Interdisciplinary Research: Impact in Academia and Beyond
10th Jun 2016 11:30am-4:00pm
Day Event: 'Interdisciplinary Research: Impact in Academia and Beyond’
Date: Friday 10th June 2016
Time: 11.30 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Venue: Boardroom M2, University of Brighton, 58-67 Grand Parade Campus, Brighton, BN2 0JY
This event will explore the practical impact of interdisciplinary research both inside and outside of academia. The event originates in students' concerns surrounding emerging academic fields, disciplines and practices that make use of mixed methodologies and innovative dissemination strategies.
The speakers, Andrea Cornwall, Deidre Osborne, and Lara Torres, will critically analyse the concept of impact in the academia, connecting the idea and concept of impact with their own research experience. This will be followed by a discussion session about the prospective benefits and challenges which may be experienced by researchers who apply an interdisciplinary approach.
The speakers represent different areas of research and are at different stages in their careers. They communicate their work in academic contexts as well as to engage local and international communities through writing (newspapers, blogs, books), exhibitions, workshops, designed objects, etc. Discussion will explore this range of experience.
The event is Free and will be of particular interest to early career researchers and those involved in interdisciplinary research. Refreshments will be provided.
Please register your interest in attending to Frances Casey f.casey@brighton.ac.uk.
Speaker Biographies:
Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and International Development and Head of School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. She has worked on topics ranging from understanding women's perspectives on family planning, fertility and sexually transmitted infection in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, public engagement in UK regeneration programs, the quality of democratic deliberation in new democratic spaces in Brazil, the use and abuse of participatory appraisal in Kenya, domestic workers' rights activism in Brazil and sex workers' rights activism in India. Andrea is involved in a number of international collaborative research programmes. She directs the Consortium Pathways of Women's Empowerment, which carries out collaborative research and communications on issues of body, voice and work in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine and Sierra Leone.
Deirdre Osborne is a Reader in English Literature and Drama at Goldsmiths University of London. She is a trained ballet dancer and studied Classics at the University of Melbourne, English Literature at Kings College London and completed her PhD in Victorian literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. Over the past fifteen years she has dedicated her research to Black British writing (prose, poetry and drama). At Goldsmiths University she co-convenes the cross-disciplinary MA Black British Writing. Her research interests span late-Victorian literature and maternity, to Landmark Poetics, mixedness, adoption aesthetics and Black writing. She has edited the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945-2010), and co-edited Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama (Palgrave 2014).
Lara Torres is currently a PhD student at the University of the Arts London where her research project, entitled “Towards a practice of unmaking: a strategy for critical fashion practices”, is under the supervision of Prof. Sandy Black and Dr. Thomas Makryniotis at the London College of Fashion. She teaches at the MA Fashion, University for the Creative Arts, Rochester since 2014. Her practice-based research debates the role of the fashion designer and questions fashion’s critical agency. She works in the expanded field of fashion, across a range of media from sculpture to performance and video installation. She is interested in the relation between memory and clothing, focusing in the transient nature of fashion. In the recent years she has explored the speculative and critical nature of design processes through the use of video.She has presented her work globally, and was awarded the Unique Design Award (2011) for the project "An impossible wardrobe for the invisible" at the Fashioning the Future Awards in London. Her work was shown in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen exhibition “The future of fashion is now” (2014), which then travelled to Shenzhen and Shanghai in China (2015-16).