BU Research Blog

The Curiosity Playground is part of this year’s Festival of Learning and celebrates the creative, fun and wacky research happening at Bournemouth University.  Hosted by the BU Research Staff Association (RSA), the event will involve researchers showcasing their work though creative and interactive methods, including props. The props will help to engage children, to enable the researchers to talk to them and their parents about their research. The purpose of this event is to increase public awareness of the spectrum of research that Bournemouth University conducts, and the key message is that research is fun, interesting and amenable to all.

If you are interested in being involved in the Curiosity Playground, please attend the next BU RSA Coffee Morning on 26 April (10-11am) in R302, Royal London House, Lansdowne Campus. The FoL organising team will be there to provide some info about how to plan a public engagement activity, with examples of what has worked well in the past.  They’ll be on hand to help you shape your ideas and think about innovative ways to share your research.

Eight lucky researchers will be chosen to take part in the event in July, and will be provided with a small budget to develop their activity for the day.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Kind regards,

BU Research Staff Association

The first EPSRC Industrial Systems in the Digital Age Conference – Looking Beyond Industry 4.0 is taking place on 20 and 21 June 2017, at the University of Glasgow.
The call for papers and conference details can be found at: https://networkplusdigital.wordpress.com/activities/events/conference-2017/.

Submission of abstracts is invited for both oral and poster presentations. All abstracts must be submitted through Easy Chair. Only one oral and/or one poster abstract may be submitted from an individual participant.

If you are interested in shaping the future of UK’s automation and computing beyond Industry 4.0, you only need to submit a one-page abstract by 28 April at
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=isda2017

Published in The Conversation: Carly Stewart and Jayne Caudwell, referring to recent incidents in British cycling and drawing from women’s autobiographies, offer a critique of post-feminism: https://theconversation.com/vicious-cycle-the-troublemakers-tackling-sexism-in-elite-sport-75687

A number of top women cyclists have claimed, publicly, that they have experienced and/or witnessed sexism in their sport. As a consequence, some of these women have been branded troublemakers. Given this backlash, we argue for an increased awareness of the post-feminist filters through which we view elite sport, and we suggest that such an awareness might ensure that women who do speak out about sexism are not dismissed as individual troublemakers.

Autobiographies by elite sportswomen, and sportsmen, provide detailed accounts of the everyday lived experiences of the culture of competitive sport. These testimonies are often ignored. And yet, they throw light on the practices that constitute gender relations within the win-at-all-cost world of international sport.

The autobiographies of top cyclists Nicole Cooke – The Breakaway, and Lizzie Armistead – Steadfast provide rich description (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011) of how those in powerful decision-making positions in British cycle propel the system of gender inequality.

In our article, we argue that the notion of post-feminism contributes to a lack of attention to sexism:

“In recent years, post-feminism has been linked to an increase in the visibility of female athletes in the sporting media. Female athletes are often (self-) represented as strong and resistant to gendered limitations. This reinforces their seemingly abundant opportunities for liberation and upward mobility in elite competitive sport.

And so post-feminism demands that successful high-profile female athletes embody the normative signifiers of heterosexual femininity and competitive advantage. Many do – and their achievements as both “pretty and powerful” are hailed by post-feminism as proof of equal opportunity in western societies …

However,

… for critical feminists, the warning is that when individual women “can have it all” we are not actually combating systemic gender inequalities. This is because the idea and actuality obscure the subtle, lived reality of everyday sexism. The idea that women can have it all ends up reassuring people that feminism is no longer necessary. Problems are turned into stories about conflict between individuals, a tactic used to disparage feminism and to silence voices that divulge details of discrimination and abuse. All the while, the faults in the system go unaddressed.”

People with dementia often find it more difficult to understand and navigate built environments. Dementia-friendly environments compensate for impairments to maximise independence and quality of life. Within the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) a team of academics are conducting research into the design of supportive dementia-friendly environments. This research builds on over 10 years of research by Prof Jan Wiener and is currently supported by a two year ESRC grant which support a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and several PhD Students.

A key output of the research is to create empirically validated design guidelines that support effective way finding in people with Alzheimer’s Disease. These principles are widely applicable to many stakeholders including architects, building standards agencies and care commissioning bodies to ensure that they are used to develop national standards for residential care home design. Our Advisory Board who met for the first time in January 2017, is therefore formed of invited stakeholders from organisations that span these diverse disciplines: Dr Moamer Gashoot, BU; Sian Gregory, Sunrise; Alexandra Ledger, Bright Bay Design Limited; Jo Malyon, Alzheimer’s Society; Graham Parkes, Quantum Group; Stephen Pennington, QP Architecture; Lynne Petty, Sunrise; Becky Robson, Quantum Group; Sue Slater, First Port Retirement Property Services; Alice Stevens Arts Univeristy Bournemouth; and Susan Wiffen, BUPA. These invited stakeholder join internal colleagues who represent the ADRC: Dr Jan Wiener (Chair), Dr Ramona Grzeschik, Dr Michelle Heward, Christopher Hilton, Mary O’Malley, Denise Carroll and Michelle O’Brien.

The aim of our research is to help increase or preserve the independence and well-being of people with dementia, avoiding a further loss of autonomy, dignity and control that is, in theory, preventable. The Advisory Board will meet again in May and we look forward to the discussions at our next meeting!

Day of Deviance

Thoughts from the fringes and future deviations in consumer and brand research

The Promotional Cultures and Communication Centre (PCCC) hosted a one-day seminar under the theme of ‘deviance’ on 16 March 2017 at the  Hunterian Museum in London. The event involved researchers from the fields of critical marketing, consumer culture, branding, popular culture and punk. The aim was to generate discussions around discordant theories, digressive methodologies, deviant consumers and disruptive brands.

Academics invited were those who are (or have) been providing a discordant voice in the literature, or been researching in an area that could be perceived as deviant, or been exploring a sector considered as marginal, or some of their views expressed in some of their work could be considered as deviant. According to Dr Tauheed Ramjaun, lead organiser of the event: “The idea was to gather an eclectic mix of participants to stimulate debate but also to encourage a cross-fertilisation of ideas around non-mainstream perspectives”.

Participants were given the opportunity to present think pieces of five minutes about their topic of interest in an informal setting. Presentations included themes like extraterrestrial consumption, consuming the Third Reich, the voluntary consumption of physical pain, marketing and industrious modernity, the normalisation of consumer deviance, glitch as a methodological device, critique of the service-dominant logic, pursuing gay masculinities through consumption practices, the evolution of punk, etc. Our colleagues Maria Musarskaya, Chris Miles and Stuart Armon also contributed to the event.

This seminar follows the very successful Seminar by the Sea (2011) and Contemplating in the City (2014) organised previously by the PCCC. According to Dr Janice Denegri-Knott, Head of PCCC: “It was a day of thought-provoking discussion.  The productive and often dangerous quality of the ‘deviant’  was clearly evident in the think pieces that were shared on the day and the conversation they initiated.  A number of collaborations are in the pipeline as a result of this, and we look forward to our next seminar in 2019′”.

An ‘Early Reflections’ booklet for industry is currently under production as a follow-up to the event. The next event will be organised in 2019 in collaboration with another academic institution.

The Ministry of Criminal Justice in Norway have funded Bournemouth University’s Dr Sarah Hean and Finnish colleagues 300 000NOK to continue their work piloting the Change Laboratory Model of workplace development and transformation in the Norwegian prison system.  The aim of this pilot is to enhance working between mental health and prison services, particularly in the way confidential information on the mental health of offenders is shared between agencies

This funding is the first spin off project from the Horizon 2020 funded COLAB project that began in February this year in which Bournemouth University and staff (Dr Sarah Hean, Prof Jonathan Parker, Prof Sara Ashencaen Crabtree, Dr Carol Bond and Dr Jaqui Hewitt Taylor) are participating.  COLAB has developed a strong international community of practice of participants from practice and academic partners in the UK, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Norway that is well placed to make a significant contribution to the way services work together when addressing the multiple rehabilitation needs of the offender population.

For further information on either this project or COLAB as a whole, please contact the project lead/COLAB coordinator Dr Sarah Hean (shean@bournemouth.ac.uk).