Category / ESRC

SCRAMBLE EVENT : Come along to the ESRC Explore people’s relationships with digital technologies session

Funding opportunities

The ESRC have pre-announced the following call: Explore people’s relationships with digital technologies, discussed at the funding development briefing this week.

Who should attend?

All are welcome with an interest in exploring relations with digital technologies. This call should be social science-led, with at least 50% of the programme falling within ESRC’s remit. But to enable approaches to the challenge of understanding our relationships with technology, it should also look widely across disciplines, drawing on expertise from fields such as:

  • the humanities
  • computer science
  • software engineering
  • mathematical sciences.

RDS will be running a brainstorming session on the 10th November 13:00 -14:30. It will be an opportunity to identify potential collaborators/ themes for this network funding call. The session will be hosted on Zoom here

ACTION REQUIRED: Ahead of the event, we invite you to discuss your interests, potential collaborators, project ideas on Padlet. As ideas get added we can start to identify potential themes prior to the session. You can access the Padlet here.

Agenda:

13:00- 13:30      Information on the call and ESRC delivery plan overview.

13:30 – 14:15    Discussion around emerging themes from Padlet and potential collaborations.

14:15 – 14:30    Discussion about next steps.

If you have any queries or are unsure as to whether you ought to come along, please email your faculty facilitator in the first instance or Alexandra Pekalski apekalski@bournemouth.ac.uk .

Changes to ESRC New Investigator Grant scheme

Funding opportunities

ESRC are pleased to confirm that from 1 January 2020 they will be revising the eligibility criteria for this scheme to remove the four-year time bound criterion. This change is in recognition of the increasing diversity of career paths and trajectories and ESRC’s ambition to be as inclusive and supportive of these as possible.

New Investigator grants will remain a funding opportunity aimed at supporting early career researchers who have yet to make the transition to be an independent researcher, but from January the onus will be on applicants to articulate why they consider themselves to be in that career stage. This could reflect differences across disciplines or fields of research; periods of employment in non-research roles; where applicants are looking to re-skill in new research area; or, where relevant, personal circumstances such as career breaks. Peer reviewers will be directed to consider that justification when they assess applications.

This justification will need to be included in an attachment to proposals submitted from 1 January onwards. If you are in the process of developing an ESRC New Investigator Grant then please speak with your RDS Funding Development Officer.  The updated call guidance will be published in December at the following website: https://esrc.ukri.org/funding/funding-opportunities/new-investigator-grants/

New BU cross-faculty publication

international, NHS, Publishing, writing

This week Evidence-Based Midwifery published the latest article from the BU team working on the portrayal of midwifery and maternity in the media.  This qualitative paper ‘Changing the narrative around childbirth: whose responsibility is it?’ is co-authored by a multidisciplinary team including the disciplines of Midwifery, Sociology and Media.[1]  The lead author is Prof. Vanora Hundley in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH), one of longest established centres at BU, her co-authors are Dr. Ann Luce in the Faculty of Media & Communication, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen director of CMMPH and Sophie Edlund, who was based at BU at the time of the research but who is now at Malmö University in Sweden.

The paper addresses societal’s interest in all aspects of childbirth, which is reflected in both social and traditional media. Stories often focus on dramatic, risky and mostly unrealistic events; misrepresenting childbirth and maternity care professionals. The authors raised the question: “Whose responsibility is it to ensure accurate representations of childbirth?”   Using semi-structured in-depth interviews with ten midwives working in the UK some working in the NHS, some in Higher Education or independent practice, the authors distilled four separate but inter-related themes:

(1) not my responsibility;

(2) fear of retribution;

(3) power balance; and

(4) social media.

The themes sat within two wider societal issues that reflect the current challenges for midwifery, these were (a) the ongoing battle between the social and the medical models of childbirth and (b) the impact of gender.  Finding that midwives fear the media resonates with experiences from a number of countries and professional groups. There is a need to change media discourse in both fictional and factual representations of childbirth and midwives have a critical role to play in this, but to do this they need to equip themselves with the skills necessary to engage with the media. Guidelines on responsible media reporting could ensure that media producers portray pregnancy, midwifery and maternity care as naturally as possible.

This paper is paper of a growing body of interdisciplinary research at BU across faculties, which had already resulted in six earlier publications. [2-7]  In addition last month Dr Chapleo from the Faculty of Management submitted a grant application to the ESRC under the title ‘Rebranding childbirth: understanding the role of marketing in influencing uptake of health services’, a joint application with CMMPH staff (Profs. Hundley & van Teijlingen) and the Media School (Dr. Luce).

 

References:

  1. Hundley, V., Luce, A., van Teijlingen, E., Edlund, S. (2019) Changing the narrative around childbirth: whose responsibility is it? Evidence-based Midwifery 17(2): 47-52.
  2. Luce, A., Cash, M., Hundley, V., Cheyne, H., van Teijlingen, E., Angell, C. (2016) “Is it realistic?” the portrayal of pregnancy and childbirth in the media BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth 16: 40 http://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-016-0827-x
  3. van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P., Luce, A., Hundley, V. (2016) Media, Health & Health Promotion in Nepal, Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences 2(1): 70-75. http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/JMMIHS/article/view/15799/12744
  4. Luce, A., Hundley, V., van Teijlingen, E. (Eds.) (2017) Midwifery, Childbirth and the Media, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  5. Hundley, V., Duff, E., Dewberry, J., Luce, A., van Teijlingen, E. (2014) Fear in childbirth: are the media responsible? MIDIRS Midwifery Digest 24(4): 444-447.
  6. Hundley, V., Luce, A., van Teijlingen, E. (2015) Do midwives need to be more media savvy? MIDIRS Midwifery Digest 25(1):5-10.
  7. van Teijlingen, E., De Vries, R., Luce, A., Hundley, V. (2017) Meer bemoeien met media (In Dutch: more engagement with media). Tijdschrift voor Verloskundigen (in Dutch: Journal for Midwives), 41 (6):28-29.

Canada-UK Artificial Intelligence Initiative: building competitive and resilient economies and societies through responsible AI

Funding opportunities, international

The three Canadian federal research funding agencies and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have announced an interdisciplinary joint call aimed at building competitive, resilient and healthy economies and societies through responsible AI. The call is now open and the deadline for applications is 12 September 2019.

This call is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Medical Research Council (MRC), in collaboration with three Canadian federal research funding agencies – the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Academics interested in applying or finding more details related to this call may refer to ESRC web page or RDS.

NEW: ESRC Delivery Plan 2019

Today sees the launch of Economic and Social Research Council’s delivery plan for 2019.

All the key opportunities and challenges for the UK have people and behaviour at their core. Raising productivity, realising the full potential of medical and technological advances, coping with an ageing population, addressing climate change and improving public services will all require a rich understanding of how individuals, firms, markets, communities and governments behave and interact.

ESRC supports social science that generates this rich understanding.