Moving on and apologies

My many apologies for not keeping up to date with this blog So I am just writing a brief summary here for now.

But…a lot has been happening, I’ve not been away on holiday.

Firstly, I am moving to University of Bristol from the beginning of October.  To my delight I was awarded an early careers fellowship from Leverhulme Trust.  This is a two year fellowship and will enable me to continue working in an academic environment.   I’m particularly pleased given that I’ve spent the last two years on short term contracts; valuable as that experience has been it’s stressful working on contracts that last less than a year.  The piece of research I will be undertaking will be exploring the concept of group rights in education, with deaf children as the case study.  This follows on very nicely from my PhD in citizenship, where Deaf people expressed serious concerns for the education of deaf children, and this fellowship will enable me to investigate this further.

But first of all, there is work to complete and I have been keeping busy with analysis of research that has been undertaken on Deaf people’s attitudes and beliefs on genetics.  We have our workshop at Cardiff on 18th September to disseminate the findings.  I’m also giving a paper on the subject at a conference in Amsterdam on 25/26 September, and will be at the Centre for Deaf Studies 30 year celebrations in Bristol on 27th September.

My small-scale but important piece of research on mental health in the Glasgow Black Minority Ethnic Community has been complete; I’ve written up the report and that is due for launch and publication in November.

I’m particularly pleased that a 7,000 word peer-reviewed article I wrote on citizenship is due to be published in Citizenship Studies; it’s a good summary, I think, of what my PhD is all about.

On a lighter note, I managed to catch some of the Edinburgh Festival amidst all the work, seeing two signed comedies and watched three mime-comedies as well as some street theatre and a fab exhibition.   And I treated myself by buying a replica Brighton and Hove Albion away strip that arrived today, but my excitement was dampened cos they lost today for the first time this season 4-1   Oh well, the players are probably all excited about facing Man City (and Robhino?) in the Carling cup…

Two other projects to mention…and an update on the genetics research project

In addition to research on attitudes to genetics there are two other projects currently being worked on at Heriot Watt.

The first is subtitling; there has been very little done into how deaf and hard of hearing people read subtitles, what they think of it, and what styles and types they prefer.  A guy at Heriot-Watt, Pablo Romero, is doing his PhD on this subject; they are collecting views of Deaf and hard of hearing people in three different European countries, and I’m working with him advising and assisting with setting up groups etc.  It is hoped that the findings of the project will help in the running of courses for translators who want to work in subtitling, so it does have a practical application.

The second is research on the mental health needs of Deaf Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people in Glasgow.  This is a pilot research project spread over 5 months and involves me working with the Deaf BME Officer in the Glasgow Deaf community to evidence whether there is any need for a larger project (or what might be necessary that would support the community there in Glasgow).

Two very different projects, therefore, and along with the genetics research are keeping me busy!

Incidentally the collection of data in the Deaf community for the genetics project is now complete and I will begin working on analysis of the data.  Information from hard of hearing people has yet to be collected but will start very shortly.  Results of the findings will be published in journals and presentations given to conferences in the future.

Apologies if that is a very dry rendering of where my life is with work in progress; but I just wanted to give a brief information update for now

Steve