Diversity in Research Podcast

Alfonso Pezella is a mental health lecturer at Middlesex University, and he has been part of the IENE9  research project that looks at intercultural training for nurses and health care workers in Europe with a focus on LGBTQ+ rights. It was a broad discussion on the role of culture, the health consequences for LGBTQ+ persons and how training can look in this area. We also talked about how this app...

Jonathan Grant  is a professor at King’s College London , and we talk to him about his new book “The New Power University”. Jonathan’s book challenged and inspired us, so we had to get him on the podcast to explain how he sees universities changing in the 21st century.  We talk about how the world has changed without universities noticing it, and how universities will have to rethink the purpose o...

First of all apologies for the poor sound quality in parts of the recording! In this episode, we talked to Thomas Jørgensen, the Senior Policy Coordinator at European University Association. We invited Thomas on the podcast to talk about “A global approach to research innovation, education and youth”, which is the EUA’s input to the EU Commissions consultation for their new strategy for research,...

First of all apologies for the poor sound quality on some parts of this recording! As the UK announced its national researcher mobility scheme named after after the famous Enigma mathematician Alan Turing to be launched as the new EU mobility programme Erasmus was being launched we decided it was time for a chat about the two schemes and what it would do to researcher mobility and collaboration bo...

Jennifer Stergiou is the Director of Research Services at the University of Northumbria and the chair of ARMA (Association of Research Managers and Administrators) in the UK.  She took over as chair in the middle of the pandemic, so we had a chat with her about how that has been. The main reason for inviting her however was to discuss the recent revision of ARMA's strategic plan including a s...

We were intrigued when we heard about the term bibliodiversity and had to learn more. The result was this eyeopening talk with Dr Arianna Becerril-García. She is a professor at Autonomous University of the State of Mexico and executive director at Redalyc. We talk about the differences in how we look at scholarly publications in the Global North and the Global South, how open access models are the...

In the final episode of Season Two, we chat with Professor Alexander Serebrenik (Software Engineering and Technology cluster, Eindhoven University of Technology) and Senior member of technical staff, Reed Milewicz (Center for Computing Research, Sandia National Laboratories). Alexander and Reed met at a conference in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois where they built on their mutual interests as part of...

In this weeks discussion, we chat with Professor Dr Ludovic Thilly , Chair of the Coimbra Group and Professor of Physics at the University of Poitiers. We discuss Professor Thilly's recent work developing HR strategies for researchers based on the presentation he gave at European Research & Innovation Days in September 2020. We talk about career paths and how we need to think differently...

Dr Clara Barker is unique in that she is transgender and holds an academic research post at Oxford University. But how did she get there and what hurdles did she face along the way? In this fascinating chat, we learn about Clara's accidental road into research and how she almost walked away. Now in her academic position, she works to promote transgender voices and LGBTQ+ inclusion across acad...

To start 2021 we chatted with Tyson Yunkaporta. Tyson is an indigenous activist, thinker and academic in Australia who challenges us all to think differently about the way we live and work. Indigenous communities around the world have lived in sync with the land and with each other for generations and these approaches to thinking and knowledge are profoundly different to what we might be used to....

In this week's podcast, we chat to Lizzie Gadd and explore how bibliometrics, citations and rankings can impact on the diversity of research and the research environment. Lizzie chairs the International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS) Research Evaluation Working Group . The group has recently examined the role of bibliometrics in the global research environment and has recen...

We are joined this week by Tena Prelac, Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) at the University of Oxford, who is a member of the Academic Freedom and  Internationalisation Working Group. We discuss the rise in self-censorship amongst UK academics, academic freedom and what the role of international research funding, collaborations and partnerships play i...

Mental health understandings have been surrounded by stigma and a lack of literacy for many years but this is slowly changing. In our conversation with Associate Professor Nicola Reavley,  Principal Research Fellow, Mental Health Literacy Programme at  Melbourne School Of Population And Global Health we explore how this stigma is changing, what this means for education and support services and wha...

Laura Evans from Nifty Fox (@NiftyFoxCreativ) joins us to launch season two of the podcast. Laura started her career in Higher Education by supporting widening participation and student engagement. Through this experience, she could see that it wasn't always easy for her to come out and she felt that many services were missing their mark including missing the LGBTQ+ community. Her experience...

We had the pleasure of chatting with Saskia Walcott of Walcott Communications in this episode. Saskia has had an unusual journey into the research and higher education sector. Following a career in communications and public relations, she joined the Economic and Social Research Council ( ESRC ). She has also worked for universities before starting her own consultancy company. She recently publishe...

Vicky Williams, the CEO of Emerald Publishing, joined us this week to reflect on their recent report, The Power of Diverse Voices, which explored diversity and inclusion in global academia and publishing. Vicky explains how Emerald has worked to increase equality and diversity within the company and how they are now championing change across the sector. Publishing is an integral part of the academ...

In this episode, we talk to Dr Eric Cervini about his book, The Deviant's War, his life in academia in the US and UK as well as why he is no longer in the academy. We discuss the lessons learnt from the book which charts the fight for gay rights in the US before Stonewall as well as exploring what this might mean for creating a more inclusive academy. The importance of understanding history a...

In this episode, we discuss a recently published research report from Denmark which was looking at the impact of Covid-19 on minority communities. The results are surprising and demonstrate how discrimination and harassment can manifest in different ways and the ways in which this has been exacerbated during the pandemic. We discuss these findings and look at the ways in which this may have alread...

In today's episode, we speak with Professor John MacGrath who is a psychiatrist and professor of clinical medicine at the University of Queensland. Since 2017 he has also held the  Niels Bohr Professor at the National Centre for Register-based Research at Aarhus University in Denmark. Professor McGrath specialises in researching risk factors for schizophrenia and undertakes research from his...

In a special Pride Month episode, we talk to Dr Frances Hamilton (Senior Lecturer in Law) and Cameron Giles (Postgraduate Researcher) from the Law School at Northumbria University about their recent research into UK Higher Education travel policies and how they apply to LGBTQ+ staff and students. We explore how the research came about, what they found and some of the issues faced by the LGBTQ+ com...

In this episode, we talk to Professor Felix Riede, Head of Department and Professor of Archeology at Aarhus University in Denmark. Felix grew up in Germany, completed his PhD in the UK and has worked in the UK and now Denmark for over ten years. He leads international research projects including an ERC Consolidator Grant, Computational approaches to Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic archaeolo...

In today's launch episode, we talk through what the podcast is all about, how we met and a little about the conversations we have had, all leading to this podcast. We preview what we will be talking about in the coming weeks with a focus on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and using cultural intelligence to create more inclusive and effective research cultures, environments and interna...