Projects
Our staff are engaged in research projects supported by a wide range of funders. A selection of the current projects, and the members of staff invovled, are detailed below.
Climate change
From Greenhouse Effect to Climategate: A systematic study of climate change as a complex social issue.
Find out more about this project.
Religion, Youth and Sexuality
This project explored the constructions and management strategies undertaken by religious / spiritual young adults to help contribute new knowledge to academic and policy debates on religion, youth, sexuality, and gender.
Find out more about this project.
Citizens in Diversity: A Four-Nation Study of Homophobia and Fundamental Rights
This project, funded by the European Commission, is an international collaboration between scholars from Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, and the UK. The aims as follows:
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to highlight the every-day life dimension of homophobic attitudes and behaviours in society at large and in specific ethnic and religious communities
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to emphasise the fundamental rights angle in understanding and contrasting discrimination of gays and lesbians
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exchange anti-homophobic practices between countries with different cultures of and legal approaches to homosexuality
Find out more about this project 
The Impacts of Fall in Exports on Livelihoods in China: Urban Unemployment, Rural Poverty and the Welfare of Rural-urban Migrants
The fear of falling exports due to the global economic crisis is regarded by the Chinese government as the number one problem it faces. Exports have fallen by 23% and 20 million workers are officially estimated to have lost their jobs as a result. The Human Rights Watch has highlighted the plight of rural-urban migrant workers in particular, a group especially at risk of retrenchment.
This ESRC funded project traces the impact of the slow-down of exports on three related areas: the urban labour market; rural poverty; and health and education. Specifically, the project provides rigorous and reliable information on questions such as: the extent of unemployment and underemployment; the prevalence of wages below minimum wage; remittances to rural areas; and the access of migrants to social sector services. It appraises the policy responses to the fall in exports.
Three objectives are constructed for the project. First, with regard to the urban labour market, the project identifies the impact of the crisis on the wages and employment of different groups of workers. A key policy concern being investigated is that the distributional impact of the crisis may particularly be retrograde - eroding the foothold migrant workers have obtained in the face of official discrimination and squeezing the private sector while ailing state owned enterprises are propped up through the government's stimulus package. Secondly, the project examines the extent to which the crisis worsens rural poverty directly through rural export-oriented industries and indirectly through remittances and migration jobs. Rural-urban migration has been cited by the United Nations as arguably the single biggest driver of poverty reduction in China; the project investigates whether this engine of development may be stalled by the crisis. Thirdly, the project identifies the implications of falling wages, unemployment and remittances on the budgets of affected households for schooling, health care and food.
Poverty, Migration and Public Health in China
The nexus of issues surrounding poverty, migration and health risk in China is of great contemporary policy interest. Although great progress has been made in poverty reduction in China, around 10% of the population still lived below international poverty lines. Consequently more of the world’s poor are found in China than in most other single countries. At the same time, the country is experiencing one of the most dramatic processes of urban-rural migration with more than 10% (140 million) of its population recorded as “floating”. This rural-urban migration has been described as “perhaps the most powerful force for further reducing poverty in China” (UN Country Team, 2004). However, there are concerns that this internal migration raises the risk of disease epidemics, compromising China’s efforts to meet its sixth Millennium Development Goal.
The project, funded by the Ford Foundation, conducts a rigorous study of the links between poverty, migration and epidemic risk in China. It employs the migrant survey using longitudinal questions on health, migration and poverty to provide insights into outcomes over time, rather than relying solely on cross-sectional comparisons.
An in-depth understanding of the health problems facing migrants and their current access to health inputs is essential to the policies to promote migrants’ well being and reduce poverty. Within the health sector, key responses have centred on the provision of medical checks for migrants, treatment of infectious diseases and health education.
Best Practice in Safeguarding Adults with Learning Disabilities
Under present governance arrangements, issues relating to the abuse of vulnerable adults are dealt with under the framework of No Secrets (2000), whilst matters relating to poor practice in the provision of care are the responsibility of the Care Quality Commission (CQC). However, the distinction between abuse and poor practice remains unclear. This lack of clarity creates problems by both allowing poor practice to flourish within some services for adults with learning disabilities and generating significant numbers of inappropriate adult safeguarding referrals from more conscientious services which, in turn, wastes scarce resources and exacerbates workload pressures in statutory adult social care teams. This project will work with adults with learning disabilities and family carers to identify frequently-occurring types of poor practice in residential care homes and supported living services. It will then explore whether frontline support staff share the same definitions of what constitutes poor practice, examine staff explanations/understandings of the causes of poor practices and identify any barriers which may prevent staff from challenging and preventing such practices. Finally, findings will be used to develop practice-oriented outputs which will aim to bridge the gap between CQC inspection and adult safeguarding processes, thereby reducing the likelihood of inappropriate safeguarding alerts.
Gujarati Identity, Lifestyle and Health
People from a `South Asian’ origin have very high rates of CHD and Type 2 Diabetes, which are preventative with a `healthy lifestyle’ . However, that grouping covers many different communities and cultures and although useful at an epidemiological level has no relevance to an understanding of behavior. The aim of this project is to understand and explore `resistance’ to change in diet and lifestyle of the `South Asian population in the UK’ by exploring the cultural meaning of food and the role food plays in cultural identity within one focused community - the Gujarati community. It is hoped that understandings gained from this community may provide insights into adapting public health programmes here and possibly also in other communities within the `South Asian’ grouping.