The 2020 ESRC Festival of Social Science took place between Saturday 7th November to Sunday 15th November. Academics hosted a series of online events exploring topics such as Climate Change, Migration and Social Care. You may be surprised at just how relevant the Festival's events are to society today. Social science research makes a difference. Discover how it shapes public policy and contributes to making the economy more competitive, as well as giving people a better understanding of 21st century society. From big ideas to the most detailed observations, social science affects us all everyday - at work, in school, when raising children, within our communities, and even at the national level.
Everyone - from school children to politicians - can take part in, and hear about, social science research at the Festival's many engaging events. This year, the festival will run 1-30 November 2021.
Managing Seaweed Through More Than Maps
Managing Seaweed through More than Maps was a co-development project that fostered transferable skills for college students. The free workshop explored seaweed management as a climate change adaptation case study. Two hours were spent on coding skills using remotely sensed data, and two hours focused on the role for social science methods in adaptation.
Using seaweed as a unique example, researchers aimed to learn from the student’s what skills are useful in ground-level climate change adaptation and how skills are best transferred. The students gained coding and data analysis skills, with possible future support for their Extended Project Qualification.
Migration and Performance Between Languages and Cultures
Migration offers us the opportunity for multilingual and multicultural encounters in everyday life. Not all those encounters will be straightforward. There will be times, when we want to communicate with someone, and we don't share a common language. That's when we need the help of an interpreter. One example could be a healthcare practitioner (a physician, nurse, GP, etc.) in a medical consultation with their patient. That can be a challenge for everyone involved. In their regular tasks, interpreters are constantly navigating between language and culture. Language is culture and culture is deeply embedded in language. What's that like for the interpreter? What's that like for the patient and the doctor?
The performance group 'Around the Well' together with the University of Southampton organised an interactive event designed for both the public and the research community. During this event, the audience were invited to engage their various senses and immerse themselves into the world of interpreters through shared activities and experiences.
Digital Transitions: Learning from Lockdown for The Future
The Autism Community Research Network @ Southampton (ACoRNS) is a public engagement project that has developed a research-practice partnership between Education and Psychology at the University of Southampton, school leaders and practitioners in the local community. Together they have established a co-constructed network for researching evidence-based practices in autism education, with the views and perspectives of children and young people at its centre.
This online event was an opportunity to share the important and innovative research that took place with Digital Stories, during lockdown, to support the assessments of children for their Education, Health & Care Plans (EHCPs), and the transitions of older students with complex needs beyond school. These approaches were particularly important under social distancing measures and could also be helpful for the longer term.