The IDS Nature Initiative Research, Development & Demonstration (RD&D) Project

Announced in January 2008, a new £20 million investment has established five Centres of Excellence across the UK to strengthen research into complex public health issues such as obesity, smoking and health inequalities. (See linked Editorial page xx.) The UK Clinical Research Collaboration (UKCRC) brought together funders to support this initiative to develop a coordinated approach to strengthen public health research in the UK, which was administered by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The funding Partners are the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Economic and Social Research Council, Health and Social Care Research & Development Office for Northern Ireland, Medical Research Council, National Institute for Health Research, Wales Office of Research and Development—Welsh Assembly Government and the Wellcome Trust. The Centres have a clear brief to bring together leading experts from a range of disciplines to work in partnership with practitioners, policy makers and wider stakeholders to tackle public health issues that are likely to have a significant impact on the health of the nation, and to strengthen the research capacity in public health. Five successful Centres were awarded funding through a competitive process, and are based in Newcastle, Cardiff, Belfast, Cambridge and Nottingham. Between them, the Centres will conduct research across a broad range of public health issues, and on topics including diet and nutrition; physical activity; and alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Each Centre will receive up to £5 million over 5 years to create new academic posts and develop strong training and career development programmes. The funding will also provide the technical staff, IT systems, equipment, administrative support, research facilities and other infrastructure needed to support high-quality researches. Further details of each of the five centres are shown in Box 1. Box 1. Centres of Public Health Excellence Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, led by Newcastle University (in collaboration with Durham, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside Universities)—directed by Professor Martin White. Centre for the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public Health Improvement, Cardiff University (in collaboration with Swansea University and Bristol University)—directed by Professor L. Moore UKCRC Northern Ireland Centre of Excellence for Public Health Research, Queens University Belfast (in partnership with the Institute of Public Health in Ireland)—directed by Professor F. Kee Diet and Physical Activity Public Health Research Centre, Cambridge, University of Cambridge (in partnership with the University of East Anglia)—directed by Professor N. Wareham The UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, University of Nottingham (a strategic partnership between seven of the leading tobacco control and policy research groups in the UK: Nottingham; Bath; Edinburgh; Birmingham; Stirling; Queen Mary, University of London; and University College London)— directed by Professor J. Britton.

Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, is a new household panel survey motivated by the success of longitudinal studies in the UK, and funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) with co-funding from UK government departments. The UK has a diverse and rich portfolio of longitudinal studies including the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), based on 5,500 households, which ran for eighteen years from 1991 and is the predecessor of Understanding Society. The BHPS continues to be a widely used dataset in the UK and internationally, but as the panel matured it was recognised there was a need to look to the future of longitudinal data resources for the coming decades in the UK. The ESRC and the wider academic community saw this as a strategic priority to meet the emerging data needs of the social science and policy-making communities. The ESRC were successful in establishing funding for a new study which would incorporate the existing BHPS sample but with an expanded and ambitious scientific research agenda. What follows is a short description of the study’s development to date to provide the background for the papers included in this special section. In July 2005, the ESRC submitted a pivotal bid to the UK Government's Large Facilities Capital Fund, which typically funds key infrastructural investments across the natural sciences. The success of this bid represented a sea change in funding mechanisms for the social sciences, with the growing recognition that large data sets are the key infrastructural investments for the social sciences, equivalent to laboratories for the natural sciences such as the Large Hadron Collider facility in Geneva. The bid sought funding for a new and much larger household panel study, following a consultation report carried out by Longview, which recommended renewal and major expansion of the BHPS (Martin et al 2004). In May 2006, the then Office for Science and Information agreed funding for the new household panel study. The new UK household longitudinal study (UKHLS), which became known as Understanding Society, was to have the following features: • A longitudinal survey, with at least a 20 year life, of a cross-section of UK households • A sample size of 40,000 households • Innovative methods and types of data collection • A resource facilitating research on a wide variety of issues, involving not just traditional social science but linking to medical and environmental sciences • Data collection starting in 2008

IDS BulletinVolume 38, Issue 5 p. 61-73 Farmer Participation in Private Sector Agricultural Extension Dominic Glover, Dominic Glover I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the research assistance of Mr Kiran Sakkhari in carrying out the research on which this article is based. I am also grateful for the helpful comments of the three editors, Ian Scoones, Peter Newell and participants in the conference session on which this article is based. The interviews cited in this article were conducted during field visits to India and the USA between October 2004 and December 2005.Search for more papers by this author Dominic Glover, Dominic Glover I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the research assistance of Mr Kiran Sakkhari in carrying out the research on which this article is based. I am also grateful for the helpful comments of the three editors, Ian Scoones, Peter Newell and participants in the conference session on which this article is based. The interviews cited in this article were conducted during field visits to India and the USA between October 2004 and December 2005.Search for more papers by this author First published: 02 February 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2005.tb00409.xCitations: 1 AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume38, Issue5November 2007Pages 61-73 RelatedInformation

The impact of higher education institutions on society has become the focus of significant policy attention in recent years, most prominently as part of research evaluation. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of the notion, identifying the key dimensions as source, form, trajectory, intensity, timescale and destination. While acknowledging the importance of porosity between universities and society, and the need to address critical contemporary challenges, five dangers of the impact agenda are highlighted: the normative dimension; the linear relationship; unpredictability; measurement; and instrumentalization. As a response to dominant conceptualizations, the paper proposes the notion of the generative intrinsic as a more robust basis on which to base the work of universities.ResumoO impacto das instituições de ensino superior na sociedade tem se tornado o foco de atenção política significativa nos últimos anos, mais proeminentemente como parte da avaliação da pesquisa. Este artigo apresenta uma exploração teórica da categoria noção, identificando as dimensões-chave como fonte, forma, trajetória, intensidade, escala de tempo e destino. Embora reconhecendo a importância da porosidade entre as universidades e a sociedade, e a necessidade de abordar desafios contemporâneos críticos, cinco perigos da agenda de impacto são destacados: a dimensão normativa; o relacionamento linear; imprevisibilidade; medição; e instrumentalização. Como resposta às conceituações dominantes, o artigo propõe a noção do intrínseco generativo como uma base mais robusta sobre a qual basear o trabalho das universidades.Keywords: Higher education policy, Impact, Instrumentalization, Public engagement, Research evaluation, Universities.Palavras-chave: Políticas de educação superior, Impacto, Instrumentalização, Engajamento público, Avaliação da pesquisa, Universidades.ReferencesASHWIN, P. (2016) ‘From a teaching perspective, “impact” looks very different’. Times Higher Education, 21 March. Online. www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/teaching-perspectiveimpact-looks-very-different (accessed 3 May 2018).BARNETT, R. (2004) ‘The purposes of higher education and the changing face of academia’. London Review of Education, 2 (1), 61–73.BELFIORE, E. (2014) ‘”Impact”, “value” and “bad economics”: Making sense of the problem of value in the arts and humanities’. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 14 (1), 95–110.BRENNAN, J., KING, R. AND LEBEAU, Y. (2004) The Role of Universities in the Transformation of Societies: Synthesis report. London: Association of Commonwealth Universities and the Open UniversityBYNNER, J. AND EGERTON, M. (2001) The Wider Benefits of Higher Education. Report by the Wider Benefits of Learning Research Centre, Institute of Education, University of London.CHUBB, J. AND WATERMEYER, R. (2017) ‘Artifice or integrity in the marketization of research impact? Investigating the moral economy of (pathways to) impact statements within research funding proposals in the UK and Australia’. Studies in Higher Education, 42 (12), 2,360–72.COLEMAN, J.S. (1986) ‘The idea of the developmental university’. Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 24 (4), 476–94.COLLINI, S. (2012) What are Universities For? London: Penguin. Dewey, J. (1967) ‘The continuum of ends-means’. In Archambault, R. (ed.) John Dewey on Education: Selected writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 97–107. ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) (n.d.) ‘What is impact?’. Online. www.esrc.ac.uk/ research/impact-toolkit/what-is-impact/ (accessed 22 April 2018).FIELDING, M. (2003) ‘The impact of impact’. Cambridge Journal of Education, 33 (2), 289–95.FRANCIS, B. (2011) ‘Increasing impact? An analysis of issues raised by the impact agenda in educational research’. 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Online. www.timeshighereducation.com/features/the-impact-of-impact/2018540.article (accessed 3 May 2018).LEE, S.T. (2017) ‘The Structure of a University: A Karatanian interrogation into instrumentalism, idealism and community in postwar British higher education, 1945–2015’. Unpublished PhD thesis, Birkbeck University.MACFARLANE, B. (2011) ‘The morphing of academic practice: Unbundling and the rise of the paraacademic’. Higher Education Quarterly, 65 (1), 59–73. Marginson, S. (2011) ‘Higher education and public good’. Higher Education Quarterly, 65 (4), 411–33.MARGINSON, S. (2016) ‘The worldwide trend to high participation higher education: Dynamics of social stratification in inclusive systems’. Higher Education, 72 (4), 413–34.MARTIN, B. (2011) ‘The Research Excellence Framework and the ‘impact agenda’: Are we creating a Frankenstein monster?’. Research Evaluation, 20 (3), 247–54.MARTIN, C. (2011) ‘Philosophy of education in the public sphere: The case of “relevance”’. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30, 615–29. McCowan, T. (2009) Rethinking Citizenship Education: A curriculum for participatory democracy. London: Continuum.MCCOWAN, T. (2015) ‘Should universities promote employability?’. Theory and Research in Education, 13 (3), 267–85.MCCOWAN, T. (2016a) ‘Three dimensions of equity of access to higher education’. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 46 (4), 645–65.MCCOWAN, T. (2016b) ‘Universities and the post-2015 development agenda: An analytical framework’. Higher Education, 72 (4), 505–23.MCCOWAN, T. (2017) ‘Higher education, unbundling and the end of the university as we know it’. Oxford Review of Education, 43 (6), 733–48.McDowell, G. (2003) ‘Engaged universities: Lessons from the land-grant universities and extension’. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 585 (1), 31–50.MCMAHON, W. (2009) Higher Learning, Greater Good: The private and social benefits of higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.NIXON, J. (2004) ‘Education for the good society: The integrity of academic practice’. London Review of Education, 2 (3), 245–52.OANCEA, A. (2013a) ‘Buzzwords and values: The prominence of “impact” in UK research policy and governance’. Research Trends, 33, 6–8.OANCEA, A. (2013b) ‘Interpretations of research impact in seven disciplines’. European Educational Research Journal, 12 (2), 242–50.OKETCH, M., MCCOWAN, T. AND SCHENDEL, R. (2014) The Impact of Tertiary Education on Development: A rigorous literature review. London: Department for International Development.OVSEIKO, P., OANCEA, A. AND BUCHAN, A. (2012) ‘Assessing research impact in academic clinical medicine: A study using Research Excellence Framework pilot impact indicators’. BMC Health Services Research, 12 (478), 1–23.PARKER, J. AND VAN TEIJLINGEN, E. (2012) ‘The Research Excellence Framework (REF): Assessing the impact of social work research on society’. Practice: Social Work in Action, 24 (1), 41–52.PENFIELD, T., BAKER, M.J., SCOBLE, R. AND WYKES, M.C. (2014) ‘Assessment, evaluations, and definitions of research impact: A review’. Research Evaluation, 23 (1), 21–32.PERKIN, H. (2007) ‘History of universities’. In Forest, J.J.F. and Altbach, P.G. (eds) International Handbook of Higher Education. Dordrecht: Springer, 159–206.PHIPPS, A. (2014) ‘The dark side of the impact agenda’. Times Higher Education, 4 December. Online. www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/opinion/the-dark-side-of-the-impactagenda/2017299.article (accessed 3 May 3018).READINGS, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.REF (Research Excellence Framework) (2011) Assessment Framework and Guidance on Submissions: Research excellence framework 02.2011. Online. www.ref.ac.uk/2014/pubs/2011-02/ (accessed 22 April 2018).RESEARCH COUNCIL ECONOMIC IMPACT GROUP (2006) Increasing the Economic Impact of Research Councils. London: Department of Trade and Industry.Research Councils UK (2017) Excellence with Impact. Online. www.ukri.org/innovation/excellencewith-impact/ (accessed 15 July 2017).SALL, E., LEBEAU, Y. AND KASSIMIR, R. (2003) ‘The public dimensions of the university in Africa’. Journal of Higher Education in Africa, 1 (1), 126–48.SANTOS, B.S. (2004) A universidade do século XXI: Para uma reforma democratica e emancipatória da universidade. São Paulo: Cortez.Siegfried, J., Sanderson, A. and McHenry, P. (2007) ‘The economic impact of colleges and universities’. Economics of Education Review, 26 (5), 546–58.SMITH, S., WARD, V. AND HOUSE, A. (2011) ‘”Impact” in the proposals for the UK’s Research Excellence Framework: Shifting the boundaries of academic autonomy’. Research Policy, 40 (10), 1,369–79.UNIVERSITIES UK (2014) The Impact of Universities on the UK Economy. London: Universities UK.UPTON, S., VALLANCE, P. AND GODDARD, J. (2014) ‘From outcome to process: Evidence for a new approach to research impact assessment’. Research Evaluation, 23 (4), 352–65.WALTER, I., NUTLEY, S.M. AND DAVIES, H.T.O. (2003) Research Impact: A cross-sector review. Research Unit for Research Utilisation, University of St Andrews. Online. www.ruru.ac.uk/pdf/LSDA%20 literature%20review%20final.pdf (accessed 22 April 2016).WATERMEYER, R. (2016) ‘Impact in the R

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 6Front coverWAR TRAUMA IN CONTEXTLost identity (2018), 50×70 cm, acrylic on canvas by Willarekezi.Rwandan Willy Karekezi's painting reflects on how forcibly displaced people imagine themselves in recollections of home and flight. Their memories become fractured, even unrecognizable, over time.This artwork is part of a collection that was shown in an exhibition called ‘When we return’, in Gulu, Uganda, during July and August 2019. It brought together research and visual outputs from Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The artwork was an output of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Politics of Return Research Programme, curated by Kara Blackmore (an exhibition catalogue is available).1Based on the Politics of Return work, as well as long‐term research supported by linked Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants, in this issue, Torre et al. argue that the literature underlying the recently published World Health Organization's assessment of mental health in conflict settings is inadequate. It sets aside crucial evidence and promotes misleading responses to suffering.(1). https://issuu.com/lseflca/docs/new_por_catalogue_print_final_sept_2019-digital-isBack coverDetail from Three women on the lake (2018), 245×170 cm, collage on canvas by Kusa Kusa Maski Gael.The figure is located in a dream‐like vision of the lake and mountain range between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.It is a complex image, full of nuances and ambiguities, linked to the artist's own memories of flight from the Congo, as well as those of the conflict‐affected people he worked with in Uganda.In this issue, Torre et al. warn that conceptualizing war trauma in terms of psychiatric pathologies promotes the symptoms that therapists and aid projects purport to address. Without due consideration for the specificities of lived experiences and cultural contexts, what is actually happening may be largely overlooked, with potentially harmful consequences.

Implementing and ascertaining impact and outcomes of research is a prolonged process that may take several years due to complexities in bureaucratic, social, and economic systems. At the macro level, collective reflection on the different methods and approaches that research projects use to promote uptake and impact is rare but has potential to encourage learning and exchanges between different funders and projects around impact pathways as useful road maps for research. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the nature of research – while it has increased the demand for evidence to inform decision-making, it has further disrupted both the policy-influencing and engagement activities that would usually accompany such research. This report is based on an analysis of 90 research projects supported by the Covid Collective, COVID CIRCLE, and Covid Response for Equity (CORE) initiatives. It provides an overview and insight into how different funders and initiatives were working to facilitate change in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. In line with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) definitions of ‘impact’, and subsequent work by the ESRC-FCDO’s (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office) Impact Initiative, four categories were used to map the emerging outcomes and different types of change. These outcome areas comprise capacity, networks, conceptual, and instrumental outcomes. Outcome examples were then classified into more detailed descriptive groups highlighted in Table 1.

Greetings to readers as we start a new year for Qualitative Social Work. Last year saw an increase in papers to the Journal and as our readership continues to grow, the value of qualitative research for social work is confirmed. However, there is no room for complacency and if we are to ensure that the Journal continues to thrive, it is important to remain abreast of changes in the world of qualitative research and social research more generally. So, this brings me to consider the issue of innovation in this new year editorial. For readers familiar with writing or reviewing grant applications, claims by academics that their work is novel or innovative are all very familiar. As Taylor and Coffey described in 2009, pressures stemming from funding councils and publishers encourage academics to state and indeed over-state the cutting edge nature of their work. Writing in 2015, it seems that claims to innovation are now endemic and if we examine the mission of the UK’s major social science research funding council – the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) – the word innovation is never far from the Council’s funding calls, strategy statements or impact case studies. In the Council’s research funding guide, applicants must pay attention to impact, innovation and interdisciplinarity. The Council’s conceptualisation of innovation is broad, to include: ‘innovative or even untested methods’, through to research which challenges ‘existing paradigms in respect of research ethics’ (ESRC, 2015). So what exactly is meant by innovation and to what extent is new invention better than old? In response to the latter question, critics differ in their opinion. For example, there are those who consider that innovative methods simply represent the latest fads, leaving unresolved the long-standing challenges in qualitative research (Travers, 2009). The problem of fad is that where we fetishise the novel we may inadvertently recast tried and tested methodologies as dated, or at worse obsolete. Traditional ethnography and conventional methods of qualitative interviewing have been so vital to our understanding of the social world, we must resist casting such methods as old hat (Wiles et al., 2011). Critics have also argued that claims to innovation are frequently overstated and can amount to little more than Qualitative Social Work 2016, Vol. 15(1) 3–10 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325015619822 qsw.sagepub.com

Major upheavals in world agriculture, interacting with rapid changes in national policies and technology, are making the role of agricultural research dynamic and uncertain. In UK, the Agriculture and Food Research Council (AFRC) looked for new and/or joint research initiatives. A first project was set up with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), namely, a study of changes in UK agriculture, reasons for these and likely consequences.

A Complex Parade: Problems and Prospects for Picturing the Nation Wilfred M. McClay (bio) On October 23, 2008, representatives from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the United States’ National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) met for a day-long conference at the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., entitled “Picturing the Nation.” The inspiration behind the conference was the remarkable popular success of the NEH’s “Picturing America” program, which made available to schools and libraries across the United States a selection of forty high-quality reproductions of masterworks of American art depicting characteristic American scenes and themes.1 The AHRC was interested in exploring how a similar set of masterworks might beassembled for the UK, allowing for its very different history and culture. The images in “Picturing America,” which range from a portrait of Paul Revere to a photograph of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and from Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” to Joseph Stella’s “Brooklyn Bridge,” made no claim to be canonical. They were not Ten Commandments but Forty Suggestions. And yet the point was to draw together a collection of images that are common and familiar, but also rich and complex; illustrative of American life, but also worth knowing in their own right. The goal of a project like “Picturing America” can be defined in various ways. Partly it is a matter of establishing cultural literacy, identifying images and referents that every one should know. But it is also a matter of providing mental furniture, i.e., furnishing the essential preconditions for other kinds of cultural reflection, conversation, citizenship, and shared memory. These works of art are civilizational markers, points of general reference, tools for cultural orientation. Such images also are often polyvalent in meaning—rich, full, and many-faceted, incapable of being contained or controlled by any interpreter or community of interpretation. It is useful to think of our experience of public buildings and public spaces as a point of comparison. To carry around in one’s head the knowledge of a familiar public building or street is to gain entrée into a cultural meaning that helps us transcend our sense of individuality. But we are not only talking about the places that are seen as consciously memorializing the past. We are talking about everything, down to the names of streets and buildings and bridges and airports and neighborhood landmarks. These mark the places where many thousands of people who came before us have walked, and fallen in love, and grieved, and died, and gone about the ordinary and pluriform business of life. It is one of the public uses of art to connect us in just this way with the lives of those others, to usher us out of the caves of our limited experience into a common public world by providing a number of shared and worthy objects of contemplation. So, to put it in a word: a collection like “Picturing America” is about commonality, rather than canonicity. Click for larger view View full resolution From The Arts (October 1921). Our memories play tricks on us, and they are full of idiosyncrasy. That is why we so profoundly need landmarks, the tangible and visible things that we measure ourselves against: for their permanence. Not that we measure all aspects of our lives against such public landmarks; that would be both ghastly and inappropriate. (In this connection, I think of W. H. Auden’s famous words: “private faces in public places are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places.”) In our private lives we have other and better ways to remember, ones more suitable to such lives’ untranslatable [End Page 2] particularities and intimacies. And yet there is confluence. The best and least conflict-ridden of all secular American holidays, Thanksgiving, is a moment in which private and idiosyncratic markers receive a rare kind of public visibility and endorsement. Small wonder that Norman Rockwell (one of the “Picturing America” artists) made it the subject of some of his most memorable work. Commonly acknowledged landmarks, then, serve to lift us out of our idiosyncrasy and isolation into a world of common experience. It...

Presenting the findings of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project into urban austerity governance in eight cities across the world, this book offers comparative reflections on the myriad experiences of collaborative governance and its limitations.

Inspired by scholarly calls to focus more intently on the influence of context on leaders’ construction and negotiation of identity, this paper draws on evidence from our Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project in London, New York City and Toronto. Throughout the paper, we strive to illuminate how the city-based context influences how race/ethnicity is experienced and described. We use social identity theory, organisational fit and in-group prototypes to frame school leaders’ explicit discuss race/ethnicity when reflecting on identity. We describe our data gathering process using our Professional Identity card-sort Tool, which guided leaders’ reflections on identity. The analysis details how we extracted and interpreted evidence from leaders who were explicit about the interrelationship between their own personal racial/ethnic identification and its alignment or misalignment with their school-level communities. We explore how different city contexts influence leader experience of in-groups and out-groups and the related leadership challenges and opportunities. In conclusion, we reflect on the influence that structures, policies and communities have on how leaders experience identity and the possible implications for their work. We also explore the value of attending to potential context-based identity-driven experiences for school leader development and support.

PurposeThis paper critically examines the development and direction of the Fabricating Future Bodies (FFB) Workshop. Troubling notions of co-production as enacting equality or empowering participants, it draws on feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts to understand it as an eventful process that occurs in unpredictable and shifting affect-laden assemblages.Design/methodology/approachThe FFB Workshop formed part of the final phase of my Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded doctoral study, titled “Exploring young people's digital sexual cultures through creative, visual and arts-based methods”. With additional support from Wales' Doctoral Training Partnership, the workshop provided sixteen young people (aged 11–13 years) from one fieldwork school with the opportunity to work with two professional artists in order to creatively re-animate research findings on the digitally networked body. In a three-hour workshop, participants produced cut-up texts and life-size body fabrics that re-imagined what bodies might do, be and become in the future.FindingsThis paper finds that co-productive practices cannot flatten out the institutional and societal power dynamics operating within schools, highlighting how adult intervention was necessary to hold space for young people to participate. It also observes the agency of the art materials employed in the workshop in enabling young people to articulate what mattered to them about the digitally networked body. While the workshop was limited in its ability to renegotiate institutional and peer power dynamics, it produced rich data that indicated how carefully choreographed arts-based practices offer generative possibilities for digital sexualities research and education.Originality/valueBy employing speculative fiction, cut-up poetry and textiles to explore the digitally networked body, this paper outlines an innovative methodological-pedagogical approach to engaging with young people's digitally networked lives.

The need for effective knowledge transfer has been well documented; however, few narratives reflect on postgraduates as brokers of knowledge when participating in collaborative studentships. This paper reports on the authors' experiences of undertaking Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Scottish Government (SG) collaborative PhD studentships in geography, a new studentship which trains doctoral students to be employable in both academe and government. Particular focus is given to the experiences related to an annual month-long SG placement, which increases opportunities for knowledge transfer by engendering a deeper awareness of the needs of all partners. It concludes by considering what the experiences offer to the PhD process, authors' future prospects, and the issue of knowledge transfer more broadly.

Eating habits, food choices, health and lifestyles have been stock-in-trade for research in health and medicine for many years. However, it would be fair to say that these areas have not been of major interest in mainstream sociology until recently. Indeed, Murcott et al (1992) register sociology's failure to engage with foodrelated issues as social practices serious enough to warrant academic pursuit. It is true that in the writings of Marx (1977), Engels (1971) and Rowntree (1980), problems of food and diet in relation to income and social class were discussed. But these early contributions were not sustained. How things have changed. Food, eating, body weight, food geography, etc. all belong to a long list of issues which are now central to sociology generally (see for example Beardsworth and Keil 1997), and health sociology in particular (see for example Germov and Williams 2008). Judging by the number of papers, books and conferences devoted to food-related research, there has never been a time when sociological scholarship has taken food and eating so seriously. Long gone are the days when conferences struggled to find enough papers to fill a concurrent session on food sociology; indeed, there are now whole conferences devoted to the topic, for example the British Sociological Association Food Study Group Conference in July, 2010.There are a number of reasons why food, eating and associated interests may have captured the sociological imagination, but space will only allow an examination of a few here. The first reason is state funding for research that has sought answers to food-related issues. Food research has, of course, benefited from government sponsored funding for a long time, but this has usually been in the areas of biomedicine and nutrition, which are more interested in what food are eaten than who is eating it. The difference in the new interest in state funded food research is that it has sought social, rather than biological, answers. For example, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding of the 'Nation's Diet' research programme (1992- 1998) was an example of State investment in food research which supported some of the UK's best social scientists' examination of food and eating from a social angle. This included perspectives that captured food and class, food and gender, food and race or ethnicity. The underlying link in the project was its attention to food in social spaces such as homes, schools, shops, as well as families and other places where food is eaten or selected (see Murcott 1998).Another interest that has provided impetus for sociological examination of food and eating has been the health and social consequences of diet-related diseases. A major factor here has been the development of the so called 'obesity epidemic'. This has given rise to contributions from the social sciences and humanities that have hitherto been somewhat silent on food-related matters. It is now commonplace to see papers, articles and books from researchers in these disciplines contributing to debates about the recent focus on body weight and its consequences (Dixon and Broom 2007; Gard and Wright 2005).A third influence has been the impact of neoliberalism on the ways in which the food supply has been regulated and governed. Food policy, once the domain of discussions mostly about food packaging and food standards, has now opened up because of many issues concerning the safety and integrity of the food supply (Lang et al 2009). Food policy is also discussed in terms of the politics of food, and in so doing provides a platform for discussions on the ways in which food is used as a political weapon at the macro (that is, jurisdiction, country, territory) level (for example, Lang and Heasman 2004), but also at the micro (that is, family, personal, private) level (for example, Charles and Kerr 1988).The last reason we give for recent sociological interest in food concerns the various crises that implicate the food supply. …

This chapter documents a collaborative investigation of students’ developing understanding of two threshold concepts in Economics which was carried out in the context of the Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses (ETL) project. ETL was a large-scale research project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of their Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). The notion of a threshold concept is part of the larger conceptual framework developed by the ETL project. The main issues here are whether it provides practitioners with a novel and useful pedagogic tool and whether thinking about teaching-learning environments in terms of threshold concepts has the potential to enhance them. Many of the economists who were interviewed identified concepts which they regarded as thresholds for their discipline and some of them suggested that threshold concepts may be particularly important at the beginning of an Economics degree course.