Monday

Gender Pay Gap

Information from the Office for National Statistics has revealed that the gender pay gap in higher education narrowed significantly over the past year. Gender pay gap in higher education shrinks (THE).

Tuesday

Graduate Recruitment

Early data collection by the Association of Graduate Recruiters suggests that last year about 8 per cent of job offers by graduates were accepted but turned down at a later date. Graduates are being advised not to rush into applying for lots of graduate jobs as they often turn down offers if they are given another offer later down the line, this can lead to employers not having enough time to fill the vacancy. University students told not to panic over job pitches (Financial Times).

Research and Teaching

The Green Paper is argued to create a possible disconnect between research and teaching with the introduction of a new TEF. Reform could force universities to choose between teaching and research (The Guardian).

Wednesday

Spending Review

George Osborne’s Spending Review revealed the following implications for higher education:

• The BIS budget will be cut by 17%.
• A reform of funding for health students by replacing grants with student loans and abolishing the cap on the number of student places for nursing, midwifery and allied health subjects
• The Nurse Review recommendations will be implemented. Therefore subject to legislation, the government will introduce a new body – Research UK – which will work across the seven Research Councils.
• The science budget will be protected in real terms including a new £1.5 billion Global Challenges fund to ensure UK science takes the lead in addressing the problems faced by developing countries whilst developing our ability to deliver cutting-edge research.
• Part-time students will be able to receive maintenance loans from 2018-19.
• Tuition fee loans will be available for all higher skills students on apprenticeships.
• Loans will be extended for postgraduate students for everyone under the age of 60 from 2016-17.
• For all STEM subjects, tuition loans will be extended to students wishing to do a second degree from 2017-18.
• The government will take forward a review of the Research Excellence Framework in order to examine how to simplify and strengthen funding on the basis of excellence, and will set out further details shortly.
• The government will reduce the teaching grant by £120 million in cash terms by 2019-20, but will allow funding for high cost subjects to be protected in real terms.
• Current students and graduates who took out loans after 2012 will be asked to pay more in repayments, via a freeze in the £21,000 repayment threshold until April 2021.
• Thursday

Martin Lewis

Martin Lewis, founder of the Money Saving Expert website has criticised George Osborne’s plans to freeze the student loan repayment threshold at £21,000, the government had originally pledged to uprate the threshold in line with earnings. It will mean students have to pay back more of their student loan repayments. Martin Lewis: George Osborne ‘doesn’t have balls’ to tell ‘millions’ they must pay more on student loans (THE).

HEPI

Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute reveals that although universities did not suffer as much as expected in the Spending Review, poorest students may well struggle. Universities got off lightly, but will poorest students pay the price? (Guardian).

Friday

Freedom of Speech

Peers have called for Universities UK and the National Union of Students to “live up to their responsibilities” and protect freedom of speech in universities. Lords call on universities to do more to protect freedom of speech. (Research Professional). 

Metrics

An academic has argued that metrics are ultimately not about the individual student, or teacher.  Rather, they are about making educators accountable which could mean that academics will lose sight of what they are supposed to focus on. Our obsession with metrics turns academics into data drones (Guardian).

You may recall from Dr Sonal Minocha’s email introducing Global BU to all staff in October that the first ASEAN Hub of Practice was supported through the last round of the Fusion Investment Fund. We are now looking to set up two more Hubs in India and China and welcome applications in support of this.

The deadline for applications is 12pm on Monday 18^th January 2016. For all the updated strand policy documents, application form and more information please visit the FIF website, the Global BU pages on the intranet, and see the Global Engagement Plan.

The Fusion Investment Fund is managed by Corrina Lailla Osborne and the Co-ordinators are Sue Townrow and Sarah Oliffe.

If you would like to discuss your ideas please contact globalbu@bournemouth.ac.uk. For enquiries about the application process please contact the Fusion Fund.

The second BU Research Staff Association (RSA) coffee morning took place today in the EBC café. This was a fantastic opportunity for research staff across BU to meet to discuss their work and share ideas for future collaborations. Members of RKEO were also on hand to provide research related advice and support. We will continue to hold the BU RSA coffee mornings in 2016 on the last Wednesday of each month, in the EBC café between 10-11am.

To enable research staff to showcase their work internally and externally, the BU RSA also hopes to participate in a number of BU events in 2016. If any one has any ides or would like to help organise these events then please do get in contact with us.

See you on 27th January at the first coffee morning of 2016!

Kind regards, Michelle and Marcellus
Michelle Heward and Marcellus Mbah (BU RSA)

THE BOX SET MINDSET: THE FORENSICS OF POPULAR CULTURE

A day conference organised by

The International Association of Forensic Psychotherapy

and 

Media and Inner World research network

in association with

Bournemouth University and the University of Roehampton

28 November 2015, 9.30am – 6pm

The Wesley Centre, London, 81-103 Euston Street, London NW1 2EZ

Representations of crime and criminal behaviour have long been central to the history of popular culture and now seem to dominate the landscape of the popular cultural imagination. From Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books through to Hollywood films such as The Silence of the Lambs and television shows such as Law and Order, and The Bridge, the forensic dilemmas underpinning dramatic fiction have regularly fascinated audiences. In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in long-form television series that grapple with forensic dilemmas involving gangster and mafia groups, murderers, drug barons and corrupt political figures and organisations. Our fascination with these shows has been intensified by technological shifts that allow us to ‘binge-watch’ box sets so that aspects of the experience of addiction also arise in us as avid viewers and fans.

This one-day symposium brings together members of IAFP and the Media and the Inner World research network to explore the psycho-cultural appeal of well-known television dramas, in which the forensic themes of murder, violence, and revenge play a key narrative role. Focusing on highly successful television series such as Forbrydelsen/The Killing, Breaking Bad and House of Cards, this event will apply the expertise of eminent forensic psychotherapists and senior academic researchers to discuss why and how audiences relate to such programmes and their dark, compelling themes and characters. The production of such drama is now big business thanks to the box-set mindset it invokes, and it is significant that forensic ideas often lie at the heart of the storylines.

What fantasies are at play when engaging with the psychopathologies of crime on show in such programmes and what makes them such compulsive viewing? What do these forensic themes and their dominance in popular culture tell us about the psychodynamics of contemporary society and the fantasies that circulate within it? How can an understanding of these processes enhance the practice and theories of forensic psychotherapy and also create a dialogue with academic researchers in the field of media and cultural studies? We hope to address these questions throughout the course of the day through an exciting programme of panels and discussion groups.

THE BOX SET MINDSET

THE FORENSICS OF POPULAR CULTURE

Programme and Speakers

9.30 – 10.00                       Registration and coffee

 10.00 -11.00                    The Killing and its Forensic Psychopathologies

• Dr Sandra Grant, OBE (Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist)
• Dr Andrea Esser (Principle Lecturer in Media and Communication, University of Roehampton)

 11.00 – 11.15           Refreshments

 11.15 – 12.15                   The Forensic Dilemmas of Breaking Bad

• Dr Estela Welldon (Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust)
• Bradley Hillier (Specialist Registrar in Forensic Psychiatry in the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation)

 12.15 – 1.15                      The Forensic Pleasures of House of Cards

• Brett Kahr (Psychotherapist, Broadcaster and MiW Honorary Professor)
• Candida Yates (Professor of Culture and Communication, Bournemouth University)

1.15-2.15                            LUNCH

 2.15. -3.30                          Workshops on The Killing, Breaking Bad and House of Cards

 3.30-3.45                            Refreshments

 3.45-5.00                            Reflecting on the Day: A Group Experience

5.00-6.00                            Drinks Reception

Communicating Research:
FMC Research Seminar Series 2015-16
Time: Wednesday, 25 November, 3-4 pm
Venue: The Screening Room W240, Weymouth House, Talbot Campus.
A Politics and Media Research Centre event:

Katy Parry, University of Leeds

‘Discussing photographs of soldier transgressions in the news with British military, families and veterans’

This presentation draws on a press photo story of alleged soldier transgressions in Afghanistan to explore both the mainstream media presentation of leaked soldier-produced photographs, and the reactions to this photo-story garnered from group interviews with serving media operations personnel, veterans’ groups and forces families. The photographs apparently depict a British RAF serviceman posing next to a ‘dead Taliban fighter’. Primarily concerned with the visual representation of soldiering in the news and what we can learn from the responses of those with direct experience of war and its after-effects, I contend that the news treatment of this snapshot style imagery presents a particularly rich example through which to explore the unsettling relationship that the press and public have with the act of killing in war, and the jarring discomfort experienced when ‘our boys’ are shown to not only take part in seemingly reprehensible activities, but to picture themselves enjoying such acts.

Whilst the larger project that this paper draws upon is concerned with a range of media genres (film, documentary, comedy, social media), this particular case deals with newspaper journalism. I am concerned here with the represented experience of war for the soldier ‘on the ground’ and the responses to such media portrayals. In the age of more personalised media, peer-to-peer sharing, YouTube memes and citizen witnessing, the perceptions of military personnel and emotional connections with civilian audiences are formed through a more varied and unpredictable media ecology and a hybrid set of production and viewing practices. Shifting focus from the traditional institutional relationships (say, between the state and journalism) to mainstream media handling of individual soldiers’ transgressions also acknowledges the attempted media management of more vernacular and affective qualities (i.e. how soldiers appear in the media as individual moral actors and the emotional responses stimulated).

Katy Parry lectures in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her work focuses on visual politics and how ‘frames of war’ circulate in public culture. She is a co-author of Pockets of Resistance: British News Media, War and Theory in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq (with Piers Robinson, Peter Goddard, Craig Murray and Philip Taylor, Manchester University Press, 2010), and Political Culture and Media Genre: Beyond the News (with Kay Richardson and John Corner, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

About the series

This new seminar series showcases current research across different disciplines and approaches within the Faculty of Media and Communication at BU. The research seminars include invited speakers in the fields of journalism, politics, narrative studies, media, communication and marketing studies.  The aim is to celebrate the diversity of research across departments in the faculty and also generate dialogue and discussion between those areas of research.

Contributions include speakers on behalf of 

The Centre for Politics and Media Research

The Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community

Narrative Research Group

Journalism Research Group

Advances in Media Management Research Group

Emerging Consumer Cultures Research Group

Public Relations Research Group

The second Research Staff Association (RSA) coffee morning will be taking place on Wednesday the 25th November, in the café area of the EBC (Lansdowne Campus) from 10 to 11am. This is an informal opportunity to meet other research staff over coffee and cake, discuss your work and share ideas for future collaborations. It will also provide an opportunity to make suggestions toward a planned RSA seminar series that will act as a conduit for researchers of the University to showcase their work.

For catering purposes please email mheward@bournemouth.ac.uk to confirm your attendance.

We look forward to seeing you there!
Kind regards, Michelle Heward and Marcellus Mbah (RSA Staff Representatives)