SGSSS Hub Festival 2022
Alternative Futures: Sustainability in Context
24th and 25th February 2022
The Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) Hubs Festival 2022 focuses on how doctoral research can be communicated and used by wider audiences.
Commitment to sustainability requires systemic change across economic, political and social spheres. Imagining and implementing alternative futures and providing evidence to inform practical choices remains a central intellectual agenda for researchers now and in the future; grand challenges that will affect everyone’s lives in multiple ways.
This two-day event will bring together post-graduate researchers from the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science to reflect on these grand challenges and the ways their current and future research may shape responses to them.
The Festival will include 2 keynote speeches, along with participants attending two of five workshops:
Day 1: Thursday 24 February
13:00 – 13:45: Plenary Speaker – Lorna Slater MSP
14:00 – 16:00: Parallel Sessions
- Workshop 1 – Engaging Policymakers with Professor Melanie Simms (University of Glasgow); Dr Rachel Shanks (University of Aberdeen); Professor Graeme Roy (University of Glasgow); and Professor Alan Miller (University of Strathclyde)
- Workshop 2 – Becoming an Interdisciplinary Researcher: Tips and strategies for careers in academia and beyond with Dr Isabel Fletcher and Professor Catherine Lyall (Science Technology and Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh)
- Workshop 3 – Human Rights & Budgeting with Dr Jo Ferrie and Aidan Flegg (University of Glasgow)
Day 2: Friday 25 February
09:00 – 10:45: Plenary Speaker – Dr Katherine Trebeck
11:00 – 13:00: Parallel Sessions
- Workshop 1 – Public Engagement with Research: Engaging young people with research on sustainable diets with Dr Heather May Morgan (University of Aberdeen)
- Workshop 2 – Erik & The Iban: The Ethics of an Encounter with Dan Childs; Michelle Cullen; and Dr Kiril Sharapov (Edinburgh Napier University)
Why should I attend?
This is a unique opportunity for your academic, intellectual and career development. It is not a conference or a methods-based training event. The Hub Festival is an opportunity for greater interaction (e.g. cohort building, networking) between PhD students through lively discussion, debates, dialogue and group work. Attendees will be expected to participate fully across the two days.
Do I have to attend all the sessions?
You will be asked to rank order the five workshops in order of preference, and we hope to be able to accommodate most preferences. Attendance will be expected across both days of the Festival and at both plenary sessions.
What is the timing of the event?
The event will run for two half days: from 1pm to 5pm on Thursday 24 February, and 9am to 1pm on Friday 25 February. There will be a mix of plenary speakers and workshops on each day with a break allocated between each session.
Interdisciplinary focus
The Festival will be structured around the three Hubs that form the SGSSS. These bring together researchers in disciplinary and interdisciplinary pathways to facilitate a wider discussion and engagement.
For details on how our Pathways and Hubs are organised, please click here.
Festival Programme
Day 1: SGSSS Welcome and Plenary with Lorna Slater MSP
Day 1: Engaging Policymakers
Day 1: Becoming an Interdisciplinary Researcher: Tips and strategies for careers in academia and beyond
Day 1: Human Rights & Budgeting
Day 2: Plenary with Dr Katherine Trebeck
Day 2: Public Engagement with Research: Engaging young people with research on sustainable diets
Day 2: Erik & The Iban: The Ethics of an Encounter
Day 1: SGSSS Welcome and Plenary with Lorna Slater MSP
This session will introduce participants to this year’s Hub Festival and its focus on alternative and competing visions, aspirations and understandings of ‘sustainability’. A keynote by Lorna Slater MSP, a co-leader of the Scottish Green Party and Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity in the Scottish Government, will set the stage for discussions and debates on how to open up new possibilities for collective futures.
Day 1: Engaging Policymakers
This is a panel session of 4 academics with extensive experience of engaging policymakers in their respective fields of work and employment (Professor Melanie Simms), education (Dr Rachel Shanks Shanks), human rights law (Professor Alan Miller) and applied economics (Professor Graeme Roy).
Between them they have worked at local, Scottish, UK, EU and international levels.
They will reflect on benefits and challenges of engaging with policymakers and lessons they have learned across their careers.
Day 1: Becoming an Interdisciplinary Researcher: Tips and strategies for careers in academia and beyond
This session is designed to provide practical lessons for graduate students embarking on interdisciplinary projects, those who plan to undertake such research in the future and those considering their next steps in a research career.
Both speakers were part of the team that developed The SHAPE-ID Toolkit which provides tools and resources to improve collaboration across disciplines and between different sectors.
In our session we will introduce some of the key issues for conducting interdisciplinary research and developing a career as an interdisciplinary researcher. It will highlight some of the resources available from the toolkit and participants are encouraged to have a brief browse of the toolkit in advance of this session.
Day 1: Human Rights & Budgeting
This workshop is a practical session designed to help students learn the value of a human rights-based approach generally, to budgeting specifically. Students will have the opportunity to play with data, and consider, critically whether Scotland would benefit from a human-rights based approach to budgeting. Human Rights, since their inception by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, have been used to create a common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations. They place important normative principles such as human dignity, accountability, and non-discrimination at the heart of international law. Though attempts have been made to impact on real people, living real lives, there remains a gap between what states agree to do in principle, and people’s lived experience of human rights. Often described as the ‘implementation’ or ‘accountability’ gap.
The workshop will help students navigate the international and national state-of-play with regards to human rights. In exploring national implementation of rights, the workshop will begin the explore the nexus between rights realisation and budgetary commitments within a state. Budgets form one of the most important tools for advocates of human rights as they reflect the true values of a sitting government. Where budget analysis can form an important advocate tool, a human rights approach to budgeting could lead to transformational and preventative change. The workshop will be delivered by Dr Jo Ferrie of the Human Rights Budgeting Working Group, and PGR Aidan Flegg who works in the field of human rights realisation using interdisciplinary approaches.
This workshop is for anyone interested in the principles, norms, and obligations of human rights, enabling social impact, and the potential for fiscal change in Scotland. No expertise is required and though we ask that you bring a calculator, you only need to be able to do simple divisions.
Day 2: Plenary with Dr Katherine Trebeck
Dr Katherine Trebeck, Professor Melanie Simms – chair (University of Glasgow)
The Wellbeing Economy is getting attention in corridors of power here in Scotland and around the world. But what is it? What transformations and changes does it entail? Why has the time come to reassess the way economies operate?
This lecture will respond to these questions and the work being done to build the momentum and implementation of the Wellbeing Economy agenda. Examples from a range of sectors and countries will be shared and some of the questions still unanswered will be explored.
Day 2: Public Engagement with Research: Engaging young people with research on sustainable diets
In this session, Dr Heather May Morgan will provide an overview of some of the key considerations around doing public engagement activities using the COP26 events as a case study through interactive breakout sessions.
Heather is a Lecturer in Applied Health Sciences. She is a multidisciplinary social scientist and qualitative researcher. Heather recently ran a series of public engagement events during COP26, aligned with research she is conducting into young people’s views on climate change and meat consumption.
Day 2: Erik & The Iban: The Ethics of an Encounter
The Iban tribe of the island of Borneo, once known for being fearsome head-hunters, have a unique and rich culture with ancient traditions.
Dr Erik Jensen had dreamed of an encounter with the Iban tribe after seeing a faded sepia picture in an old geography book as a school boy in England. It was in 1959 when, at the age of 26, he boarded an ocean liner in the port of London bound for South East Asia. He had set out to do research into Iban culture and Religion and ended up staying for seven years, learning their language and forming a special bond, eventually becoming known as Tuan Ragum, “the Lord with a beard”. It was during this time that an uprising threatened to destabilise the region and Erik volunteered to travel to the remote and hostile Lemanak river to set up an innovative and much needed development scheme which would have a lasting impact on the lives of the Iban in that area and far beyond.
Join this session to watch a 40-minute documentary film, directed by Dan Childs and produced by Michelle Cullen, to follow Erik as he returns to the jungles of Borneo fifty years later to find out about the legacy of his work, and to discover how the Iban are faring in the twenty first century. Is it possible for the unique culture that he came to love so well to be preserved in times of such rapid global change?
The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Michelle and Dan to discuss both the practical issues around the making of documentaries and more challenging reflections on our positionality as researchers in the context of research encounters where the Western concepts of ‘research’ and ‘development’ are deployed.
Watch the trailer here.
Further details about the documentary here.
How to apply
Choose your Hub below to fill out a registration form. Workshop spaces are limited and will be filled on a first come first served basis. If you are no longer able to attend please unregister to allow those on the waiting list to take your place.
If you are unsure of which Hub you belong to after viewing the list of Hubs and Pathways, please contact the SGSSS team for guidance.
Economies, Mind, and Technologies
Register here for the Economies, Mind, and Technologies Hub. This Hub includes the following Pathways:
Accounting, Finance, Business and Management (AFBM)
Economics
Linguistics
Psychology
Science, Technology and Innovation Studies and Information and Communication Studies
Fore full descriptions of each Pathway, please click here.
Attendance: 24 / ∞
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Register here for the Society and Welfare Hub. This Hub includes the following Pathways:
Education
Health, Families, Relationships and Demographic Change
Social Work and Social Policy
Socio-Legal Studies and Criminology
Sociology
Fore full descriptions of each Pathway, please click here.
Attendance: 28 / ∞
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Register here for the People and Place Hub. This Hub includes the following Pathways:
Economic and Social History
Human Geography, Environment and Urban Planning
Language-based Area Studies and International Development
Politics and International Relations (PIR)
Social Anthropology
Fore full descriptions of each Pathway, please click here.
Attendance: 20 / ∞
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