BU Research Blog

Professor Jens Holscher has been invited to join the editorial board of the new Journal of Banking, Finance and Sustainable Development by the editor in chief, Professor Richard Werner (University of Southampton).

Congratulations to Mananya Podee (FHSS) and Yolanda Barrado-Martín (FST)!

Great to see both of your papers accepted meaning that BU research to improve the  lives of people with dementia and their families will be presented at the British Society of Gerontology 47th Annual Conference ‘Ageing in an Unequal World: Shaping Environments for the 21st Century’ in Manchester in July.

Mananya from the Centre for Qualitative Research (CQR) and the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) will present a paper on ‘Improving holiday accommodation and service provision for people with dementia’. Yolanda from the ADRC and the Psychology Department will present a paper on ‘How is Tai Chi received by people living with dementia and their informal carers?’ based on her work on the TACIT Trial.

Both studies are searching for more people with dementia and their carers to take part. If this sounds like something you might like to get involved in (or you know someone else that might) please contact them for further information.

• Mandy is looking for people with dementia and carers to talk about holiday experiences in a short interview. For more information please email mpodee@bournemouth.ac.uk
• Yolanda is looking for people with dementia and carers who might like to take part in Tai Chi. For more information please telephone 07801 890258 or email ybarradomartin@bournemouth.ac.uk

Ethnography of the Environment of Hospital Wards for Patients with Dementia, and the Role in which Music Can Play Within this

Rosanna Mead, University of Exeter

You are cordially invited to this seminar which is open to all BU staff and students.

Wednesday 25th April 2018

2.30 – 4 pm

F307, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus

Abstract

Rosanna Mead discusses her PhD research exploring how music can play a role within acute hospital ward environments for patients with dementia, with a specific focus on agitation and methods to measure levels of agitation in patients with dementia, in relation to environmental factors. She draws on findings from her ethnographic study conducted within two acute hospital wards for patients with dementia, exploring the link between environments and health, considering health/illness states as something which can fluctuate in relation to the environment, and within this gaining a grounded understanding of the interaction between agitation and the environment.

Biography

Rosanna Mead is a PhD Candidate at the University of Exeter in the Sociology Department, under the supervision of Professor Tia DeNora and Dr Hannah Farrimond. She is also the Director of Dorset based social enterprise Musica Music and Wellbeing.

Please find attached a link to the intranet page which has information about the HR & Payroll project – full name ‘BU2025 Digital Enablers – Phase 1 (HR & Payroll)’

On this page there is a link to a survey which is seeking to gather information about people’s views of the current system and identify areas where improvements could be made.

Link = https://staffintranet.bournemouth.ac.uk/news/news/thismonth/bu2025digitalenablers.php

Can you please:-

• Raise awareness of the project with your various groups of professional services and academic colleagues and share the above link.
• Encourage colleagues to complete the survey (closing date Monday 16^th April)

Many thanks

Craig McAulay

Professors Jens Holscher and Matthias Klaes (University of Buckingham) submitted the abstract below for presentation at the conference of the Association of Heterodox Economics. They want to contribute to the debate of Anne O. Krueger’s review in the Journal of Economic Literature:

Another instance of ignorance towards basic understandings of good scientific practice, is the economists tendency to defend one’s turf against alternative ideas and conceptions instead of trying to constructively engage with what is perceived as “input from outside”. While this tendency is well-known to heterodox economists, a recent instance refers to the broader issue of ethics in economics and relates to a review of the The Oxford Economic Handbook published by the eminent Journal of Economic Literature (JEL)<https://www.aeaweb.org/issues/469>in its book review section. While reviews in the JEL are known to be sharp, this one is especially so, implicitly chastizing the authors as “idealists [that] advocate entirely impractical or unattainable actions” (p. 216). While such a criticism would surely be legitimate in principle, the problem here is that this statement amounts to stark misrepresentation of the books actual content and thereby violates a basic standard of academic conversation, namely not to misrepresent the object of one’s criticism. In this context, I would urge you to have a look at the JEL’s review<http://www.aeaweb.org/issues/469> and the related reply by the Handbooks’s editors<https://econjwatch.org/articles/professional-ethics-101-a-reply-to-anne-krueger-s-review-of-the-oxford-handbook-of-professional-economic-ethics> published in the recent issue of Econ Journal Watch<http://www.heterodoxnews.com/n/htn227.html#art-17592186075082>. Doing so really sharpens the intuition about the degree and intensity of prevailing groupthink in economics, the means and attitudes used to defend this way of thought as well as the biases emerging from such an attitude.

The Krueger Review: Why the Dismal Science Deserves Better Than Dismal Ethics

Jens Hoelscher, University of Bournemouth

Matthias Klaes, University of Buckingham

Abstract

Economists have long held that their discipline is ‘value free’ in the sense that economics is a scientific enterprise that allows the separation of normative considerations from the presentation the findings of economic analysis. David Ricardo, in his Notes on Malthus for example, puts it this way:¹ “[I]t is not the province of the Political Economist to advise: – he is to tell you how you may become rich, but he is not to advise you to prefer riches to indolence, or indolence to riches” (Ricardo, 1820[1951], p. 338). In the neoclassical tradition, we have come to know this as ‘positive’ economics, which received perhaps its most influential formulation at the hands of Milton Friedman’s (1953) ‘Methodology of positive economics.’ What is interesting though regarding moral questions relating to economic advice in Friedman’s essay is the explicit juxtaposition of economics as an objective science with the incentive structure of economic debate: “Laymen and experts alike are inevitably tempted to shape positive conclusions to fit strongly held normative preconceptions and to reject positive conclusions if their normative implications – or what are said to be their normative implications – are unpalatable” (ibid.)

Friedman does not explicitly elaborate on these latter points, but his implicit position regarding expert advice is clear from the context: experts should be free from conflicts of interest, and whether somebody is an expert or not can only be judged through the refutable nature of the advice given. Poor expertise will be based on poor intellectual tools of analysis and reveal itself through lack of predictive success, while biased advice will reveal itself in its relation to outside influence. There are thus in Friedman’s essay, implicitly at least, the contours of a call to experts for them to adhere to a kind of virtuous honesty implicit in the enterprise of objective science itself.

We will examine in our paper the bread-and-butter workings of this implicit principle and its strengths and limitations as a foundation for professional economic ethics in the arena of economic expert advice. We will do this two-fold, first by looking at the economist as an expert on what happens in economics, and then at the role of the economist as an expert on what happens in the economy. Krueger’s recent JEL review of the Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics will serve us as a case study for the former. She reads the Handbook as a ‘series of attacks on mainstream economics and the practice of economics’. We will look at how she could have arrived at such a reading, and what this tells us about Krueger as an expert on what happens in economics. Regarding the role of the economist as an expert on what happens in the economy, we will revisit some deeply troubling implications of what happens if, when looking at the objective function of the cost-benefit analysis of institutional change, we discover human life is at stake in a way that it has been in the context of Eastern European transition.

Representing Dementia in Film and Fiction

Dr David Orr, University of Sussex and Dr Yugin Teo, Bournemouth University

You are cordially invited to this seminar which is open to all BU staff and students.

Wednesday 25th April 2018

2.30 – 4 pm

F307, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus

Abstract

From something that was ‘not really talked about’ publicly, the last two decades have seen dementia explode into the public sphere and contemporary culture’s creative imaginary. Cinema, documentary, theatre, art, memoirs, biography, poetry, literary fiction and genre fiction have all taken up dementia as a prominent theme. The gerontological humanities have been exploring what these works reveal of the experiences, preoccupations, dilemmas and misapprehensions to which dementia gives rise. This presentation discusses selected examples of engagement with dementia within (1) cinema and (2) crime fiction, asking how these narratives might reflect and shape audience perceptions of living with the condition.

Biographies

Dr David Orr is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Sussex, where his principal research interests focus on adult safeguarding and self-neglect, global mental health, and representations of dementia in contemporary films and fiction. He has worked on a number of knowledge reviews for the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) and is co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Sociocultural Perspectives on Global Mental Health. Before entering academia, he worked in Community Mental Health Teams in the areas of Adult Learning Disability and Older Adult Mental Health.

Dr Yugin Teo is Lecturer in English and Communication at Bournemouth University. He has previously taught literature and film at the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex where he completed his doctorate. His research on the representation of memory in literature and film has been published in the journals Critique, Medical Humanities and Science Fiction Film and Television. His research monograph Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.

The next BU Research Staff Association coffee morning will take place on the 28th March, 10-11am in F105, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus. The focus is on researcher development at BU. These coffee morning are open to all staff at BU, and we particularly welcome those on research specific contracts including PGRs.

We are delighted to welcome guest speakers Chloe Nevitt and Julia Calleja from the BU Organisational Development team to share their knowledge and experience in this area.

We look forward to seeing you there.

BU Research Staff Association

There’s a Research Data Management drop-in session today from 11am to 1pm on the Help Zone of The Sir Michael Cobham Library.  Pop by with a question or just find out more about the Data Management life-cycle from Data Management Plans to working with your data and sharing your data.  Can’t make this time?  Take a look at our guide: http://libguides.bournemouth.ac.uk/research-data-management

Professor Jens Holscher co-authored a new BAFES17 RePec Working Paper: https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/bamwpaper/bafes17.htm

Professor Jens Holscher has joined the review team of the ‘International Small Business  Journal’.

A Journalism Research Group research seminar. 3pm – 4.30pm, Wednesday 21 March in WG04.

After years of trial and error, Roman will share some thoughts and tips on how to do research, focusing on the main challenges of staying focused and becoming more productive. He will demonstrate some of the tools and routines he uses to organise his tasks, readings, notes and writing, as well as a few mental strategies on overcoming sticking points. This session is open to all within and outside JEC (including PhD students) but we envisage it as an interactive workshop-type session, in which colleagues will share their own thoughts, anxieties and practical tips.

The session is led by Dr Roman Gerodimos, Faculty of Media and Communication.

What are these sessions about?
They focus on the process of doing research rather than presenting the outcomes. They are less masterclass talks and more quality circles, where we all bring our research questions, dilemmas and dead-ends to the sessions. Whilst there will be someone leading the seminar, they are designed to be participatory.

Spaces are limited, so please email jacksond@bournemouth.ac.uk if you intend to come.

For more information about the Journalism Research Group (JRG) visit the CSJCC website: https://research.bournemouth.ac.uk/centre/journalism-culture-and-community/

All welcome. Hope to see you there.