Research Festival Engaging Research on Global Challenges and Social Justice

2.00-3.00pm

Roundtable
Digital research methods

‘Not quite real life: accessing authenticity through digital research methods’ will explore the practice and ethics of conducting research in an online environment. It will consider not only the practical but also the ethical, methodological and theoretical rationales for conducting research in this way. Rather than conceptualising the internet as a substitute or stand in for ‘real life’, it will locate this practice within an understanding of the power of this medium as a fundamentally relational technology. Speakers: Rose Capdevila, Lisa Lazard

Building upon her award-winning Enduring Love? study, Jacqui Gabb worked with a start-up tech company to develop Paired, which is now the global #1 couple relationship app. Her current research is pioneering conceptual tools to examine contemporary relationship quality and digital intimacies. Speaker: Jacqui Gabb

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Roundtable
Engaging with Publics and Policy Maker

‘Research that reaches a general audience: tips and tricks to make media commentary work for you’. Speaker: Precious Chatterje-Doody

‘Forest and Trees’: doing feminist and queer public sociology on Chinese social media. Speaker: Ling Tang

‘The research-policy nexus’: This talk will outline Prof Nicola Yeates’ experience of working with advocacy actors across different social policy worlds. Speaker: Nicola Yeates

Chair: Umut Erel

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Roundtable
Participatory research methods

‘Arts into Acts’ is an action participatory research investigating how young people, refugees and locals, create belonging and enact citizenship. Located in Lesvos, Greece it has taken place online through creative and digital methods. Speaker: Elena Boukouvala

‘Participatory photography for peace’: navigating methodological and ethical challenges when using images as part of socio-political transformative research agendas. The presentation draws on PhotoVoice projects working with refugee women and youth in Uganda and trans-community members in Mozambique. Speaker: Craig Walker

Critical reflections on participatory visual methods and voice: This presentation offers some critical reflections on the relationship between participatory visual methods and voice. Drawing on research which aimed to explore this relationship from the perspective of researchers, participants and audiences, it also considers why it matters that we ask critical questions about this supposed relationship in our own research. Speaker: Daniel McCulloch

Chair: Melis Cin (Lancaster University)

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Co-hosted by the REDEFINE Project and the GCSJ Centre
China/Europe and the Changing Global Order Seminar Series

Re-orienting global development: the multiscalar narratives of Chinese infrastructure investment in Europe. Speakers: Giles Mohan, Ran Hu & Weiwei Chen

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Research in Focus
Lighting up the sparks: Why we need good stories for bad times

How do new ways of thinking emerge in times of ideological polarisation and division enabling those involved to transform destructive conflicts into constructive ones, and what can these stories of hope and possibility do in times of contestation today. This paper explores one example from the conflict in and about Northern Ireland (1972-1998) and its transformation, using the oral histories of politically motivated prisoners and Open University students from The Open University in Ireland’s Time to Think archive, as a case study, alongside follow up focus group discussions undertaken across a politically tumultuous year locally and globally, from July 2020-July 2021. Speaker: Gabi Kent

Chair: Keir Irwin-Rogers

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Roundtable
The Global Commons

‘The high seas, the deep-sea bed, Antarctica, the atmosphere, and outer space are all defined as “global commons”. That is, they belong to no particular jurisdiction and we all (seem to) have rights concerning them. Where did the idea come from, and where is it going? What light can we throw on the concept and its relations to current controversies and debates?’

Details

Who owns the global commons? Speaker: Derek Matravers
Rights for none and all? The historical demise of the commons and the problem of power. Speaker: Dan Taylor
What's so Common(s) about Outer Space? Speaker: Natalie Treviño

Chair: Giles Mohan

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Research in Focus
(In)visibility, business continuity and organisational survival in the United Nations system during crisis

How do international organisations (IOs) survive during times of global crisis? In this paper Dr Georgina Holmes examines how the UN system bureaucracy continued to function in the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting a feminist ethics of care and drawing on field research conducted with UN Women, the paper critically analyses staff perceptions of their experiences of operating in UN ‘virtual offices’ between March 2020 and August 2021, when the UN Secretary General called for a system-wide adoption of the Alternative Working Arrangements Directive. It is argued that business continuity is a necessary component of IO survival, and that staff efforts to secure their own employee survival at the micro-level supports system-wide IO organisational survival. Yet if not effectively designed and implemented, business continuity processes can come at a cost to staff well-being. Speaker: Georgina Holmes

Chair: Filippo Boni

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Research practices
Research funding – academic and research support perspectives

The workshop will give an overview of main funding opportunities and introduce the research bidding support team who are available to help colleagues who are considering applying for research grants. It will also include the perspectives of experienced academics who have successfully received funding for their research and the best practices they have developed in this process. Speakers: Suzanne Duncanson-Hunter, Simon Usherwood, Sophie Watson

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Research in Focus
Who are the Climate Activists in Parliament Square? A Study of the Big British Rebellions

This talk provides a historical and social scientific examination of climate activism in Britain through the prism of the demonstrations and protest actions carried on in London since the first Extinction Rebellion mass protest in 2018. I will offer context by discussing the preceding Global Days of Action, which started in the early 2000s, with my own ethnographic data going back to December 2007. Descending onto the capital, often in pilgrimage-like fashion, should not suggest that the Houses of Parliament represent a sacred site where protestors can claim justice, but increasingly a global stage for performing new protest repertoires oriented against what activists understand as political injustice fuelled by fossil fuels. I am particularly interested in examining what the various strategies of conducting protest by the British Houses of Parliament, from carnivalesque processions, to being arrested, can tell us about the cultural heritages of alternative and mainstream political cultures today. Speaker: Maria Nita

Chair: Mark Lamont

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Research practices
Publishing in academic journals - tips and perspectives from editors

Speakers: Les Levidov, Arabella Fraser, Aiora Zabala

Chair: TBC

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite

Research in Focus
Directing Innovation Towards Just Outcomes: The Role of Principles and Politics

Contemporary innovation theorists tend to defend a combination of Schumpeterian and Keynesian politics of innovation as a solution to the problem of directionality of new technologies towards socially just outcomes. Their hope is that the Schumpeterian motor of innovation would keep entrepreneurs incentivised to take market opportunities and the Keynesian state would invest in infrastructure, redistributing risks and rewards of new technologies. In contrast, Hayekian theorists of innovation insist that top-down state interventions aiming at directionality suffer from epistemological and moral problems. For them, politics of innovation ought to abandon the idea of directionality towards social justice altogether because it is morally questionable and creates disincentives for taking up new risky ventures in the market. Instead, politics of innovation ought to be restricted in promoting an institutional environment that is conducive to entrepreneurship. I will argue that despite differences, both theoretical camps rely on liberal notions of morality and politics which justify predominantly distributional currencies of justice, overlooking questions of relational equality in innovation. Therefore, they fail to go far enough to eliminate unjust relations of private ownership, domination, and oppression within processes of production of novel technological goods and services (e.g., IPRs). Speaker: Theo Papaioannou

Chair: Jamie Gaskarth

Sign up for this event via Eventbrite