Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The 2nd PostGrad Cafe Conference

The 2nd PostGrad Cafe Conference will be held on the 20th of Febuary 2008. 'The New Generation of social research' will see ten postgraduate research papers celebrating the range and quality of postgraduate research. Students and staff with an interest in socail research are welcome to attend. The conference will be hekd in the Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University.
The plan for the day is as follows:

1:30pm
Registration, poster presentations and introduction - Committee Room 2
2pm-5pm
Parallel presentations in rooms -1.56 and -1.80, including the following presentations (running orders will be anounced shortly).


- 'Huntingdon’s Disease: Ethnography of a research clinic' - Jackie Needs

- 'A difficult day in the field' - Mark Whiteley

- 'Exploring the relation between migration management and EU strategies for employment. An ethnographic study of the policy process at the European Parliament' - Gabriella Alberti

- 'What’s in a name? The diagnostic labelling of 22q11 Deletion Syndrome' - Rebecca Dimond

- 'Genuine or fake? Mbeki, AZT, and the status of scientific controversies' - Martin Weinel

- 'Ceci n’est pas Cardiff Bay: Visual research, representation and meaning' - Rob Smith

- 'Picture this! An intergenerational case study involving participant-directed visual data production' - Dawn Mannay

- 'Searching for citizenship: LGBT movements in Argentina and Chile' - Penny Miles

- 'The comparative advantage of non-comparability' - Heike Doring

- 'Free home care for disabled people in Wales: elite perspectives on policy failure' - Aimee Grant

5-5:30pm
Buffet in the Senior Common Room


5:30pm onwards
Postgraduate cafe
Presentations on completing a doctorate
, from Pam Robinson (second speaker TBC), as well as wine and refreshments.

Many thanks,
The Postgraduate Cafe Team

Speed Social

The Postgrad Cafe held a Speed Social on the 6th February. This cafe gave everyone a chance to get to know each other on a social level and to discuss their respective research interests.
One of the main purposes of this event was to welcome and integrate relative newcomers into the network of research students who are currently at various stages of PhD study within the department. As such, we encouraged any students currently studying for the MSc in Social Science Research Methods to join us for the event.
In addition, for those who have been coming to the cafe's for a while, this was a chance to discuss some of the changes that have taken place since this time last year.

Speed Social

The Postgrad Cafe held a Speed Social on the 6th February. This cafe gave everyone a chance to get to know each other on a social level and to discuss their respective research interests.
One of the main purposes of this event was to welcome and integrate relative newcomers into the network of research students who are currently at various stages of PhD study within the department. As such, we encouraged any students currently studying for the MSc in Social Science Research Methods to join us for the event.
In addition, for those who have been coming to the cafe's for a while, this was a chance to discuss some of the changes that have taken place since this time last year.

Conducting research in primary schools

On Wednesday the 15th of December Graeme Mooore presented at the Postgrad Cafe on Conducting research in primary schools. He gave a reflexive account of issues he encountered in relation to conducting research in a school setting, whilst working as a researcher on the evaluation of the Primary School Free Breakfast Initiative in Wales. The talk was largely based upon sections which Graeme wrote for a paper recently published in the journal BMC Public Health, which describes the design and conduct of the evaluation.
The study was a large scale cluster-randomised controlled trial with an embedded qualitative process evaluation, involving 111 primary schools and approximately 7000 primary schoolchildren. Schools’ participation in the study lasted for a little over a year, and Graeme talked about his experiences of building and maintaining an effective working relationship with schools during this time, drawing on his experiences of what seemed to work, as well as what didn’t. Graeme also be talked about difficulties involved in conducting research with children, covering issues such as consent, data protection, child protection and engaging children in the data collection process, detailing how myself and other researchers on the project dealt with these issues.