School of Humanities and Social Sciences Good News October

Conference news

Dr Sophia Price was an invited key note speaker at the ‘Women, Gender and Financial Inclusion’ Conference hosted by the University of Johannesburg. Contributors and participants at the Conference included politicians, policy makers, practitioners and academics from across Africa. A number of contributors had been participants in Sophia’s British Academy funded Writing Workshop Programme, Writing and Researching the Political Economy of Inequality in Africa. The year-long Writing Workshop Programme focused on supporting research capacity building in African Universities and among African Early Career Researchers and Post Graduate student communities whose research is focused on the Political Economy of Inequality. The project culminated in the launch of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Writing and Researching the Political Economy of Inequality, which provides free open access resources to support researcher development.

Dr Sophia Price convened a panel on Diplomacy and (De)Coloniality in Africa EU ties at the Annual Conference of the University Association for Contemporary European Students (UACES) in Lille in September. Sophia is co-lead of the UACES Network of EU-Africa Research (NEAR), and contributed a paper to the panel with her co-author Dr Mark Langan, Kings College London, on Pan-Africanism and Neo-colonial Desire in Europe: A Critique of the EU’s Response to the African Continental Free Trade Area. In October, with colleagues from the University of Ghent and the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), NEAR  co-convened a workshop on EU Development Studies – a Decolonial Avenue? at the University of Ghent where participants were drawn from a number of EU and UK institutions. 

Over the next 6 months Dr Bridgette Rickett will be giving keynotes on the project to NHS Leeds Clinical Psychology Away Day, University of Stirling, University of St Andrews, the London School of Economics and at BPS division conferences. 

Guest Lectures

The School hosted the Annual Olof Palme Peace Lecture, on 18th October with speaker Anna Sundström presenting on ‘Common Security – the way forward for a failing world?’ This was a hybrid event, chaired by Professor David Webb and organised by Professor Rachel Julian. 

Dr Alexandria Bradley recently gave a talk at St Andrews University Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST), the UK’s hub for applied security research. The title of her talk was Prison Safety and Security: Exploring the Impact of Trauma-Informed Practice and Trauma-Responsive Interventions. She has turned this into an article for the CREST Security Review’s Magazine Special Issue on Trauma It will be available here within the next week to read: CREST Research.

Development sessions

Professor Rachel Julian is running ‘Researcher Development/ Writing Development’ sessions every Friday 9-11am from 29th April on MS Teams. The broad theme is ‘Lives and Voices’, as there are many people interested in how we include people’s lived experience and diverse voices into research. The aim is that, during a shared time in the week, there is time to write, reflect and develop research ideas and/ or outputs. It’s also a time to share and listen to each other about what we’re working on, learn more about other people’s research interests and create a space in which we can support each other in our research goals. Please contact Cat Brooke for the MS Teams joining link.

Projects

Dr Kata Pauly-Takacs has been invited to be a member of the 'Yorkshire and Humber Brain Health Research Network Advisory Group'. This is a project led by Dr Laura Boi, Research Fellow at the Centre for Dementia Research at Leeds Beckett, and is funded by NIHR/ Clinical Research Network Yorkshire and Humber. 

Dr Bridgette Rickett & Dr Maxine Woolhouse formed an across UK expert team of psychologists for a project to recommend that social class be added into the Equality Act (2010) as a protected characteristic. This project had two main goals; to report a review of the diverse evidence on psychological contributors to social class-based prejudice and discrimination (classism) and the psychological consequences for those who experienced it, and to report any evidence-based implications for a revised Equality Act that protected social class. 

The project team embarked on a pre report tour including presentations at BPS Section and Division events, The London School of Economics Policy Event and at The House of Commons at the 12 year Equality Act Review Event. The report titled ‘Psychology of social class-based inequalities: Policy implications for a revised (2010) UK Equality Act’ was published on the 20th of July 2022 by the British Psychology Society. 

Since then, the project team have been interviewed by BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 and LBC, the Trisha Goddard show and the New Statesman.  They are are now presenting their findings to the BBC’s Group for increased social class based representation - RAISED steering group and the APG ParliON on social economic diversify and are a member of an expert steering group aiming at creating a legal case to protect class in law lead by Weil, Gotshal & Manges (London) LLP. 

Course Collaboration

We’re happy to announce a collaboration between Criminology and Creative Writing! Dr Alexandria Bradley and Dr Bill Davies have teamed up with Dr Alison Taft and Dr Nasser Hussain in order to introduce creative writing to the popular L6 Criminology module: Prison: Learning Together. 

Ali and Nas will work with L6 and MA creative writing students to develop a creative writing workshop and deliver it as part of the innovative module developed by Alex and Bill. This module sees 12 Criminology students and 12 HMP Full Sutton students learning together in a prison environment and gives students from both institutions the opportunity to experience learning as part of a diverse group.