Category / Research themes

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

Awarded & submitted bids, 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

Research themes

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

Upcoming event for staff and students: Simon Phelps ‘Starting & Growing a Business’

The Centre for Entrepreneurship is delighted to host a presentation by Simon Phelps a BU graduate and founder of Fluvial Innovation Ltd. Simon founded Fluvial Innovations Ltd alongside Bournemouth University in 2006. Fluvial Innovations Ltd designed, developed and patented the modular flood barrier – Floodstop.

Floodstop was specifically designed to fill a gap within the market for a functional and rapidly deployable flood barrier and is used throughout the UK, US and parts of Europe. Awards for Floodstop include Winner of Climate Week – Best Climate Ready Initiative 2013 and Emergency Planning Society’s Most Innovative Product of the Year 2009. To find out more about Floodstop or Fluvial please visit the website: www.fluvial-innovations.co.uk

Join us to hear more about Simon’s journey from being a Bournemouth University Student to running Fluvial Innovations as a growing and sustainable business. You will get a chance to hear about the steps Simon took along the way and find out about his up and downs on the road to success.

This event is for Bournemouth University Staff and Students only.

To book please visit: bit.ly/1lwiaFV 

Tourism, Alcohol and Public Health – tensions and opportunities

Fusion

Philip Long and Andy Adams of the School of Tourism are collaborating with Ann Hemingway and Will Haydock of the School of Health and Social Care in a Fusion CCP project that aims to explore issues associated with alcohol consumption, public health and tourism. The project will examine the views of producers and distributors of alcohol products in Bournemouth, Dorset and the New Forest on visitor markets and their regulation. The research team will also explore public health, tourism, planning and local political perspectives on the relationships between policy and practice concerning alcohol and tourism (the visitor and ‘night-time’ economy) in the region.

This project will address research, policy and media discourses on public health concerns about excessive consumption of alcohol among visitors to coastal resorts such as Bournemouth. Although much of this focuses on public order issues relating to young drinkers, captured in the phrase ‘binge’ drinking, there is increasing anxiety surrounding older drinkers.  Nationally, 2012 saw the publication of The Government’s Alcohol Strategy, which noted the importance of ‘chronic diseases’ related to alcohol amongst those aged 25 and over, and promised a review of consumption guidelines that would include specific work on those aged over 65. 

Alongside this there is a research, policy and media focus on more positive connotations of alcohol, such as real ale, rural and urban ‘gastro pubs’, micro-breweries and festivals that are packaged and promoted as tourist attractions in areas such as the New Forest and Dorset. The importance of the real ale industry in the revitalisation of tradition and social, cultural and regional identities is increasingly acknowledged. In addition, given that social capital is understood to affect people’s long-term health, it may be that the social networks involved in real ale appreciation and tourism actually help to foster psychological health and wellbeing.

The key objective of the project is to establish how researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and the wider community can contribute to reconciling these apparently conflicting perspectives.

The research team is developing a mixed-method approach focusing on the consumption, production and distribution and, regulation dimensions of the relationships between alcohol, public health and tourism. We are now working to identify and secure participants in the research and would welcome comments and suggestions from colleagues across the University.

Towards Platform Agnostic Software Development for Games

PG research

We would like to invite you to the next research seminar of the Creative Technology Research Centre that will be delivered by Karsten Pedersen.

 

Title: Towards Platform Agnostic Software Development for Games

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM                

Date: Wednesday 5th March 2014

Room: P302 (Poole House, Talbot Campus)

 

Abstract: With the rapid introduction and deprecation of mobile platforms it is becoming increasingly necessary to develop games in a portable manner so that as much work as possible is transferable between them. This talk looks towards changes which can be made to the development pipeline that can help create a game in a more platform agnostic manner, whilst still being able to utilize any unique features native to a device that the players will want to take advantage of. An explanation is provided of what DeepThought, the main tool facilitating all this, is and how it can be used to develop games in a modular and portable manner. The handling and inlining of different languages with a tool called Iffe will also be covered. Together, these two technologies can greatly simplify the development process by not just simply providing a cross platform game engine for existing platforms but also by providing a generic solution that can be adapted to any future technology.

 

We hope to see you there.

Fusion – Study leave to research 2 books – AIDS Education and Media Gaze

Fusion

I am delighted to report that I have been sucessful in my Fusion Investment Fund bid for study leave to research two academic books, between August this year and the end of January 2015.

These are books are titled ‘Pedro Zamora: A Media Icon for AIDS Education, under contract with Cambria Press, and ‘Straight Girls and Queer Guys: The Heteromedia Gaze upon the Queer Male’, under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

This will include not only research time where I can involve myself looking at archives, examining media texts and holding interviews, but also this will involve visiting other academic institutions, charitable health educational organisations, and practice production houses.

These projects are very exciting, as to some degree they represent a culmination of ideas that I have been working on for many years.

With the Pedro Zamora AIDS education book, I first heard of Pedro Zamora and his status as a leading youth educator on AIDS way back in the early 2000s. Appearing the The Real World TV series, and reaching a worldwide audience, his impact  was phenomenal, and his legacy as an influence on AIDS educators is very important. Pedro’s death in 1994, just after The Real World aired, seemed such a loss.  Yet his legacy continues, speaking to Latino and gay youth audiences.  Whilst I have examined Pedro’s appearances in media texts, in a few of my publications, I have not yet closely examined his impact as an AIDS educator, relative to practice.  I have set up a range of interviews with those who not only knew Pedro, but also have been inspired by his impact, and potentially exhibit this in their educational practice

With the ‘Straight Girls and Queer Guys’ book, I will be considering the rise of the relationship between ‘straight girls’ and ‘gay guys’ in the media.  This seems like an entirely different prospect (to the Pedro Zamora book), but in many ways its another aspect, of media identification potential. This relationship dates back to the early part of the 20th century, considering the union or camaraderie exhibited between gay men and prostitutes in London, and the use of the secret language of ‘Polari”, a coded language where secret discourse could be exchanged, without the general population getting in on the know.  Later gay men’s identification with female movie stars such as Judy Garland, revealed a similar type of coupling – where gay men identified with the sense of tribulation and trial as being outside.  Even more later shows like Will and Grace seem to offer this type of union, and on the internet, there is a proliferation of this coupling.

Well enough for now, there’s lots to think about.  I am just so pleased that I can get to do these engaging projects.  I am now in the process of careful time planning, as I tell my students, time management is everything.

Dr Chris Pullen – Senior Lecturer in Media Theory – The Media School.

 

 

 

 

Networking opportunity with expert in Behaviour Change

PG research

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.

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

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

Publishing, Research assessment

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

BU Social Science Input at Tasik Chini, Malaysia

Fusion, 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

Fusion, REF Subjects

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.