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

Authors: Prof. Steve Yearley and Dr. Eugénia Rodrigues A recent report by the CCC (the Committee on Climate Change) made its low-key way to Parliament (‘The compatibility of UK onshore petroleum with meeting the UK’s carbon budgets’). In it a key message: shale gas exploitation, commonly known as ‘fracking’, if it is carried out on a significant   …Continue Reading

Academics working in the UK are being increasingly encouraged and incentivized to seek research impact beyond the academy and the consequences of these changes have caused alarm for some. In a new article in the Journal of Social Policy, we outline a range of concerns that have been raised in publications to date, across disciplines,   …Continue Reading

Authors :  Hilary Cornish and Graham Spinardi The recent discussion in parliament, which passed the motion to replace Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent submarines, was a rare occasion where a defence procurement decision hit the headlines. The MoD’s current estimate for four new submarines is £31bn, with a planned contingency of £10bn, a figure that has   …Continue Reading

Drawing on a detailed case study of Scotland’s National Health Service, Publics and Their Health Systems: Rethinking Participation is a novel contribution to the growing academic engagement with the institutionalisation of public participation as a routine feature of governance. Author Ellen Stewart offers a ‘citizen’s-eye view’ of the Scottish health system, challenging dominant policy narratives by   …Continue Reading

The shift towards ‘evidence-based’ policymaking and pressure from the EU have pushed European governments to increasingly make use of technocratic expertise in policymaking, write Elke Heins and Hartwig Pautz. They call for a new research agenda to explore the facets of ‘independent evidence’ and the role of austerity in European governments’ policy responses to the Great Recession. Over   …Continue Reading