

Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
At the online editorial board meeting today [Saturday 29th June] of the Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology I had the pleasure of seeing Bournemouth University’s latest paper ‘The Importance of Positionality for Qualitative Researchers‘ ahead of publication [1]. The lead author of this paper is Hannah Gurr and this methodology paper is part of her M.Res. research project in Social Work. Hannah is supervised by Dr. Louise Oliver, Dr. Orlanda Harvey and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences (FHSS).
Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology is a Gold Open Access journal so when it appears online it will be free to read for anybody across the globe.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
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Dr. Nirmal Aryal, who is a part-time researcher in the Department of Nursing Sciences, is in Malaysia this week to prepare further migrant-health research collaborations and plans. His trip is part of the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences (FHSS) seed-corn funding for Early Career Researchers. In Malaysia Nirmal has conducted several PPIE (Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement) events with migrant workers and stakeholders, including current Nepalese migrant workers. Nirmal is working closely with Dr. Pramod Regmi and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (both based in FHSS) in the field of the health and well-being of Nepalse migrant workers. Today Nirmal also met with the Ambassador of Nepal in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) who expressed a great interest in our work.
Nirmal is on a double mission as building links in Malaysia is also important for our latest funded project ‘ENSURE‘. ENSURE is a project led by La Isla Network in the United States of America. La Isla Network, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (based in the U.S.), the Nepal Development Society and Bournemouth University are leading the first-ever international effort to research and address trafficking among Nepalese labour migrants. The work is funded by a $4 million cooperative agreement awarded by the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, International Programs.
BU Research Centre CSSRC is celebrating its interdisciplinary and intersectoral research around sustainable food on Wednesday 26th June 2024, 4.45-7.00pm.
The Centre for Sustainable & Socially Responsible Consumption (CSSRC) invites you to attend its research event on Wednesday 26th June 2024 to celebrate its interdisciplinary and intersectoral research around sustainable food. After a welcome refreshment this interesting and informative event will comprise of three topical presentation sessions, each lead by a member of CSSRC, as outlined below. Opportunity for discussions and networking over drinks and nibbles after the talks will round off the event.
Session 1: FoodMAPP: Local food supply communicated through a transactional searchable MAP based APPlication
FoodMAPP is a European funded research project that is developing a searchable map-based platform that will enable consumers to search and buy food products directly from local suppliers. Currently within Europe food is transported, on average, 171km from farm to fork. 26 per cent of global carbon emissions come from food and large volumes of food are wasted. The FoodMAPP project aims to address these challenges by enabling consumers to identify and purchase local sources of food in real time to shorten supply chains and reduce food waste, while also providing additional sustainable income to food producers and providers. The project, led by Professor of Consumer Behaviour Jeff Bray, consists of a consortium of European partners, comprising academic partners in Croatia, Hungary, Spain and Belgium and industry partners in France & Austria. In this session Professor Bray will introduce the project and discuss current insights from it.
Session 2: Assessing the impact of food prices on consumption and health
Professor of Economics Tim Lloyd will present this session and introduce this Defra funded project. The overall aim of this project is to develop user-friendly software, underpinned by theory and modelling that will provide Defra with the capacity to assess the potential impacts of external and internal shocks and the outcome of potential policy options, not just on prices but on food consumption more generally, including the health impacts across socio-economic groups, while addressing the resilience of the UK food chain and environmental challenges. The project has Defra Funding for two years and is a collaboration with the University of Exeter, that develops previous work on food price modelling in relation to Brexit that formed the basis of an Impact Case submitted to UoA17 (Business and Management) in REF2021. The current project started in December 2023 and is in its early phase of development. The BU team comprises Tim Lloyd (Professor of Economics) and Adam Witt (ECR) from the Department of Accounting Finance and Economics in BUBS. It is envisioned that the output of the project will augment the government’s analytical capacity in the politically sensitive area of food prices and form an Impact Case Study for REF2029.
Session 3: An exploration of alternative food network practices
The landscape of food systems is evolving, with alternative food networks (AFNs) gaining prominence. AFNs encompass decentralised and locally rooted system that seek to establish direct connections between producers and consumers, often bypassing conventional supply chains e.g. farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA), and food cooperatives. As consumer preferences shift towards locally sourced and sustainable food options, it is essential to assess the challenges and opportunities that arise in the context of AFNs. Through exploring AFNs and SFSCs, this project seeks to understand their potential contributions to sustainability, resilience, and community well-being. In this session Dr Anthony Ezenwa will present his BU QR-funded research that explores the nuances of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) and Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs), using Dorset County, England as a comprehensive case study. Dr Ezenwa will highlight the various typologies and meanings associated with these concepts and discuss how the social and institutional perspectives surrounding the challenges and opportunities within AFNs and SFSCs practices in the region, shedding light on their intricate links.
Provisional Timetable:
4.45-5.00pm – Welcome refreshments
5.00-6.15pm – Presentation sessions
6.15-7.00pm – Discussion, networking and refreshments
This is a free event, but you must register to attend via Eventbrite: A Celebration of Sustainable Food Related Research Tickets, Wed 26 Jun 2024 at 16:45 | Eventbrite
At BU we promote and celebrate the work done to engage public audiences with our research.
The Public Engagement with Research team in Research Development and Support can help promote your event to relevant audiences through our monthly newsletters and via our social media channels.
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This month we welcome Sandra, CEO of Christchurch Community Partnership
Christchurch Community Partnership’s vision is to see social isolation and loneliness eradicated in Christchurch. Although working with the whole adult population, the CCP mainly delivers services and projects to older residents, given that Christchurch has the highest proportion of 65-90 years old in Dorset.
Their objective is to reconnect isolated folk back into community through Lunch Clubs, Coffee Connections and many other activities, where they can build social networks, to improve their quality of life. CCP’s other focus is to bring organisations and groups together to work collaboratively so the community benefits from a wider range of support.
Community voices is a collaboration between BU PIER partnership and Centre for Seldom Heard Voices to provide a platform and a voice to local community activists.
Please do join us for this webinar….
Microsoft Teams meeting
Join on your computer, mobile app or room device
Click here to join the meeting
Meeting ID: 397 765 953 34
Passcode: ohbzTW
Today, Sunday 9th June, our paper ‘Health and well-being of Nepalese migrant workers abroad was highlighted by ResearchGate as being widely read. This scientific paper which was part of Dr. Pratik Adhikary’s PhD study in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences has been read 1,000 times.
Rejection is a key part of an academic’s life. Typically, your scientific paper gets rejected at least one before getting accepted for publication. Whilst it is common knowledge among academics is that your average grant application has a chance of about one in eight, and Innovate UK Smart grants have a “public” success rate of just 5%. As academics we all have to learn to live with ‘failure’ . However, when we received a rejection this week to be part of the ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council) Festival of Social Science 2024 for our research project Preventing drowning of children under two in Bangladesh: An interdisciplinary approach, it was a first!
We thought we had a decent chance as (1) our interdisciplinary team includes an anthropologist, an economist and a sociologist. (2) This year the call for Festival of Social Science was for a joint Bournemouth University and the University of Southampton programme, and our NIHR (National Institute for Health Research)-funded Sonamoni project is an international joint project between Bournemouth University and the University of Southampton, working with the University of the West of England, the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute), CIPRB in Bangladesh and Design Without Borders in Uganda. (3) We had included an element of Virtual reality as this year’s festival theme will be ‘Our Digital Lives’. Finally, (4) I have been successful before in the past applying for inclusion into the ESRC Festival of Learning, for example highlight our research in Nepal and India in 2018 or our Breastfeeding Debate in the 2017 Festival of Learning. Obviously past success is no guarantee for future success! Hopefully, we have better luck next year when we have more results to present in a knowledge exchange event like this.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
Earlier this week ResearchGate alerted us that the paper ‘The Growing Importance of Mixed-Methods Research in Health‘ has been read 900 times on that platform [1]. This methods paper focuses on the growing importance of mixed-methods research to a wide range of health disciplines ranging from nursing to epidemiology.
Mixed-methods approaches requires not only the skills of the individual quantitative and qualitative methods but also a skill set to bring two methods/datasets/findings together in the most appropriate way. Health researchers need to pay careful attention to the ‘best’ approach to designing, implementing, analysing, integrating both quantitative (number) and qualitative (word) information and writing this up in a way that enhances its applicability and broadens the evidence-based practice. This paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of mixed-methods approaches as well as some of the common mistakes made by researchers applying mixed-methods for the first time.
Our team in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH) has written several other methods papers on the importance of mixed-methods research in community-based health studies [2-5]. We have, of course, conducted and published many mixed-methods studies over the past two decades [see for example 6-10].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
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The fourth International Conference on Medical and Health Sciences in September 2024 aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from around the world to discuss the latest advancements, challenges, and innovations in the field of medical and health sciences. Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen co-director of the Centre for Midwifery and Women’s Health (CMWH) has been invited as a keynote speaker. He will be addressing the issue of being a interdisciplinary researcher in a larger research team.
Last week we found out that the paper ‘Moral panic, fear, stigma, and discrimination against returnee migrants and Muslim populations in Nepal: analyses of COVID-19 media content’ was published by the Journal of Media Studies [1]. This latest paper is co-authored by Dr. Nirmal Aryal and Dr. Pramod Regmi in the Department of Nursing Sciences, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH), as well as former BU employee Dr. Shovita Dhakal Adhokari. The published paper addresses the effects of COVID-19 stereotyping and so-called ‘othering’ on migrant workers returning home to Nepal is the latest article in a long line of publications by Faculty of Health and Social Sciences (FHSS) academics.
This BU team (including former and current PhD students) has published over thirty papers on a wide range of aspects related to migrant and their work, health and well-being [2-31].
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Furthermore, there will also be a presentation on another recently completed study on the impact of federalisation on Nepal’s health system. The paper ‘Studying The Effects Of Federalisation On Nepal’s Health System: From Participatory Action Research To Producing Policy Briefs’ will be presented by Dr. Sharada P. Wasti (University of Greenwich), Prof. Padam Simkhada (University of Huddersfield & Visiting Professor at BU), and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. This interdisciplinary study was funded by the Health Systems Research Initiative (MRC/FCDO/Wellcome Trust/ESRC).
Funding of up to £1,000 per event is available, and BU’s Public Engagement with Research team offers continuing advice and support on all areas of event development, planning, delivery and evaluation.
The 22nd annual ESRC Festival of Social Science will take place this year Saturday 19 October – Saturday 9 November, with the theme ‘Our Digital Lives’
This national festival offers the chance to create an inspiring event to connect your research in an engaging way with a broad public audience and take your research off campus.
For the second year, BU is partnering with the University of Southampton (UoS) and we are particularly keen to hear from researchers who have already established collaborations with UoS colleagues and may wish to run a joint event. This collaboration enables us to run an extended programme of events, broadening our impact reach and expanding our networks across Dorset and Hampshire.
The Festival of Social Science is an annual celebration of research and knowledge about humans and society. It is an opportunity for anyone to explore topics relating to social science – from health and wellbeing to crime, equality, education and identity – through events run by researchers from UK universities. There’s no cost to attend, and most are open to everyone, though some are aimed at specific groups.
Everyone has to start somewhere, and this is the ideal place. You’ll have access to support, advice and training throughout. If you’re unsure, seek out a more experienced colleague to collaborate with.
The ESRC says that events must “feature social science (ideally with a social scientist involved in the event)”. If this doesn’t clearly apply to you, consider these options;
Being part of this festival means a higher level of support and reach than we usually provide.
Before applying, you’ll have access to:
When your application is successful, you’ll get:
Apply to take part in the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2024 by completing the online application form,
Should you require any more information, or if you would like to arrange a chat with the Public Engagement Team to discuss your application, please contact: publicengagement@bournemouth.ac.uk.
BU Professor Zulfiqar A Khan has been invited to the 12th International Conference KOD 2024, Machine and Industrial Design in Mechanical Engineering to deliver a plenary talk to disseminate and discuss, the latest work on numerical simulation and modelling in interacting machines and systems conducted in NanoCorr, Energy and Modelling (NCEM) Research Group led by Professor Khan. This talk is also aimed to provide an overview of Professor Khan’s work in terms of Nanoengineering & Energy Systems (NES®).
System and Design – © Z Khan 2024.
The overall relation of interacting systems, durability and reliability will be discussed by Professor Khan in the following invited lecture, entitled “an overview of research: numerical modelling and simulation for predictive condition monitoring,” invited by Professor Aleksandar Marinković, Head of Machine Design Department, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering University of Belgrade, and Prof. DR Vladimir Popović, Dean of Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade, the Republic of Serbia. Professor Popović has extended this invitation to include Professor Khan’s meetings with Faculty Management and Chairs of Laboratories for exploring to pursue mutual interests’ initiatives and common goals in Nanoengineering & Energy Systems (NES®).
Interacting System © Z A Khan 2024.
Contact mechanics and nanomaterials – IC © Z Khan 2024.
Professor Khan will then deliver an invited lecture in Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, National Institute of the Republic of Serbia to discuss the latest developed mathematical models, Khan-Nazir I, Khan-Nazir II and Khan-Nazir III, these are BU’s ground breaking and globally leading contributions to knowledge in terms of developing impactful design solutions to aid safety, cost savings, energy efficiency and reliability applied in complex interacting and energy systems. These novel models are linked to recently awarded GB, US, PR China, Singapore, Hong Kong (notice of allowance) and EU/EPO (pending) patents in mechanistic, nanofluidics and energy systems developed at BU by NCEM team led by Professor Khan. This lecture is invited by DR Ivana Atanasovska, seminar leader and Stepa Paunović, secretary of the seminar. This lecture will be live streamed on Tuesday, 28 May 2024, you are invited to join.
Interacting System 2 © Z Khan 2024.
This will be followed by invited meetings with key researchers and academics in the Institute of General and Physical Chemistry, Studentski try 12/V, Belgrade to explore collaborative initiatives in Clean Energy Systems.
If you are interested in any of the above topics, events and would like to know more then please get in touch through this link.
Fifteen years ago I started as a professor in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences. I have had three different job titles without moving jobs, starting in 2009 with ‘Professor of Maternal & Perinatal Health Research’, which, after a few years, changed to ‘Professor of Reproductive Health Research,’ and again then a few years later dropping the ‘Research’ to my current title of ‘Professor of Reproductive Health’. During these 15 years there have been major changes especially in terms of research in our Faculty. There has been a growth in quantity as well as quality as reflected in our REF scores in 2014 and 2021! We also have a much higher proportion of staff with a PhD then when I started. Currently, I am the Research Culture Champion for our Faculty, tasked with a small team to strengthen our research culture and profile even further.
At a personal level, I have supervised 17 PhD students to completion at BU in the past 15 years, plus an additional nine students registered elsewhere. The latter were mainly PhD students from the University of Aberdeen whom I continued to supervise. Interestingly, two of these Aberdeen PhD students ended up working for BU. I counted 42 PhD viva as external examiner in this period as well as five as internal BU examiner. Some of my experiences at BU were captured last year when I was interviewed by the editors of a sociology journal based in Nepal. [1]
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMWH (Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health)
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Two weeks ago our eBook Evidence-based approaches in aging and public health was published online by Frontiers Media [1]. This ebook is co-edited by BU Visiting Faculty Dr. Brijesh Sathian (based in Qatar), Prof. Padam Simkhada (based at the University of Huddersfield) and Prof. Edwin van Teijingen in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH) as well as Drs. Russell Kabir and Hanadi Al Hamad. This eBook started life as a Special Issue for the journal Frontiers in Public Health. We wrote the accompanying editorial for 15 selected articles in this Special Issue [2]. This publication raises the interesting question when does a Special Issue become an eBook.
CMWH
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At Café Scientifique, you can explore the latest ideas in science and technology in a relaxed setting. Enjoy listening to a short talk before engaging in debate and discussion with our guest speaker and audience
We’ll be joined by Professor Lee Miles, Dr Frazer Ball, Dr Yue Zhang, & Martin Travers and Charles Jenkins on Tuesday 4 June from 6:30 – 8:00pm.
There are many dangers faced by societies, communities, and households today – whether that is accidents in the home, flooding, other extreme weather events, medical emergencies such as pandemics, and even terrorism.
Join researchers from Bournemouth University Business School to hear about how they are helping communities and households understand the range of hazards they face.
You’ll also hear from Safehouse Pro, experts in public safety, who are working with our researchers, and get a chance to record your views for their ongoing national survey.
This event will be held at The Black Cherry in Boscombe, Bournemouth. Although the talks start at 6:30pm, the café will be open early so we encourage you to arrive early for a drink and a bite to eat before the talk starts.
If you have any questions about this event please email the Public Engagement with Research Team: publicengagement@bournemouth.ac.uk
Yesterday our latest methodological paper ‘Methods or Methodology: Terms That Are Too Often Confused’ appeared online. [1] We recently published a methods paper outlining the difference between Methods and Methodology as so many postgraduate students manage to get it wrong or don’t understand the distinction between the two. There is a distinct difference between methodology and methods in research. However, too many students, researchers, and authors of academic papers do not seem to pay attention to the crucial difference. This is true not only in education research but also in many other academic disciplines. In simple terms, the term methods refers to the research tools and techniques; for example, in the qualitative field, interviews are a tool to collect data, and in the quantitative field, a questionnaire-based survey is an example of a data collection tool. Methodology is a broader concept as it refers to the overall approach to the research, includes a justification for this approach, and links to research philosophy, i.e., how we produce knowledge. This methodological note aims to explain the confusion, drawing on examples from the published literature in education research and beyond. It also considers the complexities and crossovers. The final section ends with key advice to researchers and authors on key mistakes to avoid regarding the difference between methods and methodology, including covering this in early supervision discussions.
Our interdisciplinary team, based in the UK and Nepal, comprises Dr. Orlanda Harvey in BU’s Department of Sociology & Social Work, Dr. Pramod Regmi in BU’s Department of Nursing Science, Dr. Preeti Mahato from Royal Holloway, University of London, Dr. Shovita Dhakal Adhikari, London Metropolitan University, Dr. Rolina Dhital, based at Health Action & Research in Nepal and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in BU’s Department of Midwifery & Health Sciences. In addition it is worth mentioning that both Preeti and Shovita are both former member of staff in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences (FHSS) at BU. Finally, although the official publication date is Sept 2023, it only appeared online yesterday. This new methods paper is part of growing series of methods papers by members of this team of academics [2-12].
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