Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Just to advise you our next BRAD events programme is now LIVE.
BRAD week is taking place from the 29th of June – 6th of July 2015.
Check out our events below and Book into BRAD now!
Please see the comments we received from people who attended our April BRAD events.
Introduction and Basics
We hope to see you at the events ……….soon
How can we do research that engages with communities in a genuinely collaborative way? What kind of research produces findings which address critical questions about the structural issues and problems faced by communities, but which are also of practical and transformative benefit to them? If these two objectives pull researchers in different directions, what kind of balance can be struck between them?
These are questions I have been pondering during two visits this semester to IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis), in Indianapolis, USA. This is a university which places strong emphasis on the importance of community collaboration and engagement in scholarship and education. During two visits, I have particularly followed the community engaged work of Professor Susan Brin Hyatt.
I have known Professor Hyatt since June 2013, when she came to Bournemouth University to give a research seminar presentation about urban ethnographic research projects she and her students had undertaken in Indianapolis and Philadelphia (e.g., Hyatt et al 2012, Hyatt et al 2009. See also Hyatt 2001). During her visit we talked a lot about our common scholarly interests and discovered that we had a shared interest in the British Community Development Projects (CDPs) of the 1970s. The CDPs provide a very interesting example of the politics of using academic knowledge to bring about social change – or what we now call (societal) impact.
Meadow Well playground, 1976. Photography courtesy of Ken Grint. Available at IUPUI Digital Archive: http://indiamond6.ulib.iupui.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/CDP/id/3685/rec/120
Initiated in 1969, the CDPs were a major social policy initiative, by the standards of then and now. There were twelve CDPs across the UK – mostly based in urban, industrial areas affected by economic decline, job loss and poverty. CDPs were set up with the aim of using community action to tackle various social problems associated with poverty and develop more integrated forms of service provision which responded to the local population’s needs. Each of the twelve CDPs incorporated a research team based in a university, and an action team based in the community, accountable to a local steering group. The idea was that social science knowledge and methods should both inform and support the development of local projects. The CDPs had an estimated budget of £5 million – a lot of money in those days. Most of the funding came from central government, but local CDPs operated with a high level of autonomy.
It is interesting to reflect on the CDPs from today’s vantage point. This was the creation of an ambitious infrastructure, across 12 regions, linking universities and academic researchers directly with community workers and activists in poor areas, with the explicit aim of enabling social science to inform social transformation. It is hard to imagine such a wide-ranging initiative emerging now, backed up by an equivalent budget from central government departments, in spite of widespread current concerns about growing use of food banks, zero hours contracts, high levels of in-work and child poverty and obscene income and housing inequalities; the kinds of problems which, some argue, are far more endemic now in the UK than they were in the 1970s.
Yet the CDP story is one in which two conflicting explanations of the causes of poverty unfolded (Loney 1983). The politicians and civil servants who set up the CDPs assumed a social pathology definition. They understood poverty to result essentially from the actions and beliefs of the poor themselves. From this viewpoint, what was needed was better, more joined up local services to help the poor to improve their skills and lifestyles, and become better adapted to the new economic realities of deindustrialisation. By contrast, those who worked for the CDPs quickly abandoned this definition of poverty in favour of a more structural perspective, attending to how social and economic policies reflected within corporate and government decision-making directly and indirectly gave rise to poverty and related social problems. In effect the CDP researchers, workers and activists refused to ‘localize’ the cause of the issues they tried to tackle. Their structural perspective informed how community action and research was used to engage, inform and mobilise local populations, and transform people’s lives for the better. This brought about many positive changes in areas in which CDPs were active and left some important legacies. However, this kind of impact was not what the government had in mind. CDPs were eventually wound down in the late 1970s, by which time politicians and senior government officials had mostly switched off from considering the implications of their findings for social policy at a wider level.
Although this was forty years ago, the CDPs have a strong contemporary resonance. Many of the problems tackled by the CDPs (poverty, insecure low paid work, unemployment) continue today, as do debates over how to deal with them. The activism and scholarship produced by the CDPs illustrates vividly how attempts to bring about positive change (to make an impact) in poor communities necessarily depends upon definitions of poverty which are always, inescapably political, whether or not they are recognised as such. As part of her research on British CDPs, Prof Hyatt and her colleagues at IUPUI have created a unique and extensive digital archive of many CDP reports, publications and photographs. This is an excellent resource for both teaching and research and I would like to recommend it to all colleagues interested in the issues discussed here.
References
Hyatt, SB., Linder, BJ., and Baurley, M. eds. 2012. The Neighborhood of Saturdays. Memories of a Multi-Ethnic Community on Indianapolis’ South Side. Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing.
Hyatt, SB., Branstrator, DW., Baurley, M., Dagon M., and Yarian, S. eds. 2009. Eastside Story. Portrait of a Neighborhood on the Suburban Frontier. Indianapolis: Department of Anthropology IUPUI, Neighborhood Alliance Press.
Hyatt, Susan B., 2001. From Citizen to Volunteer. Neoliberal Governance and the Erasure of Poverty. In Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky, eds. The New Poverty Studies. The Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States. New York: New York University Press.
Loney, Martin 1983. Community Against Government. The British Community Development Project 1968-78. London: Heinemann
Just to advise you our next BRAD events programme is now LIVE.
Check out our events and Book into BRAD now!
BRAD week is taking place from the 29th of June – 6th of July 2015.
Please see the comments we received from people who attended our last BRAD event week in April.
We hope to see you there……….soon
By Professor Ann Brooks, Professor of Sociology
The 5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies hosted by The University of Edinburgh was set against the stunning backdrop of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags at The University of Edinburgh’s John McIntyre’s Conference Centre.
The conference attracted 250 international academics from a wide range of disciplines including sociology, geography, literature, cultural studies, art, archeology, anthropology, urban studies, gender studies, tourism and many more. Delegates came from US, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Brazil among others. The conference chair was Professor Liz Bondi from the University of Edinburgh and teh conference was supported by Elsevier publishers, who publish the conference journal Emotion, Space and Society and hosted a superb pre-conference welcome and reception.
The Conference streams reflected an international and interdisciplinary research profile combining theoretical and applied work as well as implications for policy debates at the local and national level. For example in one of the Conference Themes: Persisting Selves: the Practices and Politics of Keeping Going and Carry On (divided into I Selves; II Time and III Recovering) papers included: ‘How does “a day at a time” work? Patience, Persistence and Proaction in Everyday Sustained Alcoholic.’(Julia Mills, University of Manchester) and ‘Persistence, Insistence and Endurance in Pregnancy Loss Grief.’ (Abigail McNiven, University of Oxford).’ A Conference Theme: which showcased a wide range of doctoral, postdoc and Early Career Researchers’ work was Childhood Youth and Intergenerationality: Relational Geographies of Emotions /Affects, Childhood and Youth, papers included: ‘The Emotional Geographies of Children of Prisoners’(Helene Oldrup, The Danish National Centre for Social Research) and ‘Slovenia’s Izbrisani (‘Erased’) Youth, Transitional Spaces and Radical Ethical Acts’ (Stuart Aitken, San Diego State University). Other Conference Themes included Creative Spaces, Emotions in Fieldwork, Urban Life in Theory and Practice, Time and Space, Liminal Spaces, and Connecting across Space: Tourism.
I presented a paper in the Urban Life in Theory and Practice stream as one of three papers discussing the impact of the urban environment and landscape on emotional well-being. My paper looked at the impact of gentrification in cities in the US including San Francisco and New York City, where long term city dwellers and migrants are being forced out of their homes because of the gentrification of traditionally ethnic parts of the cities by corporate investors and wealthy foreigners. I also explore the growth of the Occupy Movement as a collective expression of anger at the increasing disparities of wealth in US cities. This work is part of the work undertaken for a forthcoming book on Emotions and Cities.
One of the high points of the conference was the presentation of one of three keynotes –Professor Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of Chicago. http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/berlant
Berlant is a foremost contributor to feminist and literary discourse in the US and it is a unique opportunity to have her appear at a UK conference. She is author of a number of outstanding books including: Cruel Optimism (2011), The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2009), Desire/Love (2013), Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (2001), Intimacy (2000), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997).
Berlant describes her work as follows:
My work has focused on politics, emotion and intimacy in the U.S. nineteenth and twentieth centuries – now the twenty-first in particular, in relation to citizenship, to informal and normative modes of social belonging, and to affective attachments and fantasies that take shape through ordinary practices. These scenes zone and disturb the relations between public and private, white and non-white, straight and non-straight, and /or citizen and foreigner –along with providing settings for other, inventive kinds of social bond through which people imagine and practice world- making.
Presenting her keynote address: ‘On being in Life without Wanting the World: Living in Ellipsis’, Berlant captured the imagination of delegates with an erudite and amusing presentation of concepts around emotion and affect. Berlant sought to define a range of new ‘affective’ states for addressing sex, democracy and belonging. Drawing on one of the classical social theorist Georg Simmel’s work on Metropolis and Mental Life, Berlant explored the concept of ‘disassociation’. Her ability to communicate with a wide range of academics using complex and imaginative frameworks of analysis is inspiring both on pedagogical and substantive issues.
Other keynotes included Professor Jane Speedy, University of Bristol and Associate Professor Joyce Davidson, Queens University, Canada.
This was a conference which not only provided outstanding networking opportunities and an opportunity to develop research synergies with international and national delegates but in addition it was a great opportunity for me to reflect on a chapter I have just completed on Lauren Berlant’s work for my upcoming book Genealogies of Emotion, Intimacies and Desire (Routledge, New York 2015). More food for thought from this exceptional academic.
This was a conference to inspire the intellect, engage the senses, to enrich international networking and to light the way for doctoral, postdoctoral and Early Career Researchers on the best of interdisciplinary research and to showcase this on the world stage.
The following funding opportunities have been announced. Please follow the links for more information.
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council invites applications for funding for the delivery of Exploring Innovation seminars. These enable universities and institutes to deliver events to facilitate discussion and improve awareness of knowledge exchange and commercialisation of BBSRC-supported research. The event may include a half day with networking and panel discussion for academic staff and academic-related colleagues involved in developing the programme and encouraging attendance. Audience or speakers could include academic staff, university business development staff, knowledge exchange professionals, technology transfer specialists, patent attorneys, KTP advisors and representatives of life sciences businesses. Potential discussion topics include the following: case studies of practical approaches for working with business and other user organisations; research organisation strategy and policy surrounding intellectual asset management; practical and flexible approaches to achieve greater impact in areas related to intellectual property rights in biological sciences, formation of spin-out companies, research and development, licensing, consultancy, collaborative R&D, open innovation or social enterprise; BBSRC support and funding mechanisms for knowledge exchange; networking and sharing of best practice. Applicants should be research organisations that are in receipt of funding from BBSRC. Applications that are coordinated across departments or between different organisations are encouraged. Funding may be used to contribute towards the costs of external speakers, room fees, time spent in organising the event and any other reasonable costs, excluding lunch and refreshments.
Maximum award: £2k. Closing date: not specified.
Economic and Social Research Council invites expressions of interest for a collaborative Knowledge Exchange Fellowship. The fellowship will enable a mid-career academic to develop skills and experience of knowledge exchange and impact activities by working on behalf of the council’s Urban Transformations portfolio, where they will promote opportunities for policy and wider societal impact, with particular emphasis on the Foresight Future of Cities project and its wider network of cities’ stakeholders. The programme may offer opportunities for reflection and the advancement of academic career priorities as well as directly contributing to the work of the two programmes.
Maximum award: £80k at 80% fEC for 12 months. Closing date: 01/07/15.
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council invites proposals for access to ARCHER through its resource allocation panel. This scheme provides access to the council’s national state-of-the-art high performance computing facility for proposals that are within the council’s remit and that would benefit from ARCHER. Proposals may include short computational projects that do not warrant a full grant application, projects that link consecutive standard grant applications or that aid the preparation of a grant or fellowship, extended feasibility studies, and trialling application developments at scale. Computing resources on ARCHER are awarded in kilo-allocation units with one kAU representing a measure of relative performance of ARCHER based on a range of benchmarks compared to previous national services. One core hour equates to 0.015kAU. Users can request significant amounts of computing resource (>1,000kAU) over a maximum one-year period. Although there is no limit to the number of kAUs that can be applied for, there is a limit to the total amount of kAUs available against this call: around 300,000 kAU, or 20 million core hours.
Maximum award: N/A. Closing date: 4pm, 07/09/15.
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, as part of the Research Councils UK Energy Programme, invites registrations of intent for its call on reducing energy demand in the transport sector. Funding supports interdisciplinary collaborative research to reduce energy demand in the energy sector. Proposals with innovation in engineering, physical sciences or information and communication technologies, together with an application, business and economic modelling, and considering behavioural aspects of transport systems, are particularly encouraged. Furthermore, proposals should address the following research challenges: decarbonising freight using multidisciplinary research, including behaviour, economics, governance and technology; energy demand implications of technological, institutional and infrastructural change; vehicle design to meet challenging mobility needs in an integrated transport system.
Maximum award: £2 million. Closing date: Registrations of intent 4pm, 31/07/15.
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council invite technical assessments and applications for their ARCHER leadership projects. Awards provide direct access to the UK’s national supercomputing facility ARCHER for computationally intensive individual projects. Eligible projects may include the following: leadership calculations that push the boundaries of scientific high performance computing; calculations that require a large number of processing cores; high-risk, high-reward projects that rely heavily on high performance compute resource and have significant potential for large future impact; substantial computational projects by experienced teams that need large compute resources, but do not rely on additional support by EPSRC or NERC; pre-competitive computational production runs by non-academic research groups within sectors related to the remits of the ARCHER partner research councils. A total of maximum 2 million kAU is available, split between EPSRC and NERC remits at the ratio of 77 per cent EPSRC and 23 per cent NERC. Each applicant should apply for at least 100,000 kAU for a maximum period of two years.
Maximum award: N/A. Closing date: 4pm, 01/09/15.
Leverhulme Trust invites applications for its Visiting Professorships. These enable UK institutions to host eminent researchers from overseas, primarily to enhance the skills of academic staff or students at the host institution. Visiting professors may also wish to use the opportunity to further their own academic interests. Any field of research is eligible. Applications must be made by a member of academic staff, based in a UK university or other higher education institution, who will be responsible for coordinating the visit. Priority is given to new or recent collaborative ventures. Funding covers maintenance, travel expenses and research costs and supports visits that last between three and 12 months. Travel within the UK, laboratory consumables and essential technical assistance may also be covered.
Maximum award: Not specified. Closing date: 4pm, 08/10/15.
Medical Research Council invites applications for its Discovery Awards. These support discovery research in areas with potential for development, which are strategically sound within the institution’s strategy and are important nationally. All discoveries relevant to the MRC’s remit are accepted, and applicants are encouraged to explore how awards could be used to develop interdisciplinary interactions, for example by linking with physical sciences, mathematics and social sciences. Awards support recruitment or initial development of new PIs at junior or senior levels, or linked pilot work or technology and methods development. Institutions are expected to initiate and build critical mass and capacity in otherwise underexplored, high-potential areas of research, which may not yet compare to more established fields but have a clear vision for development.
Maximum award: £1 million. Closing date: 10/08/15.
Medical Research Council together with the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology, and with support from the Newton Fund, invites proposals for its UK-Vietnam infectious disease research call. This supports collaborative UK-Vietnamese biomedical research in health areas of importance to the Vietnamese population, leading to health benefits in Vietnam, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Areas of particular interest include antimicrobial resistance, vaccine development for humans and malaria. Each proposal must involve a UK partner and one based in Vietnam. Interdisciplinary collaborations are particularly welcome.The budget for this call is £2.6 million, with up to £2m available from MRC for UK collaborators and up to £600,000 from MOST for Vietnamese collaborators. Funding is expected to support a maximum of five projects, worth up to £520,000 per project over two to three years.
Maximum award: £520k. Closing date: 15/07/15.
Medical Research Council, the Department for International Development and the Wellcome Trust invite proposals for their joint Global Health Trials scheme. This funds trials to generate new knowledge about interventions that will contribute to the improvement of health in low- and middle-income countries. Priority is given to proposals that are likely to produce implementable results and that address the major causes of mortality or morbidity in low- and middle-income countries. The focus is primarily on late-stage clinical and health intervention trials evaluating efficacy and effectiveness. The scheme is aimed at funding randomised controlled trials, but innovative trial methodologies and adaptive designs are also welcome. Phase IIb trials of major relevance may also be considered. Proposals for research into chronic non-communicable diseases and reproductive, maternal and newborn health are particularly welcomed. The scope encompasses interventions of all kinds, including behavioural and complex interventions, disease management, drugs, vaccines, hygiene and diagnostic strategies. The scheme is open to principal investigators based in low- or middle-income economies at higher education institutions and non-profit research institutions, and principal investigators based in UK HEIs, research council institutes and eligible independent research organisations.
Maximum award: Not specified. Closing date: 10/09/15.
Natural Environment Research Council invites applications for its Collaborative Gearing scheme. This offers opportunities for fieldwork-based scientific collaboration with NERC’s British Antarctic Survey, in cases where no funding for salaries, grants or other direct science costs is required, but where access to BAS Antarctic facilities and research stations would enable fieldwork to be conducted for the proposed project. Proposed projects must be allied to the BAS science programme.
Maximum award: Not specified. Closing date: 4pm, 31/03/16.
The World Health Organization, together with the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership and the UK Medical Research Council, invites proposals for research and capacity development in support of the Ebola virus disease response. The previous deadline of 18 June 2015 has now been extended to 6 August 2015. This call aims to build and strengthen regional, national, institutional and individual capacities to conduct high quality health research during infectious disease outbreaks resulting in health emergencies. Proposals should address at least one of the following areas: establish training or other capacity building activities for healthcare and laboratory personnel to detect and respond to infectious disease epidemics, conduct clinical trials and analyse samples in an emergency context to ensure clinical trial site preparedness; generate evidence for and implement ethically sound approaches to the introduction and clinical testing of new prevention tools or treatments during outbreaks of Ebola virus disease or other emerging infectious diseases of particular relevance to Africa; identify and implement best practices for building both community and national health authority support and engagement in clinical trials being conducted in emergency situations, including activities related to the development of appropriate mechanisms for surveillance, identification, tracking and referral of cases, as well as reintegration of survivors into the community. Consortia of researchers composed of at least one legal entity may apply. Projects involving transnational collaboration and regional networking are encouraged. Applicants are encouraged to establish links with relevant WHO and EDCTP-funded activities.
Maximum award: €250k. Closing date: 06/08/15.
Please note that some funding bodies specify a time for submission as well as a date. Please confirm this with your RKEO Funding Development Officer
You can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in RKEO or view the recent blog post here.
If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.
The latest issue of the Journal of Asian Midwives includes an article Twinning in Nepal: the Royal College of Midwives UK and the Midwifery Society of Nepal working in partnership by BU Visiting Faculty and NHS Poole midwife Jillian Ireland, co-authored by Joy Kemp (RCM Global Professional Advisor) and BU Professor Edwin van Teijlingen.
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) in the UK has twinned with the Midwifery Society of Nepal (MIDSON) to help strengthen the latter, through its Global Midwifery Twinning Project (GMTP). The GMTP aims to strengthen midwifery and develop leadership, advocacy, and campaigning skills both at the level of the association and at the individual midwife level. Reciprocity is an important aspect of twinning as the RCM also hopes to strengthen midwifery in the UK through greater engagement of its members and a raised profile of global maternal and new-born health. This paper describes the importance of collaboration between established national midwifery organisations and newly established ones. It includes a case study outlining the experience of a UK midwifery volunteer in Nepal. The paper ends with some thoughts on the effects of the GMTP project on midwifery in Nepal.
This paper is part of a larger body of research work conducted by the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health in Nepal.
Reference:
Ireland, J, van Teijlingen, E, & Kemp, J. (2015) Twinning in Nepal: the Royal College of Midwives UK and the Midwifery Society of Nepal working in partnership. Journal of Asian Midwives. 2(1):26–33.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Just a quick reminder our next RKEO coffee morning will be taking place on Thursday the 25th of June and will be held in conjunction with our colleagues from the Legal Services team.
Members of the RKEO and the Legal Services teams will be in the Retreat, Talbot Campus from 9.30 to 10.30am.
Come along and discuss your research plans with our RKEO team and check out how they can support you through the whole research funding process from applying to successful project management and delivery. We can also help you find the right funding opportunity, discuss the processes relating to funding schemes, as well as identifying potential collaborators and partners to strengthen your application. We can help with public engagement, knowledge transfer opportunities and much, much more….
Representatives from Legal Services will also be available to answer queries on matters such as contracting arrangements, freedom of information and data protection.
Come along and have a chat with us and see how we can help you, or just pop by and enjoy a coffee and a cake.
We look forward to seeing you!
Just to advise you details of our next BRAD events programme will be coming out very soon….watch out for our announcements on the Research BLOG and BU Intranet and get yourself booked in via Organisational Development.
BRAD week will be held from the 29th of June – 6th of July 2015.
Please see the comments we received from people who attended our last BRAD event week in April.
Pop these dates in your calenders and get ready!
Our next RKEO coffee morning will be taking place on Thursday the 25th of June and will be held in conjunction with our colleagues from the Legal Services team.
Members of the RKEO and the Legal Services teams will be in the Retreat, Talbot Campus from 9.30 to 10.30am.
Come along and discuss your research plans with our RKEO team and check out how they can support you through the whole research funding process from applying to successful project management and delivery. We can also help you find the right funding opportunity, discuss the processes relating to funding schemes, as well as identifying potential collaborators and partners to strengthen your application. We can help with public engagement, knowledge transfer opportunities and much, much more….
Representatives from Legal Services will also be available to answer queries on matters such as contracting arrangements, freedom of information and data protection.
Come along and have a chat with us and see how we can help you, or just pop by and enjoy a coffee and a cake.
We look forward to seeing you!
We have just been alerted that our paper has been cited for the hundredth time in Scopus. The paper ‘Maternity satisfaction studies and their limitations: “What is, must still be best’ was published in Birth. The paper originated from the Scottish Birth Study which we were both part of in our previous academic posts at the University of Aberdeen.
This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of satisfaction studies in the field of maternity care, including the issues that service users tend to value the status quo (i.e. What is must be best) . The implications are that innovations, of which users have no experience, may be rejected simply because they are unknown. The paper warns that problems may arise if satisfaction surveys are used to shape service provision. We advised that satisfaction surveys should be used with caution, and part of an array of tools. While involving service users is important in designing and organizing health services, there is still the risk that using satisfaction alone could end up promoting the status quo.
Professors Vanora Hundley & Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Reference:
van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V., Rennie, A-M, Graham. W., Fitzmaurice, A. (2003) Maternity satisfaction studies and their limitations: “What is, must still be best”, Birth 30: 75-82.
The emergence of Hybrid Threats and Hybrid War as new security challenges of the 21st Century – from its early examples in Israels war against Hezbollah in 2006 to Russia’s War in Eastern Ukraine. Dr. Sascha Dov Bachmann, Associate Professor in Law, Co-Director of BU’s Conflict, Rule of Law and Society( https://research.bournemouth.ac.uk/centre/conflict-rule-of-law-and-society/) presented at the 24th Annual SLS-BIICL Conference on Theory and International Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in London. He argues that Hybrid War is more than Compound Warfare by utilising new technologies of cyber and Hybrid Threats. His work on teh subject was recently published as HYBRID WARS: THE 21st-CENTURY’S NEW THREATS TO GLOBAL PEACE AND SECURITY in the South African Journal of Military Studies, http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/1110/1107.
Sheetal Sharma, PhD student in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health (CMMPH), published her latest paper this week in the Asian Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities [1]. The paper ‘Nepenglish’ or ‘Nepali English’: A New Version of English? raises the question whether we are beginning to see a new variant of English.
The paper is co-authored with Mrs. Pragyan Joshi from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Kathmandu and BU Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. Sheetal’s PhD research focuses on the evaluation of a large-sclae maternity care improvement intervention in rural Nepal.
The paper is based on listening to people in Nepal speaking English and reading their writing in English. English is a living language and different native and non-native speakers develop English in slightly different ways. This paper argues that it is time to consider whether we should study the English spoken by native-Nepali speakers (Nepenglish) as a separately developing variant of English. The question is particularly intriguing since Nepali English bears such a similarity with Indian English, as both are largely based on originally Sanskrit-based languages. The focus is particularly on how native-Nepali speakers express themselves in English.
Reference:
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
They are all tools for digital storytelling. On Thursday May 14th, the Fusion-funded, inter-faculty BU Datalabs team presented at Interdisciplinary Research Week. Guests from across the University and beyond came to learn about digital storytelling and how visual data stories can better communicate the significance of research findings to policy-makers and the public.
Weathering the rain, the event kicked off with a reflective exercise called ‘Analogue Twitter.’ Participants were asked to write down a story of their research in 140 characters or less. From sports management to midwifery, research stories spanned the disciplines.
To get things going, Senior Lecturer in Digital Storytelling, Dr. Brad Gyori brought his expertise in interactive media, and his experience as the Head Writer of the Emmy award winning show Talk Soup, to introduce the audience to the many storytelling patterns that have emerged with the rise and innovation of digital platforms. Digital storytelling can range from Fishbone narratives that have one main linear narrative with suggested diversions, to the Amusement Park that offers loosely clustered, different perspectives with no central hub, as we see in Highrise: Out of my Window.
Next up, Dr. Anna Feigenbaum, a Senior Lecturer from the Faculty of Media and Communications, introduced the audience to the power of storytelling with maps and infographics. Drawing from her own tear gas project and others’ expertise, she explored how visuals can act as ‘infobait’, drive curiosity, and interrupt dominant narratives.
After lunch, BU Datalabs project partner Malachy Browne from the social media journalism outfit reportedly shared insights and strategies for using online tools to do investigative research, share your findings, and dig deeper into social data. From apigee for APIs to mine social media data, to wolframalpha that can return the weather from any date in history, Browne made connections between the tools of his trade and the possibilities for expanding our digital methods in academia.
For more information on the BU Datalabs project, email: afeigenbaum@bournemouth.ac.uk If you would like to get involved, we will be hosting a meeting open to all staff and students in early July. Details to follow.
The following funding opportunities have been announced. Please follow the links for more information:
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, GB
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, together with the Medical Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, invites outline proposals for its Diet and Health Research Industry Club. Funding enables UK universities and institutes to carry out research that will enhance understanding and facilitate the development of products with health and nutrition benefits, and help address diet-related health issues in the longer term. Research proposals must address at least one of the challenges: Understanding the relationship between food processing and nutrition; designing foods to maintain and improve health; understanding food choice and eating behaviour to improve health through diet. Maximum award: Not specified. Closing date: 4pm, 01/07/15 for outline proposals. Full proposals are by invitation.
Economic and Social Research Council, GB
The Economic and Social Research Council, the Medical Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the National Council of State Funding Agencies (CONFAP) and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) invite applications for their Healthy Urban Living call and the Social Science of the Food-Water-Energy Nexus, under the Newton Fund. For the Healthy Urban Living stream, all proposals must address the theme of health inequalities and justice and one or more of the following areas: urban design, planning housing and infrastructure; communities, culture and heritage; leadership, governance and institutions. The total fund from the Research Councils is £2.5m, with matched equivalent for Brazilian partners. For the Social Science of the Food-Water-Energy Nexus stream, proposals should clearly identify one or more of these themes as the focus of the research project and demonstrate how it will be applied to the development of the Social Science of the Food-Water-Energy Nexus: Measuring, modelling and understanding the Nexus; innovation for sustainable transformations; the political economy and governance of the Nexus; human welfare, development and the Nexus. The total fund from the Research Councils is £1.25m, with matched equivalent for Brazilian partners. Maximum award: Not specified. Closing date: 4pm, 02/07/15.
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, GB
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Innovate UK invite expressions of interest to attend their state of the art in simulation and design workshop. This aims to identify the state of the art in fundamental simulation and modelling techniques that can help improve the design process within engineering design, and to enable users to progress in their use of these tools and determine key areas of need not currently being addressed by research programmes. The workshop will be held on 16 July 2015. The workshop will focus on the areas of optimisation, multiphysics, materials modelling and multiscale, with challenges identified in the sectors of automotive, aerospace, energy, built environment, healthcare technologies, electronics, and the process industries of chemicals and food.Awards cover reasonable travel and subsistence costs, including accommodation, refreshments and meal costs. Maximum award: Not specified. Closing date: 4pm, 10/06/15.
Innovate UK, GB
Innovate UK, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council invite expressions of interest for the fourth round of their Early-stage Translation studies, under the Industrial Biotechnology Catalyst. This supports research and development for the processing and production of materials, chemicals and bioenergy through the sustainable exploitation of biological resources, including tissues, enzymes, and genes from organisms that include algae, marine life, fungi, microorganisms and plants, and accelerate commercialisation. Projects must be pre-competitive and academic-led. Funding is only available to academics in line with the standard BBSRC and EPSRC eligibility rules. Total project costs should be between £2m and £5m and projects should last between three and five years. Maximum award: £5m. Closing date: 12pm, 05/08/15 for expressions of interest.
Medical Research Council, GB
The Medical Research Council, together with the Economic and Social Research Council, the Brazilian Council of State Funding Agencies and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, invite proposals for the UK-Brazil Neglected Infectious Diseases Partnership. The initiative will provide funding for collaborative research projects, focussed on neglected infectious diseases in Brazil. Proposals may focus on Dengue Fever and other vector-borne diseases, Leishmaniasis, Chagas Disease, Leprosy, Schistosomiasis, Omtestinal Helminth Infectious, Rotaviruses and emerging viruses. Projects should last between two and three years. Maximum award: Not specified. Closing date: 01/06/15.
Natural Environment Research Council, GB
The Natural Environment Research Council invites applications for its Industrial CASE Studentships. This scheme promotes collaboration between the research community and the end users of research. Applicants must demonstrate excellent science research along with the potential for societal or economic impact through strong collaboration with the non-academic partners and the provision of high quality training in research skills. The CASE partner must be an end user organisation that can use the outputs of research in developing business, technology, regulation, policy or social and environmental enterprise, within the public, private or third sector. The CASE partner must have a base in the UK. Maximum award: Not specified. Closing date: 4pm, 08/07/15.
Please note that some funding bodies specify a time for submission as well as a date. Please confirm this with your RKEO Funding Development Officer
You can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in RKEO or view the recent blog post here.
If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.
The Politics and Media Research Group in FMC has a very stimulating guest speaker lined up for this afternoon (Monday). Dr. Jeffrey Murer is Lecturer on Collective Violence at the University of St. Andrews, in the School of International Relations. He is unusual for an IR specialist in that he draws deeply on ideas from psychoanalysis in his studies of violent political conflict. The title of his talk is “The Politics of Splitting: Anxiety, Loss and the Anti-Semitic, Anti-Roma Violence of Contemporary Hungary”. While focussing on the situation in Hungary, his talk will illustrate how an interdisciplinary, psycho-social approach can be applied to generate insights into violence in many other contexts.
The talk will be in P406. It will start at 5.00 and be followed, until 6.30, by questions and discussion.
All staff and students are welcome.
Join us to celebrate the breadth and excellence of Bournemouth University’s research as part of Interdisciplinary Research Week this May. This is an opportunity to spark new collaborations and ideas among our diverse research community.
This year we have a week long programme of lectures, demonstrations, discussions and a film, which will showcase the fantastic research which is being undertaken at the university.
This is the tenth in a series of blog posts which will highlight the events you can join throughout the week. The tenth event of the programme will take place on Friday 15th May, Professor Vanora Hundley, Dr Ann Luce & Professor Edwin van Teijlingen will discuss if fear is increasingly cited as a reason for rising rates of intervention in childbirth, with women allegedly opting for operative birth to avoid going through labour. Explanatory factors are said to include previous negative birth experiences, but increasingly the way that childbirth is portrayed by the media is suggested to be having a significant effect on women’s perceptions and raising anxiety with regard to the birth process. This lecture reports the findings from interdisciplinary research exploring the impact of the mass media on women’s views of childbirth.
This event will take place on Talbot Campus in KG03 from 2.00pm-4.00pm, with refreshments available from 4.00pm. You can book your place by clicking here.
Join us to celebrate the breadth and excellence of Bournemouth University’s research as part of Interdisciplinary Research Week this May. This is an opportunity to spark new collaborations and ideas among our diverse research community.
This year we have a week long programme of lectures, demonstrations, discussions and a film, which will showcase the fantastic research which is being undertaken at the university.
This is the eigth in a series of blog posts which will highlight the events you can join throughout the week. The eigth event of the programme will take place on Thursday 14th May, Screening of RUFUS STONE (30 minutes) followed by Q & A with Project Lead, Executive Producer and Author of the film, Dr Kip Jones. Bournemouth University1s Gay and Pleasant Land? project was part of the national New Dynamics of Ageing Programme funded by Research Councils UK. The project investigated ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales. Research Team: Dr K. Jones, L-A. Fenge, R. Read & M. Cash
This event will take place on Talbot Campus in Stevenson Lecture Theatre from 2.00pm-3.30pm, with refreshments available from 13.30pm. You can book your place by clicking here.
Join us to celebrate the breadth and excellence of Bournemouth University’s research as part of Interdisciplinary Research Week this May. This is an opportunity to spark new collaborations and ideas among our diverse research community.
This year we have a week long programme of lectures, demonstrations, discussions and a film, which will showcase the fantastic research which is being undertaken at the university.
This is the seventh in a series of blog posts which will highlight the events you can join throughout the week. The seventh event of the programme will take place on Thursday 14th May, Digital transformations in communications have led to the increasing popularity of data visualisations and the use of maps and other multimedia interactives for representing complex data. Often, these visual data stories can better communicate the significance of research findings to policy-makers and the public. Beyond engendering greater comprehension, this turn to the visual can also tap into our emotions and cultural values. In this Masterclass, we will introduce the audience to the emerging interdisciplinary field of data storytelling research. Drawing on a range of contemporary examples, we will present a variety of techniques and technologies for creating data stories.
This event will take place on Talbot Campus in KG01 from 11.00pm 2.00pm, with lunch available from 12.30pm. You can book your place by clicking here. 
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Calling all PGRs! Apply for the May Research Café by 14 March
Coming soon : The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2025
BRIAN drop-in surgery, 11th March.
Being Human Festival 2025: call for applications now open
Presenting HSRI results at Nepal Dialogue UK
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025
Update on UKRO services
European research project exploring use of ‘virtual twins’ to better manage metabolic associated fatty liver disease
BU Professor has been invited to a series of plenary and invited lectures.
Research Information Network
Horizon Europe info days 2025