Category / Fusion themes

Cutting-edge research has assessed the carbon footprint of BU during the COVID-19 lockdown

As we have now all become accustomed to working and studying from home, research has started looking at various implications of remote work/study. These implications include the impact on our subjective being, but also on the environment. There are speculations that work/study from home may reduce our carbon footprint, for example. This is because commute and/or business travel are no longer required. These two activities have long been recognised as the main drivers of carbon emissions in Universities, alongside on-site energy use and procurement.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to compare the carbon intensity of working/studying at home and on campus. That is why Dr Viachaslau Filimonau from the Business School; Dave Archer, Laura Bellamy, Neil Smith, and Richard Wintrip from the Sustainability Team have undertaken a study of the carbon footprint of Bournemouth University during the COVID-19 lockdown. This is the first investigation of its kind and only the third attempt to assess the carbon emissions of UK institutions of higher education.

The study has found that working/studying from home may be less beneficial from the carbon perspective than originally thought. The carbon emissions produced by staff, but particularly students, at home are almost equal to the carbon footprint of commute. The complete closure of University campuses does not result in low carbon emissions.

This has important implications for the future of (higher) education in the UK and beyond. For instance, the study’s findings indicate that the model of blended teaching and learning may have low carbon efficiency and should, therefore, be applied by Universities with caution. This is because institutions of higher education should promote sustainability which involves ‘leading by example’ when it comes to reducing the carbon footprint.

The study has been peer-reviewed and published in Science of the Total Environment, a leading international journal in the field of sustainability and environmental management (impact factor 6.6). The full paper can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720374957. The team aims to advance this project by assessing the carbon footprint of Bournemouth University over the winter period. This is when heating will be put on, thus creating extra carbon emissions on campus but, particularly, at home given that we will continue working/studying remotely in semester two.

Policy Influence Opportunity – Forestry, land management & environmental

Call for potential oral witnesses for EFRA Committee tree planting inquiry

  • The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee secretariat is looking for potential oral witnesses for the Committee’s inquiry into Tree Planting and Woodlands. please see the background to the inquiry and Call for Evidence for further information.
  • The Committee would be particularly interested to hear from researchers with expertise in forestry relating to some of the following issues: woodland management, land management, agroforestry, climate change mitigation and adaptation, biosecurity, biodiversity, economics and/or policy analysis of UK Government and Devolved Administrations’ policies and funding on forestry and tree planting.
  • Researchers who are interested must nominate themselves by 15 December. Please inform your BU Impact Officer and the BU policy team (policy@bournemouth.ac.uk) if you nominate yourself.
  • The Committee is committed to improving the diversity of the witnesses it hears evidence from because this provides a broader evidence base for its inquiries, so would also particularly want to hear from women researchers and researchers from minority ethnic communities.
  • The secretariat currently expects the evidence session to take place in early February.
  • Please complete your nominations on this form.

BU Book up for National Award

Professor Tim Darvill, Kerry Barrass, Yvette Staelens from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology (BU) together with Dr Vanessa Heaslip from the Department of Nursing  Science (BU) worked with Laura Drysdale of the Restoration Trust to edit a book exploring how historic landscapes could support mental health well-being.

 

Our book titled ‘Historic Landscapes and Mental Health Well-being’ has been nominated as a contender in the 2021 Current Archaeology Book of the Year competition. This is fantastic news and really shows the benefits of cross disciplinary research and working.

Voting is open now at www.archaeology.co.uk/vote so do please cast your votes for the book, and encourage anyone else you can think of to do the same. Please also feel free to share this excellent news in your social media sites as it would be really excellent to win this award. The results will be announced at the Archaeology in Britain conference in February.

Please keep your fingers crossed for us and thank you for your votes

Virtual Coffee with IMSET

Thank you to those who attended the IMSET launch last week. We hope that you now have a better idea of who we are and what we are aiming to do.

As a follow-up, we will be holding a ‘virtual coffee with IMSET’ on Monday 30th November between 3.00pm and 4.00pm to enable more informal chat and discussion. We do hope you can make it.

Please contact SIA@bournemouth.ac.uk if you’d the meeting details.

BU Professor publishes sixth edition of bestselling book ‘Social Work Practice’!

I am pleased to say that the sixth edition of my book Social Work Practice has now been published. It is with grateful thanks to all former students and people who have received social work services that this has been possible.

I’ve updated this edition looking to the future and developing a more green and relation-based approach to social work that challenges the neoliberal narrative that has infected social work in the UK (England in particular) for so long. Developing the thinking and skills of an ethnographer are also important to becoming a questioning, critical and reflexive social worker who takes nothing for granted. Becoming an iconoclast, in this way, is also part of this book’s message.

 

‘Defying categorisation’

Donald Nordberg

During the other half of his time in semi-retirement, Donald Nordberg, Associate Professor in the Business School, is revisiting themes from his early university education in English and comparative literature. A first product has emerged: New Writing, a Routledge/Taylor & Francis journal, has accepted his paper “Category choice in creative writing“. Fiction is a uniquely flexible form of writing, he writes, but the publishing world wants to drop works of fiction into buckets, which often come in pairs. The paper examines three such dichotomies. Writing coaches want to know: Is the work plot-driven or character-driven? Publishers, booksellers and popular critics ask: Is it genre or literary? Academic analysis wonders: Is it philosophical or psychological?

     Using perspectives on heuristics and biases drawn from psychology and decision analysis, Nordberg examines similarities between these category pairs and shows how the distinctions blur, both in literary criticism and through empirical studies of reader responses. He suggests that by paying attention to the anchor-points in heuristics, writers can bend publishing imperatives and help works of fiction retain the ability to defy categorisation.

Research Assistant Post

A short-term position is required to help support a British Academy funded project. This is a BU contracted, part-time position, starting in early January 2021. It is essential that you have a very good working knowledge of NVivo.

Key duties include: the collection and analysis of corporate annual report; generating ‘word frequency’ analysis of reports using NVivo 12; presenting analysis using NVivo and Excel. Additional analysis may include gathering financial indicators from the Thomson Reuters database.

If you would like to find out more, please contact Dr John Oliver (FMC) at joliver@bournemouth.ac.uk

Institute for Modelling Socio-Environmental Transitions – Launch on Wednesday

You are invited to attend the online launch event on Wednesday 11thNovember from 14:00 – 15:00. 

The new Institute for Modelling Socio-Environmental Transitions (IMSET) is focused on addressing the most significant global challenge facing humanity today:

 

How can we manage and respond to environmental change in order to prevent societal collapse? 

IMSET is looking at how past societies were affected by environmental change (e.g. climate change, habitat & ecosystem destruction, resource depletion, soil erosion, pollution, wildlife extinction, changing sea-levels), how they responded to these and, therefore, what are the most sustainable options available to present-day societies under similar pressures.

IMSET is bringing together staff and students from across BU to create exciting and innovative research and impact. The institute is led by Dr Emma JenkinsDr Fiona Coward and Professor Adrian Newton. They are accelerating collaboration with colleagues with complementary interests such as disaster response, advanced modelling, sustainable heritage economy options and the effects of environmental change on human health and wellbeing.

To learn more about this pioneering institute and find ways to get involved, please attend the online launch event on Wednesday 11th November from 14:00 – 15:00. Please book via Eventbrite or email sia@bournemouth.ac.uk for the diary invitation with online link to be sent to you.

For more information about IMSET, or for further details on how to get involved, please contact sia@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Making your research count: how research impact is measured and what it means for you.

 

The library is offering a workshop on 16th November on Enhancing your Research Impact: understanding and navigating bibliometrics. 

This will provide an opportunity to understand both what bibliometrics are, and how research impact is measured. We will also discuss how to look after your researcher profile and the various ways impact is measured across different disciplines, as well as exploring Altmetrics and how your research can be viewed through social media posts and downloads.  

You can sign up for this workshop on the staff intranet, and you can explore the information in the guide below to find out more. 

Image sourced from:

Altmetric 2015. Altmetric logo with black text [png]. London: Altmetric. Available from: https://www.altmetric.com/about-us/logos [accessed 29th October 2020].

 

 

Interested in Marketing Attribution? and big data analytics? 

Interested in Marketing Attribution? and big data analytics?
 
New Paper published: Buhalis, D., Volchek, K., 2020,
International Journal of Information Management [IF= 8.2 Citescore=14.1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102253
 
Abstract: The integration of technology in business strategy increases the complexity of marketing communications and urges the need for advanced marketing performance analytics. Rapid advancements in marketing attribution methods created gaps in the systematic description of the methods and explanation of their capabilities. This paper contrasts theoretically elaborated facilitators and the capabilities of data-driven analytics against the empirically identified classes of marketing attribution. It proposes a novel taxonomy, which serves as a tool for systematic naming and describing marketing attribution methods. The findings allow to reflect on the contemporary attribution methods’ capabilities to account for the specifics of the customer journey, thereby, creating currently lacking theoretical backbone for advancing the accuracy of value attribution. Use Email Finder service from ZeroBounce to automate the list and find professional email addresses for potential consumers.