A blogpost by Martyn Pickersgill, University of Edinburgh – @PickersgillM Research on the brain is increasingly drawn upon in policy-making and family services, with consequences for parenting advice and parenting practices. Especially in the early years of children’s lives, infant brains are said to grow rapidly, and this notion has informed policies around parenting and services for   …Continue Reading

Øyunn Syrstad Høydal, PhD candidate, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (HIOA) This blog post informs a talk at the SKAPE seminar on 13 December 2017 10 years ago, I started work in the communication department of a Norwegian directorate. My background was from the private sector and one of the first things that   …Continue Reading

Dr Peter Matthews, Senior Lecturer, University of Stirling This blog post is based on a talk at the SKAPE seminar on 8 November 2017 Questions bout sexual and gender identity are in the news at the moment. The NHS in England has announced that patients will be routinely asked their sexual identity so services can be better tailored. The   …Continue Reading

Taina Meriluoto, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, taina.meriluoto@jyu.fi This blog post is based on a talk at the SKAPE lunchtime seminar on July 5th 2017. In early 2010’s, I was employed in a Finnish Civil Society Organisation working within the social welfare sector. I was in charge of a project whose objective was to ‘bring the   …Continue Reading

A blogpost by Simon Smith, Charles University* What happens when journalists join in the discussion in the often-frightening comments section below their articles? That’s one of the questions I sought to answer in my book, Discussing the News: the uneasy alliance of participatory journalists and the critical public, published earlier this year as part of   …Continue Reading

Dr Ingrid Young, CSO-Chancellor’s Fellow, Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, University of Edinburgh This article was originally published on Sociology Lens on 12 April 2017 On 10 April 2017, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) announced that PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) – the use of HIV treatment in people who are HIV-negative to prevent   …Continue Reading

In recent years, research impact has emerged to become a part of the everyday life of UK academics. The underlying logic of the impact agenda, as reflected in policy documents, is that excellent research would lead to societal benefits (see for example RCUK). But how do these policy expectations fit with the realities of knowledge   …Continue Reading