Are you looking to build interdisciplinary research networks?
This is an interactive workshop on interdisciplinary research projects and opportunities which are at the intersection of the social sciences and the humanities.The workshop is designed for academics who are looking to gain practical help and information on how to engage with interdisciplinary research across the disciplines. The workshops have been structured to maximise the opportunity for dialogue and will also provide a forum for wide-ranging discussions on key research themes with key speakers. It will also be an opportunity to share best practice with colleagues from a range of disciplines, and to identify potential collaboration opportunities.
This workshop builds on the strategic objectives of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute and the Leeds Social Sciences Institute to foster interdisciplinary research across the University.
Registration for this event is now closed.
Programme
9:15: Registration
9:30: Welcome and Introduction
9:40: Funding Opportunities – Martin Hamilton (Research & Innovation Support)
10:00: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research Presentations:
- Professor Alison Fell (Arts) and Dr Claudia Sternberg (PVAC)
- Dr Christopher Forde (LUBS)
10:45: Break
11:10: Group Discussions on Cross Council Themes
12:10: Summary of event / next steps
12:30: Lunch & Networking
13:30: Close
For further information about the event please contact Sophia Kennedy on ( (0113) 34 38468 or : s.kennedy@leeds.ac.uk
Access and Inclusion
We want to make sure that everyone can access and enjoy our events so please let us know as soon as possible if you have any requirements such as a dietary need, a learning requirement, access to a hearing loop or wheelchair access etc. More information on how we can help can be found at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/sddu/top/disability.html
Biographies
Alison began her research career working on representations of motherhood in C20th French women’s writing. Since 2003, her research interests have shifted to a focus on French and British women’s experiences in, and cultural representations of, the First World War. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Back to the Front: Female Veterans in Interwar France and Britain that will be published in 2014. In addition, she is running a Wellcome Trust funded collaborative research project investigating the image and experience of female nurses during the First World War. At Leeds, she is Chair of the Steering Group for the Legacies of War 1914-18/2014-18 project.
Alison has been involved in a number of interdisciplinary research projects, mostly with academics from other disciplines within Arts and Humanities, such as History, English and Cultural Studies. In addition to the Legacies of War project at the University of Leeds, she has been directing a Wellcome Trust project on First World War nursing with a colleague from the School of Nursing & Midwifery at the University of Manchester. She has been working with sociologists, historians, literary critics and health practitioners in an attempt to offer a truly interdisciplinary perspective on a corpus of primary sources. Her experiences of working collaboratively across disciplines have been generally positive, especially if projects are tightly focused, which allows real exchange to take place. There are certain barriers – although funding councils generally state that they welcome interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary projects, for example, in practice they want a focused project with a clear methodology, and the projects are assessed by individuals who may themselves not have experience of collaborative research, so this needs to be addressed from the outset. Alison would also add from her experience that it has to make sense to work with colleagues from other disciplines – all partners have to bring something to the table that makes the research project innovative and exciting, and you have to be able to demonstrate this in a funding application.
Claudia’s background is in literary, film and television studies with an emphasis on British and American cultural production in general and multicultural Britain in particular. In her work on film and television, she has addressed questions of cultural identity, predominantly in the context of (Jewish, Black and Asian) migratory and diasporic experiences. A further research area is the cinematic memory culture of the First World War in Britain as well as the relationship between war, media and cultural memory. More recently, she has begun to use ethnographic methods to conduct research of lived experiences themselves rather than their mediated representation. A former Director of Learning and Teaching at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, Claudia maintains a strong commitment to innovation in teaching, blended learning, digital reflection and student engagement.
Claudia’s first encounter with interdisciplinarity was as one of more than 30 researchers working at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 437: Experiences of War – War and Society in the Modern Age, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and located at the University of Tübingen (2002-4). From 2006-8, she was the co-Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Research Network Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe. The Network was part of the AHRC’s interdisciplinary strategic initiative Diasporas, Migration and Identities (DMI) and presented the challenges of working across borders with an international, multilingual and multidisciplinary team. Claudia currently leads the Culture and the Arts strand of the UoL Legacies of War Centenary Project. This project not only brings together researchers with diverse backgrounds and interests, but also has a strong focus on public engagement. The latter means collaborating directly with stakeholders in Leeds City Council, museums and galleries, arts and community organisations and communities themselves.
Chris is a member of the Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change (CERIC), which is an interdisciplinary research Centre based at the University of Leeds. His research is broadly concerned with the changing nature of employment and the consequences of these changes for workers. His particular research interests are: the rise of ‘non-standard’ forms of employment, particularly temporary agency work; job quality; migration; and restructuring. His research spans a range of disciplines within the social sciences and beyond. His research into migration (with Robert MacKenzie and Zyama Ciupijus), engages with debates in sociology, social policy, politics, economic geography and human resource management. His research into job quality (with Andrew Brown, David Spencer and Andy Charlwood) draws on insights from economics, employment relations and human resource management, and sociology. His research on the employment agency industry includes analysis of large-scale secondary datasets (with Gary Slater), primary survey and case study research plus archival analysis. This archival research has involved extensive interdisciplinary work, across the disciplines of business history, employment relations and economic geography. A particular strand of this research focuses on the lobbying activities of employment agencies over the 20th century. Research into lobbying forms an emerging research theme within CERIC (led by Mark Stuart and Chris Forde).