Innovation and Research Round-Up

Doctoral Thesis Award

Congratulations to Dr Bally Kaur who has won the British Education Research Association’s 2023 Doctoral Thesis Award for her thesis on “Education encounters, hybrid identities and spectral traces: contesting the myths of Aston through the accounts of South Asian Muslim Women”. British Education Research Association is a leading authority on educational research in the UK and Bally received the award in a highly competitive field. Congratulations Bally. 

Research papers used as evidence in government policy 

Dr Elina Michopoulou, Dr Kathleen McIlvenna, Claire Roe and Dr Vladimir Antchak collaborated to create a response to the recent Call for Select Committee Evidence under the heading ‘Reimagining where we live: cultural placemaking and the levelling up agenda’.

They developed an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the importance of heritage and culture for a sense of place and how this interacts with encouraging repeat visitors to an area. The written evidence provided was accepted and influenced the report published by the House of Commons.  

Read the report on 'Reimagining where we live'

A further response by Dr Michopoulou and Dr Iride Azara was submitted to ‘Promoting Britain Abroad’. Colleagues collaborated to share their expertise to address the question ‘What needs to be done to re-establish the UK as a holiday destination for international travellers?’. They argue that, to increase the attractiveness and competitiveness of the UK as a tourism destination, tourism offerings should be developed that address particular market needs.

This report prioritises different customer markets in the form of the Accessible Tourism Market and the Cultural Heritage Tourism Market. It then highlights their importance of these for the overall destination image. Finally, it proposes strategies to attract and serve those markets. The written evidence was accepted and influenced the report published by the House of Commons.

Read the report on 'Promoting Britain abroad'

New guidance for Psychologists - working with people who stalk

Dr Rachael Wheatley was the lead author on the UK’s first guidance published by the British Psychological Society for Psychologists working with people who stalk. The article discusses the experience of being stalked having a devastating psychological impact on victims and therefore highlights the importance of working with people who have stalked to prevent them from continuing. 

Find out more about the guidance

Professorial Inaugural Lectures 

Professor Keith McLay, Provost Learning and Teaching, delivered his Inaugural Lecture on ‘Amphibious Adventures: 400 years of British Warfare’, which was a fantastic event and well attended.  

Watch Professor McLay's lecture

Professor Carley Foster secures funding from the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise  

Professor Carley Foster, alongside a colleague from Newcastle University, has successfully won funding from the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise.

The funding is for a project that builds on Carley's work in the region with place-based regeneration as its focus. It will support research, impact and engagement with businesses, policy makers and organisations in Derbyshire and the Peak District. This project, underpinned by the notion of a ‘sense of belonging’, will look specifically at how rural enterprises attract and retain workers in the region and the extent to which these workers identify with where they live, work, shop and visit. 

This project is externally funded by the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise as part of UK Research and Innovation funding.

Find out more about the place-based regeneration research project

Forensic Psychology researchers secure funding for study on engagement with domestic abuse services  

Congratulations to researchers Dr Jamie Bird, Dr Dean Fido, Dr Aleksandra Monteiro, Dr Rachael Wheatley, Dr Karin Spenser, Dr Katia Vione, Louise Wallace, Robyn Mooney, and Ashleigh Thatcher who have secured funding for a study on engagement with domestic abuse services.

The study will investigate the barriers faced by people from under-reached groups when attempting to engage with services designed to address domestic violence and abuse. The research will make use of quantitative data to identify existing patterns of access with current services, and qualitative interviews and focus-groups to identify perceived barriers and potential solutions. The research builds on an existing relationship with the Safer Derbyshire Community Safety Team and will be conducted over the next six months. 

A new form of self-esteem

University of Derby researcher Dr Peter Macauley and Professor Mike Boulton from the University of Chester have established a new form of self-esteem, 'authentic self-esteem'. This is a person's beliefs about their past, present and future experiences of facing challenges (and problems) and the associated evaluations of themselves that arise out of those experiences. The academics have recently published their work on authentic self-esteem in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.  

Find out more about authentic self-esteem

The academics' latest study aimed to test if a new measure of authentic self-esteem can buffer the negative effects of bullying victimization on social anxiety and disrupted classroom concentration concurrently and across time. The study showed that positive self-views that arise out of engaging in challenges, that we call authentic self-esteem, moderated the association between bullying victimisation and two important outcomes of it, social anxiety and disrupted classroom concentration.