Universities have only relatively recently started to invest in professional services relating to research communication, the impact agenda and in so doing policy engagement. Drawing on a survey of policy engagement functions in UK higher education ins…
Author: Taster
Book Review: Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us about Humanity by Jonathan Purkis
In Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us about Humanity, Jonathan Purkis argues that the nature of hitchhiking and its place in the world has important things to tell us both about who we are and who we might be. This hopeful book suggests …
Post-COVID and the new normal for Early Career Researchers
Early career researchers have both been the most directly effected by the COVID-19 pandemic and responsible for some of the most innovative responses to it. Reporting on findings from the Harbingers-2 study, Dave Nicholas discusses how the internationa…
Research funders can tackle research waste – Lessons from COVID-19 research
Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic promoted faster and more open research practices, it also revealed ongoing issues of research waste, and the widespread duplication of research efforts. Till Bruckner provides evidence for how research waste continues to im…
Tell me what you read (or watch) and I will tell you what you research: The two-way street between science and literature
Literature and in particular science fiction is often seen as being prefigurative to the development of science and technology. Whilst this can on occasion be the case, drawing on a study of AI researchers and their reading and viewing material, Sarah …
Book Review: Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship edited by Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard
In Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship, Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard bring together academics from across the globe to explore tangible actions those wit…
UK in a Changing Europe: injecting social science into a polarised political debate
Reflecting on seven years of UK in a Changing Europe, Anand Menon and Jill Rutter discuss how the project has brought social science insights into the mainstream of a polarised public debate. Highlighting how this mode of engagement falls outside of or…
The Human Rights Case for Open Science
You’re writing a grant application, and you want to make a strong case for open science! You’ve seen colleagues use language from human rights treaties to support their arguments for open work in the past: but what does that actually mean? Does interna…
A tool for navigating your research career
In this cross-post, Christina Boswell introduces a newly developed tool to help researchers map the activities they are engaged with the aim of exposing where activity is clustered. The tool has been designed to help researchers be more strategic and s…
War in Ukraine heralds a more personalised and politicised science diplomacy
Discussing recent trends in European science diplomacy, Kapil Patil and Maria Rentetzi argue that the post-Cold War consensus of high-level co-operation is giving way to more fractured and politicised model grounded in geo-political competition. The wa…