BU Research Blog

Hello !

The entries to this year’s Research Photography Competition are now open!

Can you convey your research through an image?

We are looking for academics and postgraduates to tell the story of their research through a photograph, which can be used to inspire current BU undergraduates.

All submitted images will be showcased on the BU website late 2015, where staff and students will have the opportunity to vote for their favourite image/s. An exhibition will also be displayed in the Atrium Art Gallery during February 2016. Winners will then be announced during an Awards Ceremony which will take place on Thursday 4 February 2016.

How to enter the competition:

Step 1: Take your photo!

You can be as creative as you like in capturing the essence of your research. You could take a photo of your research in progress, showing how it is developed. Or you could focus on the people involved – the people behind the research, or the people benefitting from it. Unusual or artistic images are encouraged!

Step 2: Submit your photo

Submit your photo to the research email inbox, along with a 100–200 word description of your research by the 13th of January 2016.

Need inspiration?

Then take a look at our regular ‘Photo of the Week’, where you can read about the research behind the images or visit the Research Photography Competition 2015 webpages which highlight last year’s Research Photography Competition entries.

Sophie Smith, Lecturer in Occupational Therapy (Faculty of Health and Social Sciences) has been awarded a ‘You’re Brilliant!’ Award by the Occupational Therapy students.

The awards which were introduced to BU in 2010 have been a great way for students to nominate staff who they think are brilliant. And Sophie definitely fits that description. Sophie was praised as being fun, approachable, warm, welcoming, calm, happy, positive and a fantastic teacher.

Sophie would like to say a big thank you to all who nominated her for their kind words.

Well done Sophie!

The Festival of Learning enters its fourth year in 2016 and will be running from Saturday 25 – Wednesday 29 June. It’s a fantastic public engagement opportunity for BU to showcase the great research coming out of the university. The call for proposals is now open and the process for submitting an application is simple:

1. Think of an idea for an event that demonstrates your research – will it be innovating and interesting to members of the public? Watch our video from 2015 for some inspiration.
2. Decide if you want your event to be a bookable event that people can sign up for or whether you’d like a run a stall or drop in activity instead (i.e. an activity based on passing traffic rather than pre-bookings)
3. Consider who you want to be your target audience (adults, families, businesses etc.)
4. Consider whether your event meets the Festivals objectives, what you plan to do during the event, how it will appeal to your intended audience and what your attendees will get out of attending the event.
5. Complete the Festival of Learning event application before January 31^st 2016: see here (We are unable to accept late proposals due to the tight turn around between the call closing and review by the panel.)

If you would like to discuss an idea in more detail, please call/ email Naomi Kay (Public Engagement Officer) 61342/ nkay@bouremouth.ac.uk or click here for more detailed information about submitting a proposal.

As part of the pre-award review conducted in early – mid 2015, one of the approved actions was for the RKEO pre-award team to provide the following:

1. Pre-award Application Timeline: to inform you of what happens in the pre-award process and the timeframes required for steps to be followed for internal approvals and costing preparation. The internal legal and finances approvals processes need to be followed to comply with BU’s Financial Regulations. The Quality Approval process aims to bring your funding proposal to the best quality possible in the competitive bidding arena. As these processes involve various parties within BU, this Timeline assists you to understand the timeframes involved for each step so that we can provide you with optimal support.

2. Sample Costs: this provides the base rates of some common costing items and is to assist you to fill in the ‘Costing Information Request’ section of the Intention to Bid (ITB) form. When the ITB form is received by RKEO, your Funding Development Officer will use the base rates you provided to prepare a more accurate costing.

These documents are titled “RKE Application Timeline” and “RKE Sample Costs” – they can be found on the Staff Intranet under the section “Research”.

If you have any queries or have any issues with accessing these documents, please contact your Funding Development Team.

Dr Debbie Sadd from the Faculty of Management, is travelling to Japan as a guest of the British Council as a keynote speaker at the Sharing experiences from London 2012 symposium in Tokyo on the 18th December (https://www.britishcouncil.jp/en/events/2020-games-university-symposium).
The Knowledge Partnership, based in London, approached selected UK universities to write case studies around the roles and opportunities they gained from London 2012 and in particular to share experiences and forge a deeper UK-Japan collaboration.
Debbie’s case study of BU’s opportunity to reform the learning environment and curriculum, raise our institution’s reputation, and build our brand image from on-going legacy projects was selected as one of the exemplars for the symposium. There will be over 80 Japanese Universities in attendance as well as members of the Japanese Organising Committee for the Olympic Games.
Debbie will report further once she has returned from her trip.

‘International social work’ – this phrase to those who are interested in the profession and its developments, will either dilate eyes with lit up interest or will be scanned and dismissed as irrelevant to parochial concerns. In our experience it’s simply not a neutral subject, nor an uncontested one but is in fact replete with rich histories, cultural clashes as well as alliances; where grassroots initiatives and discourses engage a guerrilla warfare with dominant hegemonies; where neo-liberal colonialism competes for terrain and influence in poorer nations, wealthy in potential.

These were some of the topics that were discussed both formally and informally at the 2^nd International Social Work Conference 2015 held last week in Penang, Malaysia in collaboration with the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and prestigious Institut Sosial Malaysia. The organising committee was led by under the organisational leadership of our good colleague, Associate Professor Dr Azlinda Azman, Chair of the Social Work Programme at USM.

In our formal affiliation as visiting professors and editorial board members at each institution respectively, we (Profs Sara Ashencaen Crabtree and Jonathan Parker) were extremely honoured to be invited to be plenary speakers at this excellent conference with the keynote delivered by Professor Dr Vimla Nadkarni, President of the International Association of Schools of Social Work. This was a star-studded event with an opening speech by Dato’ (Dame) Sri Rohani Abdul Karim, the Minister of the Ministry of Women, Family & Community Development in Malaysia. We were also able to catch up with the President of the Malaysian Association of Social Workers, Teoh Ai Hua, by now an old friend and colleague. We also met Dr Al-Azmi Bakar, Director of the Institut Sosial Malaysia. Sara even managed to catch up with her delightful, former student, Chan Soak Fong, now an elegant, professional woman and prominent social work wheel!

It was also an opportunity to reflect upon the shifting positions of power where Western social work is declining in global influence and the new star of social work rises in the East. Civilisations fade – and in the West we have had our day in the sun, which appropriately enough is setting in this direction. The social work models we developed and imported from Britain (along with those from the USA) during our heyday, have an honoured place in the new world order, but it is quite clear that vigorous pan-Asian paradigms are decentring Western models by taking centre stage in international social work. This trend unfortunately is particularly accelerated by an inward looking stance where the energies of social work in England and Wales seems heavily occupied in negotiating the radical shifts to the profession, which many would argue are jeopardising both its independence, its diverse remit as well as threatening to dilute its intellectual rigour. In the meantime schools of social work in the USA and Australia are jostling aggressively for influence in the Asian world in a neo-colonial push for power bartering their richer resources for a place at the Asian social work table.

It was therefore exciting and important to debate with Professor Nadkarni and other colleagues, these global trends, the opportunities and the threats. We discussed the rise of expertise in Asia, particularly but not specifically located in India, and where in countries like Malaysia social work is being rightly recognised as having great power and influence globally. Accordingly, Asian governments are beginning to recognise its huge potential to help transform national landscapes and therefore to bring international prestige to nations. This seemed symbolised by the media attention the conference commanded, where both the conference and its speakers appeared in all the major newspapers and on national television twice in two days. Sadly social work commands little public or political interest in the historical land of its birth, Britain especially in England, except to focus on deficits, failures and gleeful witch-hunts of hapless social workers caught in the crossfire.

We, in England, can learn much from the Asian experience, however, and the importance of accepting the wisdom of others whilst reigniting the grassroots activism from which much social work was original forged. It changes our position and perspective but perhaps in late modern society this is good for us, challenging us to think differently. For ourselves, our social research in Malaysia, and Southeast Asia as a whole, has opened up exciting vistas for us which we will explore and immerse ourselves in as we move forward into this new age and contest for authentic, impassioned social work, welfare and grassroots action

Sara Ashencaen Crabtree & Jonathan Parker