Embargoed: 0001 Tuesday 29 May

The Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) has announced an award of £780K to create a Scottish Centre for Research on Social Justice led by the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. The award is one of a number of Research Development Grants announced by SHEFC.

Social justice is at the heart of the government's agenda for Scotland, but policies to pursue this objective require a stronger evidence base.

By bringing together two leading international Centres of excellence, the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow and the Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research at the University of Aberdeen, and by linking with others, the Scottish Centre for Research on Social Justice hopes to integrate fragmented research and develop new independent research capacity in this vitally important area. This project will reveal patterns of injustice, explore the processes involved in its emergence and persistence and inform policies which can alleviate inequalities and exclusion.

The Centre's research programme will reflect four key themes:

* the quality of individuals' lives at different stages of the life-course

* the communities and neighbourhoods in which people live

* the ways excluded groups engage with government

* the impact of policy in one policy field on others.

Particular emphasis will be placed on the interactions between urban and rural areas, and on the ways in which policies such as welfare reform impact differently on rural and urban areas and on specific disadvantaged groups. Another exciting element will be to explore how effective area-based partnerships are in tackling injustice.

The Centre will work with others to link policy and research in Scotland and the UK, and to influence international debate. The Centre's research programme will be developed in consultation with researchers, policy groups, representatives of excluded groups and a Centre advisory committee. The researchers will collaborate with existing and new units, including the Heriot-Watt Centre for Research into Socially Inclusive Services. The Centre will disseminate its work widely.

Further information for the media is available at http://www.newsdesk.gla.ac.uk/pressreleases

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For further information about this project please call

Professor Robina Goodlad on 0141 330 4516 or 0141 586 7588

e-mail r.goodlad@socsci.gla.ac.uk or call Mike Brown on pager 07644 078126 or email m.brown@admin.gla.ac.uk

or Kirsty Mullan, Assistant Communications Officer at SHEFC on 0131 313 6560.

First published: 28 May 2001