Our Postgraduate Research Community Doctoral students are a huge part of the SSIS community with 607 students currently based in the College. In the past academic year, 52 students have successfully completed, and we have awarded £529,000 of scholarships for students starting in September 2021. Our students go on to establish themselves within a wide range of careers, including academia. Alongside their research projects, many PGRs do amazing outreach and impact work and support their peers through conferences and networking, gaining vital skills along the way.
The Long Night Building on her PhD work relating to the use of sleeping medication in older people, Georgia Smith has recently been awarded a Mildred Blaxter Post-Doctoral Fellowship by the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness. Georgia’s project is entitled ‘The Long Night: A Sociological Exploration of the Pharmaceutical Cultures of Sleep in Later Life’. Georgia completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Exeter before completing an ESRC funded PhD in 2020. Her PhD research explored the experiences of older adults using prescribed sleeping medication, paying particular attention to discourses around dependence and addiction. Placing the night ‘centre stage’, she argued that the consumption of sleeping tablets can be conceptualised as ‘emotional management.’ Via use, older individuals can elude the emotional, physical and psychic threats of night-time.
Young Lawyers Committee of the Human Rights Lawyers Association In March 2021, Mollie Gascoigne, a second-year doctoral student in Exeter Law School, was invited to join the Young Lawyers Committee of the Human Rights Lawyers Association. The Human Rights Lawyers Association (HRLA) is a forum for legal professionals and people interested in the law to discuss human rights issues. The committee is tasked with organising a careers day and judicial review mooting competition, and publishing a human rights journal, among other activities. Membership of the committee will also inform Mollie’s research. She will gain practical understanding of human rights works and specifically human
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rights analysis of legal gender recognition. The committee provides a mechanism for her to disseminate her findings too, as she can incorporate her research into the various events and outputs of the committee.
GIAS: Global Islamic Archaeology Showcase 2020 The Global Islamic Archaeology Showcase (GIAS) was an online conference initiated and organised by Hannah Parsons-Morgan and Awet Teklehimanot Araya, two PhD candidates from the Centre for Islamic Archaeology, based in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS). Held on 26 September. and 3 October 2020, GIAS was a free online conference that brought together early career researchers working within the field of Islamic archaeology regardless of geographical or chronological focus. A broad range of topics was covered – from shipwrecks to inscriptions, architecture to ceramics – spanning the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe, from the 7th to the 20th century.
Surrogacy: Health and Wellbeing Based at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Zaina Mahmoud is a final year PhD student whose research focuses on the impact of the legal and health frameworks regulating surrogacy. She was recently awarded funding to organise a conference from the Society of Legal Scholars’ Small Projects and Events Fund. This conference, due to take place in 2022, will bring together academics, practitioners and stakeholders to discuss future directions in surrogacy regulation. Alongside collaborators, Zaina has also designed an interactive storytelling game for the Being Human Festival 2021. The online game invites participants to think about surrogacy from stakeholders’ perspectives (e.g. intended parent and surrogate) in different jurisdictions, asking them to ‘play’ as different characters.
InSPAration: Impact and Dissemination Workshop In early July 2021, PGRs in SPA organised a workshop on impact and dissemination in preparation for a conference in October 2021 titled, ‘Research Impact in a Digital Culture’. The July workshop offered InSPAration conference presenters a chance to explore what is meant by impact; how it can be achieved and how to use recording and streaming software effectively. Given an increasingly virtual conference culture, the workshop offered students a head start in academia’s ‘new normal’ – a digital world.
AI in the Boardroom: let the law be in the driving seat Pete Underwood, based in Law, published a paper discussing law in relation to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the boardroom. He argued AI can be used in three key ways in the corporate world: 1. To tackle corporate short-termism 2. To assist in considering wider societal interests, digesting big data on a daily basis 3. To enable directors to achieve the Environmental Social Governance goals of the company
Ethics via Lego! Warren Speed (PGR student and GSE Ethics SIG Convenor) and Karen Kenny (LEGO Serious Play Facilitator) organised a set of three workshops in July 2021 focused on exploring the LEGO Serious Play facilitation methodology. Open to all GSE staff and students, the workshops used the methodology to ‘Build confidence in ethics in educational research’.
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