and very worthy recipient of this award.

Based on the fieldwork we published our paper in BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth an Open Access journal. The paper highlights that Nepal has made significant progress with regard to reducing the maternal mortality ratio but a major challenge remains the under-utilisation of skilled birth attendants. We found other studies had explored women’s views of the barriers to facility birth; however the voices of staff who offer services have not been studied in detail. This research explored the views of staff as to the key reasons why pregnant women do not give birth in a maternity-care facility when they exist.

This study highlights a multitude of barriers, not all of the same importance or occuring at the same time in the pregnancy journey. It is clear that staff are aware of many of the barriers for women in reaching the facility to give birth, and these fit with previous literature of women’s views. However, staff had limited insight into barriers occuring within the facility itself and were more likely to suggest that this was a problem for other institutions and not theirs.

Edwin van Teijlingen, Lesley Milne & Vanora Hundley

CMMPH

@EvanTeijlingen / @VanoraHundley

Reference:

Lesley Milne, Edwin van Teijlingen, Vanora Hundley, Padam Simkhada and Jillian Ireland, Staff perspectives of barriers to women accessing birthing services in Nepal: a qualitative study, BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth 2015, 15:142 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2393/15/142

29 June 2015

GeoNet mapping for Social Change

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion, Fusion Investment Fund, REF Subjects, Research themes pgillingham

This time Dr. Steve McFarland visited us from the University of Tampa. Steve gave us a lot of interesting food for thought – I’d never considered before that maps historically have given more power to those who already have power. For example, city maps often included important landmarks and the houses of the wealthy, but slums were left as blank spaces. He then went on to describe some projects that have tried to redress this balance in the past few years. One project, ‘Queering the map’ , aimed to use maps to construct and affirm identities. Sometimes using maps has resulted in new concepts, such as environmental racism – through the work of Laura Pulido, who showed that toxic waste in LA tended to be released in areas inhabited by people of colour.

He then talked about some of his own work mapping the relative salaries of pthp lecturers in HEAs across America – rates of pay are very different across the country and it turned out that a pthp lecturer at his own university teaching 6 classes per year (as expected of a tenured academic) would just about make minimum wage. We had a very interesting discussion after the formal presentation, about the future of mapping crowdsourced information to help in disaster/crisis management. However, some people can be fearful of taking part in such projects as the maps could be subverted away from their originally intended use. For example, protestors could upload information to be mapped in real time to show where teargas is being deployed, and use this to stay away from police. However, the police could also potentially use these maps to target protesters. In this case however, the police are likely to have helicopter access, so the presence of a crowdsourced map would close the information gap between the two sides.

Ultimately, we discussed whether the growth in the use of maps has outpaced our ability to understand them. Going forwards, spatial literacy is likely to be just as important as numeracy, which is music to the ears of any geographer!

We would like to hear your thoughts on the GeoNet seminar series, please fill in our very short survey on https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HSY29L6

25 June 2015

Distinguished Social Science Public Lectures Series at BU

Edwin van Teijlingen

Presenting for the first time at this year’s Festival of Learning: the first two Distinguished Social Scientists Public Lectures at Bournemouth University. The inaugural lecture will be given by Professor John Holmwood on Monday 13th July at 18.00. John is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham and founder of the Campaign for the Public University.

His lecture will centred on ‘The University, Democracy and the Public Interest.’ Following the election of 2010, the nature of the university was dramatically changed following the introduction of tuition fees and the removal of direct public funding from arts, humanities and social science subjects. This reduced public spending on higher education by 82%, shifting the costs on to students with increased revenues going into higher education. The lecture will suggest that the university has shifted from being at the service of democracy to being at the service of markets and their associated inequalities, such that it is now integral to a democratic deficit at the heart of wider public policy.

Tickets for John’s lecture can be booked at no cost here.

The second public lecture will be presented by Professor Judy Wajcman, Anthony Giddens, Professor of Sociology, at the London School of Economics on 16 July, 6-8.30 pm. Her lecture is based on her new book Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism.

More, better, faster. That’s modern life. And it’s all driven by the very devices that were supposed to make our lives better—our communication devices, which, rather than easing our work and social lives, instead impinge, leaving us no refuge from our responsibilities. But what if it’s not the devices that are to blame? What if we turn that around, and remind ourselves that they’re just tools—and that we can decide how to design and use them. It is only by bringing a social science lens to such issues that we can begin to understand how we have remade time and remade ourselves in digital culture.

Tickets for Judy’s lecture can be booked at no cost here.

The Distinguished Social Scientists Public Lecture Serie is facilitated by BU Professor Ann Brooks.

23 June 2015

Collaborative ethnography and undergraduate learning

Fusion, Public engagement, Research Ethics, Research Integritiy, student research Rosie Read

The value of providing undergraduate students with experience of conducting first hand, empirical research is widely recognised. As a social anthropologist, I’ve long been interested enabling students to discover and engage in ethnographic research. I’m presently developing a new taught unit in which for our BA Sociology and BA Sociology and Anthropology students will carry out ethnographic projects developed in collaboration with local community organisations. This endeavour necessarily poses challenges. One of them is time. Undergrad students’ learning is divided into units delivered over semesters, but a semester is very short time frame in which to design, carry out and write up an ethnographic project. The other is the nature of the collaboration with the non-academic partner, whether that be an NGO, community group, local government partner etc. How can this collaboration be shaped in a way which is beneficial to both parties?

IUPUI students visiting a housing redevelopment scheme in a lower income neighbourhood, Indianapolis, February 2015.

This term I have visited IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis), USA. IUPUI is a public university in which dialogue and engagement between faculty and students, on the one hand, and citizens, organisations and businesses, on the other, is a priority for both teaching and research. My visits have provided me with an opportunity to see a diverse range of ways in which this dialogue is promoted and sustained. Here I will summarise some of the strategies I have seen in action at IUPUI which are most pertinent to the kinds of collaborative, community-engaged student ethnographic projects I hope to develop at BU.

1. Investing time
The importance of investing time in developing relationships with local organisations which will have a stake in the research cannot be overstated. Whoever the partner is and whatever the nature of the collaboration, the project is enormously enhanced when both parties make time to talk to each other, arrive at a suitable, realisable aim of the project, and figure out how they are going to achieve it within the fixed timescale. This is of course easy to state and much harder to realise, as it involves all parties investing a very scarce resource, time, into the process. I followed an ethnographic research methods course closely during my visits, a project exploring urban regeneration within a low-income neighbourhood. This made clear the benefits of that early investment of time. Both the academic course leader and management, staff and volunteers at the community development organisation in the local area set aside considerable time in identifying the possibilities and foci of student research projects, long before the teaching proper started. This communication and collaboration also continued throughout the course itself, adjusting to changing and contingent circumstances as the student research projects progressed.

2. Framing the question
Central to the process above is negotiating the research question; what is it that the students will research and why? The question needs to address the interests and priorities of both partners. It must contain the potential for students to formulate their empirical focus and interpret their data in the light of theories and critical questions within their disciplines, and to produce findings which are of some benefit or use to non-academic partners, organisations and citizens. At IUPUI, I found out about series of student projects on urban development issues such as poverty, homelessness, housing, city regeneration strategies, gentrification and food production and consumption, to name some of them. These kinds of topics resulted in findings and interpretations which had both critical value as pieces of academic work and practical value to local people and organisations.

3. Moving teaching to community settings
I closely followed two courses which were taught off-campus in community settings – one in a church / community centre, the other in a women’s correctional facility. The success of any ethnographic project hinges on proximity and familiarity and so establishing this sense of closeness is obviously of enormous value to students. Teaching in a setting within which students will find an immediate mutuality of interest in their engagement with the people and organisations they are going to study helps students think of themselves as ethnographers. It provides the basis for developing relationships, trust, access and cooperation within the community, and for fostering local understanding of what the project is about. This is also a valuable experience that students take with them into their future careers.

4. Finding (new) ways of disseminating the research findings
Academics at IUPUI employed many different means of disseminating their students’ research projects and findings, enabling it to reach audiences within but also well beyond the city itself. Students were strongly encouraged and sometimes financially supported to attend national and international conferences. Funding was raised for publishing pamphlets, books and eBooks about their empirical studies and findings. Time was invested in developing impressive academic blogs and websites about their research. I provide a few links to just some of this fantastic work below.
I have gained many insights, ideas and sense of possibilities from my visits to IUPUI, and I’d like to extend my warm thanks to all colleagues and students whom I had the pleasure of meeting. Special thanks to Professor Susan B. Hyatt, whose scholarship inspired my visits and who made the whole thing possible in a practical sense.

Links to some online examples of IUPUI collaborative student research and scholarship:

– The ‘Neighborhood of Saturdays’. Student research project about urban multi-ethnic neighborhood in Indianapolis.

– ‘Eastside Story: Portrait of a Neighborhood on the Suburban Frontier’: Student project exploring historical change and community identities in a suburban area of Indianapolis.

– ‘Urban Heritage? Archaeology and Homelessness in Indianapolis’. A student project using archaeological methods to explore experiences of homelessness.

– ‘Ransom Place’ project: Collaborative project on culture, consumption and race in an African American neighbourhood in Indianapolis: http://www.iupui.edu/~anthpm/ransom.html

– ‘Archaeology and Material Culture’: blog of Professor Paul Mullins.
https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/author/paulmullins/

16 June 2015

The Politics of Societal Impact: Community Development and Critical Scholarship

Fusion, Public engagement, student research Rosie Read

How can we do research that engages with communities in a genuinely collaborative way? What kind of research produces findings which address critical questions about the structural issues and problems faced by communities, but which are also of practical and transformative benefit to them? If these two objectives pull researchers in different directions, what kind of balance can be struck between them?

These are questions I have been pondering during two visits this semester to IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis), in Indianapolis, USA. This is a university which places strong emphasis on the importance of community collaboration and engagement in scholarship and education. During two visits, I have particularly followed the community engaged work of Professor Susan Brin Hyatt.

I have known Professor Hyatt since June 2013, when she came to Bournemouth University to give a research seminar presentation about urban ethnographic research projects she and her students had undertaken in Indianapolis and Philadelphia (e.g., Hyatt et al 2012, Hyatt et al 2009. See also Hyatt 2001). During her visit we talked a lot about our common scholarly interests and discovered that we had a shared interest in the British Community Development Projects (CDPs) of the 1970s. The CDPs provide a very interesting example of the politics of using academic knowledge to bring about social change – or what we now call (societal) impact.

Meadow Well playground, 1976. Photography courtesy of Ken Grint. Available at IUPUI Digital Archive: http://indiamond6.ulib.iupui.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/CDP/id/3685/rec/120

Initiated in 1969, the CDPs were a major social policy initiative, by the standards of then and now. There were twelve CDPs across the UK – mostly based in urban, industrial areas affected by economic decline, job loss and poverty. CDPs were set up with the aim of using community action to tackle various social problems associated with poverty and develop more integrated forms of service provision which responded to the local population’s needs. Each of the twelve CDPs incorporated a research team based in a university, and an action team based in the community, accountable to a local steering group. The idea was that social science knowledge and methods should both inform and support the development of local projects. The CDPs had an estimated budget of £5 million – a lot of money in those days. Most of the funding came from central government, but local CDPs operated with a high level of autonomy.

It is interesting to reflect on the CDPs from today’s vantage point. This was the creation of an ambitious infrastructure, across 12 regions, linking universities and academic researchers directly with community workers and activists in poor areas, with the explicit aim of enabling social science to inform social transformation. It is hard to imagine such a wide-ranging initiative emerging now, backed up by an equivalent budget from central government departments, in spite of widespread current concerns about growing use of food banks, zero hours contracts, high levels of in-work and child poverty and obscene income and housing inequalities; the kinds of problems which, some argue, are far more endemic now in the UK than they were in the 1970s.

Yet the CDP story is one in which two conflicting explanations of the causes of poverty unfolded (Loney 1983). The politicians and civil servants who set up the CDPs assumed a social pathology definition. They understood poverty to result essentially from the actions and beliefs of the poor themselves. From this viewpoint, what was needed was better, more joined up local services to help the poor to improve their skills and lifestyles, and become better adapted to the new economic realities of deindustrialisation. By contrast, those who worked for the CDPs quickly abandoned this definition of poverty in favour of a more structural perspective, attending to how social and economic policies reflected within corporate and government decision-making directly and indirectly gave rise to poverty and related social problems. In effect the CDP researchers, workers and activists refused to ‘localize’ the cause of the issues they tried to tackle. Their structural perspective informed how community action and research was used to engage, inform and mobilise local populations, and transform people’s lives for the better. This brought about many positive changes in areas in which CDPs were active and left some important legacies. However, this kind of impact was not what the government had in mind. CDPs were eventually wound down in the late 1970s, by which time politicians and senior government officials had mostly switched off from considering the implications of their findings for social policy at a wider level.

Although this was forty years ago, the CDPs have a strong contemporary resonance. Many of the problems tackled by the CDPs (poverty, insecure low paid work, unemployment) continue today, as do debates over how to deal with them. The activism and scholarship produced by the CDPs illustrates vividly how attempts to bring about positive change (to make an impact) in poor communities necessarily depends upon definitions of poverty which are always, inescapably political, whether or not they are recognised as such. As part of her research on British CDPs, Prof Hyatt and her colleagues at IUPUI have created a unique and extensive digital archive of many CDP reports, publications and photographs. This is an excellent resource for both teaching and research and I would like to recommend it to all colleagues interested in the issues discussed here.

References

Hyatt, SB., Linder, BJ., and Baurley, M. eds. 2012. The Neighborhood of Saturdays. Memories of a Multi-Ethnic Community on Indianapolis’ South Side. Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing.

Hyatt, SB., Branstrator, DW., Baurley, M., Dagon M., and Yarian, S. eds. 2009. Eastside Story. Portrait of a Neighborhood on the Suburban Frontier. Indianapolis: Department of Anthropology IUPUI, Neighborhood Alliance Press.

Hyatt, Susan B., 2001. From Citizen to Volunteer. Neoliberal Governance and the Erasure of Poverty. In Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky, eds. The New Poverty Studies. The Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States. New York: New York University Press.

Loney, Martin 1983. Community Against Government. The British Community Development Project 1968-78. London: Heinemann

15 June 2015

5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies at The University of Edinburgh attracts Global Academics including BU’s Professor of Sociology, Ann Brooks.

Women's Academic Network Edwin van Teijlingen

By Professor Ann Brooks, Professor of Sociology

The 5^th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies hosted by The University of Edinburgh was set against the stunning backdrop of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags at The University of Edinburgh’s John McIntyre’s Conference Centre.

The conference attracted 250 international academics from a wide range of disciplines including sociology, geography, literature, cultural studies, art, archeology, anthropology, urban studies, gender studies, tourism and many more. Delegates came from US, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Brazil among others. The conference chair was Professor Liz Bondi from the University of Edinburgh and teh conference was supported by Elsevier publishers, who publish the conference journal Emotion, Space and Society and hosted a superb pre-conference welcome and reception.

The Conference streams reflected an international and interdisciplinary research profile combining theoretical and applied work as well as implications for policy debates at the local and national level. For example in one of the Conference Themes: Persisting Selves: the Practices and Politics of Keeping Going and Carry On (divided into I Selves; II Time and III Recovering) papers included: ‘How does “a day at a time” work? Patience, Persistence and Proaction in Everyday Sustained Alcoholic.’(Julia Mills, University of Manchester) and ‘Persistence, Insistence and Endurance in Pregnancy Loss Grief.’ (Abigail McNiven, University of Oxford).’ A Conference Theme: which showcased a wide range of doctoral, postdoc and Early Career Researchers’ work was Childhood Youth and Intergenerationality: Relational Geographies of Emotions /Affects, Childhood and Youth, papers included: ‘The Emotional Geographies of Children of Prisoners’(Helene Oldrup, The Danish National Centre for Social Research) and ‘Slovenia’s Izbrisani (‘Erased’) Youth, Transitional Spaces and Radical Ethical Acts’ (Stuart Aitken, San Diego State University). Other Conference Themes included Creative Spaces, Emotions in Fieldwork, Urban Life in Theory and Practice, Time and Space, Liminal Spaces, and Connecting across Space: Tourism.

I presented a paper in the Urban Life in Theory and Practice stream as one of three papers discussing the impact of the urban environment and landscape on emotional well-being. My paper looked at the impact of gentrification in cities in the US including San Francisco and New York City, where long term city dwellers and migrants are being forced out of their homes because of the gentrification of traditionally ethnic parts of the cities by corporate investors and wealthy foreigners. I also explore the growth of the Occupy Movement as a collective expression of anger at the increasing disparities of wealth in US cities. This work is part of the work undertaken for a forthcoming book on Emotions and Cities.

One of the high points of the conference was the presentation of one of three keynotes –Professor Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of Chicago. http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/berlant

Berlant is a foremost contributor to feminist and literary discourse in the US and it is a unique opportunity to have her appear at a UK conference. She is author of a number of outstanding books including: Cruel Optimism (2011), The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2009), Desire/Love (2013), Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (2001), Intimacy (2000), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997).

Berlant describes her work as follows:

My work has focused on politics, emotion and intimacy in the U.S. nineteenth and twentieth centuries – now the twenty-first in particular, in relation to citizenship, to informal and normative modes of social belonging, and to affective attachments and fantasies that take shape through ordinary practices. These scenes zone and disturb the relations between public and private, white and non-white, straight and non-straight, and /or citizen and foreigner –along with providing settings for other, inventive kinds of social bond through which people imagine and practice world- making.

Presenting her keynote address: ‘On being in Life without Wanting the World: Living in Ellipsis’, Berlant captured the imagination of delegates with an erudite and amusing presentation of concepts around emotion and affect. Berlant sought to define a range of new ‘affective’ states for addressing sex, democracy and belonging. Drawing on one of the classical social theorist Georg Simmel’s work on Metropolis and Mental Life, Berlant explored the concept of ‘disassociation’. Her ability to communicate with a wide range of academics using complex and imaginative frameworks of analysis is inspiring both on pedagogical and substantive issues.

Other keynotes included Professor Jane Speedy, University of Bristol and Associate Professor Joyce Davidson, Queens University, Canada.

This was a conference which not only provided outstanding networking opportunities and an opportunity to develop research synergies with international and national delegates but in addition it was a great opportunity for me to reflect on a chapter I have just completed on Lauren Berlant’s work for my upcoming book Genealogies of Emotion, Intimacies and Desire (Routledge, New York 2015). More food for thought from this exceptional academic.

This was a conference to inspire the intellect, engage the senses, to enrich international networking and to light the way for doctoral, postdoctoral and Early Career Researchers on the best of interdisciplinary research and to showcase this on the world stage.

31 May 2015

New book for Centre for Social Work, Sociology & Social Policy visiting fellow Assoc Prof Dr Maria Luisa Gomez Jimenez

Knowledge Exchange, Women's Academic Network Jonathan Parker

It is our great pleasure to announce the publication of a comparative sociological, economic and social administrative study of social service provision in Spain and Costa Rica.

Visiting fellow's new book

Our visiting fellow from the Centre for Social Work, Sociology & Social Policy, Assoc Prof Dr Maria Luisa Gomez Jimenez from the Universidad de Malaga in Spain, is a legal sociologist who works with BU Profs Sara Ashencaen Crabtree and Jonathan Parker concerning housing provision and its meaning in times of austerity in Spain. She has also edited Active Ageing: Perspectives from Europe on a vaunted topic with Centre director Prof Jonathan Parker.

Jonathan Parker & Sara Ashencaen Crabtree

29 May 2015

GENERATION EXODUS! Rising from brutality’s crucible

Public engagement, Women's Academic Network Sara Ashencaen Crabtree

Professor Otto Hutter

As part of our on-going successful research seminar series at the Faculty of Heath & Social Sciences’ Centre for Social Work, Sociology & Social Policy, on the 27^th May we were very privileged to be able to invite back Professor Otto Hutter, former Regius Professor of Physiology at the University of Glasgow (1971 to 1990). This was a hugely successful public engagement event that attracted an audience of 52 people, drawn in part via the Dorset Race Equality Council, the Bournemouth Council of Christians and Jews and composed of a large number of the general public, our Visiting Fellow, the Rector of St Peter’s Church, Revd Dr Ian Terry, BU students and staff from the Midwifery, Social Work and Sociology teams and the Public Engagement team.

Educated in Vienna and England, Professor Hutter graduated with a BSc and PhD from University College, London and worked in the Department of Physiology there focusing on neuromuscular and synaptic transmissions and cardiac and skeletal muscle. He was a member of the staff of the National Institute for Medical Research from 1961 and joined the University of Glasgow ten years later, eventually becoming an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Life Sciences at the University.

His childhood experiences, however, are even more astonishing. Back in 1938 with the black clouds of war looming over Europe, Stanley Baldwin, the former Prime Minister, made an impassioned appeal on radio for public aid on the 8^th Dec 1938, in the wake of the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom that had just taken place a month earlier in Germany. Over £522,000 – a huge sum then – was raised in answer to the call from the concerned, ecumenical British public. This provided the impetus for the famous Kindertransport Movement that sought to rescue as many endangered Jewish children as possible from Nazi oppression.

Otto, as a 14-year-old boy, was one of the first children to reach sanctuary in Britain on the Kindertransport. He was eventually taken under the wing of his British sponsors and soon after excelled at the public school, Bishop’s Stortford College, as public schools also rose to the challenge of taking in refugee children on a scholarship basis. From there, he continued his rise to eminence.

However, since retirement to Bournemouth, Professor Hutter has been a tireless member of the local community, giving and attending talks at Holocaust Commemoration events. About 18 months ago Professor Hutter was kind enough to give a talk to our BU sociology students. It was so very good, so deeply moving – as many students told us later – that we wanted him to repeat it. However, Professor Hutter told us that he does not like repeating the same talk and so this time the seminar focused on the individual research he has painstakingly undertaken to uncover the stories of the 40 Viennese school mates from the academically elite Chajes Gymnasium in Vienna that he left behind upon his escape to Britain.

A quite incredible piece of social history was revealed emerging from the darkest period of modern European history; and yet among the tragic examples there were many more where the classmates had survived through combinations of ingenuity, luck, sheer perseverance and opportunism – not forgetting the key element for many tales of survival: the diligence and self-effacing devotion of the parents of these gifted children.

More of these youngsters than might reasonably be supposed went to on survive and prosper across the globe as far afield as Latin America, North America, the UK and, in particular, Israel. A high proportion went on to become academics, like Professor Hutter himself, along with others who became successful professionals and entrepreneurs. Jewish refugees, including some classmates, who escaped to Ecuador, were apparently later celebrated by the Ecuadorian Government as having brought vital technical innovation and European know-how to greatly benefit this formerly undeveloped, agrarian society.

Professor Hutter had the audience delighted by the account of an incredible escape of a particularly irresistibly charming classmate, who having escaped to Vichy France, had been rounded up for deportation and was rescued on the eve of his journey to death by the plucky daughter of a high powered Vichy politician.

However, equally those who did not survive need to be commemorated as the unforgotten victims of the Holocaust. We heard of one young girl who died of typhoid fever, having nursed fellow sufferers among the refugee ship to Cuba, where very sadly she succumbed to the disease upon docking at Havana. Professor Hutter told us about other classmates who had escaped to Belgium but were then captured and sent first to Theresienstadt concentration camp and then to their deaths in Auschwitz. One of the most moving accounts was that of young man and his sister who were killed in 1945, having managed to survive in hiding in Vienna for so long. The brother was captured in a bunker with nine other Jews as the SS were fleeing from the city ahead of the Allies, but still determined to kill as many of the dispersed Jewish community as could be found. Each captured individual was taken out one-by-one where those inside could hear the rattle and blast of the machine-guns and hand-grenades used for execution. Prof Hutter’s former classmate was the first to die.

The highly picaresque and deeply poignant were all covered in this splendid piece of research, which completely engaged the audience. However, these are also lessons from history that hold powerful resonance for today’s political arena, where European governments seem to gravitate towards entrenched right-wing positions, as can be seen by the election results in both the UK and Israel.

Each survivor from the Viennese Gymnasium enriched the countries immeasurably with their intelligence and their talent. These immigrants had no choice but to try to make a new life for themselves in their adopted countries and did so with extraordinary energy, zeal and optimism. This is the real story of why immigration remains the life-blood of progressive nations – and yet is so little heard of these fundamentally positive aspects in today’s ignorant and short-sighted political rhetoric that panders to xenophobia and isolationism. Today UK governments might well have been tempted not allow individuals like Otto Hutter into this country in the first place or equally tempted to deport them back again to their countries of origins. It makes one pause for a long moment to truly take in the full consequences of such disastrous and bigoted attitudes and associated actions.

Sara Ashencaen Crabtree and Jonathan Parker

26 May 2015

Religion as Resistance: Problematising and eulogising contemporary faith positions – Islam and Buddhism

Fusion Investment Fund Jonathan Parker

The crisis of the Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar through perilous sea routes reminds us of our visit to Myanmar, as part of our Fusion Fund study leave last year, where we discussed the newly formed assistance centre in Penang, Malaysia, set up for such people, with our Southeast Asian colleagues. The city of Yangon, formerly Rangoon, in Myanmar is graced by the golden pagodas of the national religion, Buddhism, and is also where Christian churches of past colonial times and new ‘mega-churches’, and mosques stand within easy reach and visibility of one another. Seemingly, then, based on this rich and historical bricolage of spiritual phenomena, Myanmar is a jewel of multi-faith tolerance. Underneath this thin and brittle surface, however, boils a crucible of ethnic, religious and nationalist violence.

At Schwedegon in Yangon

Our ingrained Westernised hegemonic partiality, in which we are presented with images of Buddhism as symbolising peace, compassion and contemplation, in contrast with Islam as the font of world terror, is seriously challenged in the Myanmar context. We experienced religion here as a form of resistance in respect of the revivalist religiosity of Baptist Christian groups amongst the Chin tribes during our short visit, which was also a time of curfew and riot, although not one generated by these groups who found an outlet for their dissatisfaction in their ‘born again’ philosophies and the construction of a sense of belonging through ‘otherness’. At that time the curfew was ordered in parts of the country because of the increasing discord and physical violence between nationalist Buddhist groups, including (bizarrely to some maybe) Buddhist monks, and the minority Islamic peoples, the Rohingya, who, although officially robbed of citizenship status and therefore stateless, also claim autochthonous status in Myanmar.

Indigeneity, itself, is a much-contested concept, more so when we consider theories of human evolution or when we excavate the historical migratory patterns employed by human groups. Indigeneity offers a powerful discourse that has been applied by all sides of the political spectrum: the oppressed and disenfranchised, and also those who seek, by means of violent ethno-nationalism, to protect their state borders, or to impose a particular ideology which is put forward as legitimisation owing to the prerogatives of precedence.

The Buddhist majority exert the forces of ethno-nationalism as a means of purifying modern Myanmar from this Islamic group, a use of state religion to justify oppression and to forge a single state religion. What we witnessed last year in Myanmar and what is happening to the Rohingya currently represents an uglier face of our working analytical concept of ‘religion as resistance’, creating the overt challenge of supremacist politics.

We have seen some of the worst of humanity in dealing with the crisis of the Rohingya fleeing from Myanmar. With Thailand policing its physical borders more rigorously, the people have turned to people smugglers, traffickers and to the seas, in particular the dangerous waters of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. We have witnessed Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia’s attempt to remove the ‘problem’ from their national boundaries but also then adopting a more humanitarian response under international pressure, and we have witnessed the shock of individuals when the full horror of trafficking and death is revealed. Yet we have not seen the international community mobilise in support of the Rohingya people perhaps for some immediate reasons. Firstly, the Rohingya are Muslim, and a stereotype of contemporary terrorism as located in faith ideologies prevails. These prejudices may be strengthened further by Western applaud of the economic, rather than political, raising, of the formerly impenetrable bamboo curtain of Myanmar. Finally, Western eyes may view the state religion in Myanmar through lenses of prior assumption of Buddhism as fundamentally and prima facie incompatible with aggressive oppression of others.

The plight of the Rohingya echoes, to varying degrees, that of many other displaced or disenfranchised indigenous peoples: dislocation, diminishment of economic, political and religious rights, and the precariousness of marginal existence. To exploit terms that the sociologist, Max Weber, coined, the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) offers the rational-legal authority to battle their cause. However, there is also a need to call upon traditional authority to reinforce beleaguered identities and it is here that we see the contemporary development of religious resistance. This has its positive aspects in creating a sense of belonging, of purpose, of transcendence but it may also have a downside in creating active resistance not to oppression but to the rejected Other – and together forms another important plank in our exploration and theorisation. Our continuing work with the experiences and voices of indigenous peoples throughout Southeast Asia, MENA and now Central America will further develop this deeply intriguing concept of religion as resistance.

Jonathan Parker & Sara Ashencaen Crabtree

20 May 2015

Working creatively to explore abuse in young people’s relationships – the CATCAM project

Fusion, Fusion Investment Fund, student research swincewicz

There is increasing awareness of the risks that young people face in terms of abusive personal relationships and intimate partner violence (IPV), and the Home Office has recently widened the definition the government uses to include abuse against those aged 16-17 as well as adults

Intimate partner violence concerns physical violence directed against a partner and often includes sexual violence and psychological abuse (Jewkes, 2002). This is a global issue and increasing concern is now being expressed about IPV in teenage and young people’s relationships (Keenan-Miller et al. 2007). US research suggests that 66 % of college-aged dating students experience at least one incident of IVP (Smith et al. 2003).

The project which has received Fusion Funding from BU aims to:

Develop creative methodologies/animation to explore the nature of abuse in young people’s relationships;
Explore how such methods might be used in domestic abuse prevention education

To date we have had two creative workshops which have used a range of materials and motion capture to produce a short piece of animation visualising mood and emotion. Those involved have enjoyed trying newapproaches to express and visualise meaning associated with relationships and abuse. It is great to be a co-learner in this process and to be taken out of my comfort zone as we are encouraged to use ‘visualisation’ techniques in a co-produced piece of work. Here are some examples of some of our visualisation work to date.

For more information on the CATCAM project please contact:

Dr. Lee-Ann Fenge lfenge@bournemouth.ac.uk

14 May 2015

Fusion Fund – Study Leave – Manuscript submitted

Fusion, Fusion Investment Fund, Post-award, Publishing Christopher Pullen

A little while back (August 2014-Jan 2015) I had Fusion Investment study leave to work on my manuscript ‘Straight Girls and Queer Guys: the Hetero Media Gaze in Film and Television’. Just wanted to follow up from this, to advise that the manuscript has now been submitted to Edinburgh University Press, and its on its way for production. I expect it will be a few months before its eventually published, but its such a relief to actually finish it. The research process was most engaging, and as with all concepts it changes and modifies, as a ‘work in progress’.

Here is a taster of the agreed back cover:

“Exploring the archetypal representation of the straight girl with the queer guy in film and television culture from 1948 to the present day, Straight Girls and Queer Guys considers the process of the ‘hetero media gaze’ and the way it contextualizes sexual diversity and gender identity. Offering both an historical foundation and a rigorous conceptual framework, Christopher Pullen draws on a range of case studies, including the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, the performances of Kenneth Williams, televisions shows such as Glee, Sex and the City and Will and Grace, the work of Derek Jarman, and the role of the gay best friend in Hollywood film. Critiquing the representation of the straight girl and the queer guy for its relation to both power and otherness, this is a provocative study that frames a theoretical model which can be applied across diverse media forms.”

Now I am on to my next book project, the educational biography of Pedro Zamora.

10 May 2015

Paper by BU academics used as example in Dutch university newsletter

Publishing, Research Integritiy Edwin van Teijlingen

The March 2015 newsletter of the Dutch University of Groningen’s School for Behavioural & Cognitive Neurosciences dedicated two pages to the question: ‘How to pick the right journal?’ The author of the English-language newsletter contribution, Liwen Zhang, offer its readers a brief introduction on journal selection for a scientific manuscript. The newsletter piece is based on two papers which both share their submission stories and suggestions of journal selection. We were pleased to see that one of these two papers is by two Bournemouth University professors: Hundley and van Teijlingen. Their paper which gives advice on one specific aspect of academic publishing is called ‘Getting your paper to the right journal: a case study of an academic paper’ [1]. It was published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing in 2002.

Reference:

vanTeijlingen, E., Hundley, V. (2002) Getting your paper to the right journal: a case study of an academic paper, Journal of Advanced Nursing 37(6): 506-511.

9 May 2015

Nepal earthquake follow-up

Public engagement, Research Integritiy Edwin van Teijlingen

Shortly after the earthquake in Nepal I posted on the BU Research blog as we have a long-standing presence in Nepal. We have been working there for nearly ten years, conducting research largely around community-based interventions. Several Bournemouth University colleagues (and many based elsewhere) have indicated that they have donated (or will do so) to our intervention partner, the UK-based Buddhist charity Green Tara Trust. Thank you everyone for this generous support. It has brought tents and food to rural communities in an area where we have been working for eight years. The support also has had an incredible effect on our Nepalese team, raising their spirit and encouraging them in their relief efforts.

Donations to Green Tara Trust from individuals have just reached £35,000. As there is always the question how best to support victims in such disasters, I would like to show how supporting a small existing local organisations has direct benefits. Green Tara staff in Nepal supplied medicines, blankets and basic food supplies such as rice, lentils and cooking oil for a period of one month to 130 of the poorest families in in the hills in and around Pharping within days after the earthquake when the after-shocks were still going on. Please, note the guys carrying huge sacks of rice up the mountain at the left hand side of the lorry bringing the Green Tara relief. Loads of places in the affected rural areas can only be reached by foot making the relief effort more difficult.

As we have been working with women’s groups in the community for years Green Tara staff know who the poorest people and where to find them. In addition, they provided tents to 200 families who have lost their homes. One very local solution (rather than flying in tents from the UK) was purchasing the tents elsewhere in Nepal. As we have a second field site in a part that is hardly affected by the earthquake near the Indian border, staff there bought hundreds of tents covers, put them on a bus to Kathmandu where local Green Tara staff picked them up and took them rural areas in the hills near Pharping.

Government-controlled health posts in rural Nepal often run out of medical supplies even before the earthquake. Therefore, Green Tara Nepal donated several boxes of essential medicines to two health posts in the area in case of outbreaks of infections, such as diarrhea or respiratory tract infections. Most of the time I would complain about the fact that you can buy just about any kind of medicine under sun over the counter in pharmacies shops in Nepal, but on this occasion is was very helpful.

Thank you again for keeping those affected by the earthquake in your thoughts. You can donate to Green Tara!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

6 May 2015

Research on Memory and Reconciliation after War

Edwin van Teijlingen

Is memory of war and violence in divided societies an obstacle to, or a pre-requisite for, peace-making? What are the commonalities and differences in the ways in which such memory is socially constructed and culturally expressed? What are its psycho-social functions and political transformations? What messages are communicated, and how?

Dr. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, social anthropologist in the department of Sociology and Social Work (HSS), recently presented her research findings on these questions, based on fieldwork in Kosovo, at an international conference on Narrative, Power and Commemoration in Conflicted Societies in Belfast. Hosted by the Transitional Justice Institute of Ulster University (which, incidentally, had the highest score for impact in the Law UoA in the last REF exercise), this conference assembled and compared international case studies with the case immediately at our doorsteps, Northern Ireland.
For the full conference programme, click here! Her presentation, titled Statues and statutes – nationalist versus multi-ethnic enshrinements in Kosovo after the 1999 war – juxtaposed local identifications with ideas of ethno-national, militant resistance as embodied in the material culture of commemorative sites in contemporary Kosovo (the ‘statues’) to the constitutionally enshrined paradigm of multi-ethnicity (the ‘statutes’) integral to the internationally-driven, peace- and state-building process in Kosovo after the war. However, rather than constructing a simple dichotomy of parallel discourses, her presentation traced the question of ambiguities and potentials within either type of discursive ‘enshrinement’, with a particular emphasis on stories bridging the ethnic divides and individualising responsibility in the site literature emanating from the nationalist shrines and their statues.
Stephanie will ALSO present her on-going BU research collaborations, which expand on the topic of memories and commemoration, at BU’s Interdisciplinary Week (Tuesday, 12 May, 4:30 pm KG01). Together with Avital Biran (an expert in ‘dark’ tourism); Melanie Klinkner (transitional justice); and Feng Tian (‘serious gaming’ technology) she will explore ways in which memorials may be helpful in Transforming conflict after war: memory, heritage and digital media.
Places can be booked at https://research.bournemouth.ac.uk/interdisciplinary-research-week-2015/tuesday-12-may/.

Congratulations on both accounts,

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Category / Sociology & Social Policy

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