Tagged / female academics

FHSS Women in Science

 

Tomorrow Friday 11th February is the UN’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science.  To celebrate this event we would like to highlight the contributions of three BU female academics in the sciences in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences: Jane Murphy, Rebecca Neal and Amanda Wilding.

Jane Murphy

Prof Jane Murphy – Professor in Nutrition, Co-lead for the Aging and Dementia Research Centre

Jane is a role model as a female research leader committed to solving key nutrition problems in older adults. She has won funding from prestigious organisations like the Burdett Trust for Nursing and NIHR. Jane’s research has direct impact in practice through her clinical lead role in the Wessex Academic Health Science Network. She influences high standards in education and practice in her role as an elected council member for the Association for Nutrition.

Dr. Rebecca Neal– Senior Lecturer in Exercise Physiology.

Rebecca is an Early Career Research excelling in traditionally male-dominated field of Sport and Exercise Science. Her work in the field of Extreme Environmental Physiology is published in prestigious physiology journals and she has been the recipient of external and internal grants to advance her work. Rebecca contributes greatly to transferring her research finding to the end user, through public engagement events, magazine articles and podcasts aimed at raising the awareness of the issues and needs of individuals exercising in extreme environments.

Dr. Amanda Wilding– Senior Lecturer in Sport Psychology

In addition to teaching Sport and Exercise Psychology, Amanda works as a Sports Psychologist in professional male football and Army rugby. Her involvement working in male dominated sports lead to her being invited to lead a workshop on Women in Sport  to women at the Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University in Saudi Arabia.

Women academics, social media and gender-based violence.

Dr Emma Kavanagh and Dr Lorraine Brown (FoM) have just published a paper entitled ‘Towards a research agenda for examining online gender-based violence against women academics’. Work on this topic was inspired by Emma’s research on the online violence experienced by female athletes and further influenced by work on sexual harassment by the Women’s Academic Network (WAN), which ran a symposium on the topic in June this year. The writing of the paper was supported through writing retreats organised by WAN. The focus of this paper builds upon the critical mass of research being conducted exploring inter-personal violence and gender-based violence in sporting spaces by members of the Department of Sport and Event Management, and the work of the Bournemouth University Gender Research Group.

There is an increasing call for academics to promote their research and enhance their impact through engaging in digital scholarship through social media platforms. While there are numerous benefits concerned with increasing the reach of academic work using virtual platforms, it has been widely noted that social media sites, such as Twitter, are spaces where hostility towards women and hate speech are increasingly normalised. In their paper, Emma and Lorraine provide a review of the current literature concerning violence toward women academics online and further provide suggestions for a research agenda which aims to understand the phenomena of gender-based violence more clearly and work toward safeguarding (female) academics engaging in digital scholarship. As they rightly state: “institutions such as universities that are increasingly placing pressure on women academics to engage in virtual platforms to disseminate their work have a responsibility in the prevention and protection of harm”.