GHRN Information Bulletin 25th March 2013

1. Events

18 April 2013

‘Same-sex Marriage in the UK and Scotland: Different Perspectives on a Controversial Subject’

5.30 – 7.30pm, University of Glasgow, room tbc

GHRN will host this roundtable discussion.  Speakers will include:

  • Father John Keenan (University of Glasgow Chaplain)
  • Tim Hopkins (Director of the Equality Network)
  • Dr Nicola Barker (University of Kent, author of Not the Marrying Kind: a Feminist Critique of Same-sex Marriage)
  • Professor Kenneth Norrie (University of Strathclyde, International Family Law expert)

Registration details to follow shortly.

19-20 April 2013
‘Moving Forward in the Eastern Congo: Roles to be Played by the International Community’
University of St Andrews

The Coalition for a Conflict-Free St Andrews in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics presents this conference on the 19-20 April. World renowned Africanists, Dr Gerard Prunier and Prof. Koen Vlassenroot, will be giving the keynote speeches. 

The conference will address several aspects concerning international involvement in the eastern Congo, such as armed rebel groups, the empowerment of women, resource exploitation, and the role of Congo's neighbours.

The Conference consists of two parts:

1. Friday Evening - Keynote Speech by Gerard Prunier & Panel on Armed Groups

2. Saturday Morning/Afternoon - 2 roundtables, 1 panel, keynote speech by Koen Vlassenroot with tbc presentations

Tickets can be purchased via PayPal here:

http://conflictfreestandrews.org/conference-2013/ticket-sales/

23 April 2013

GHRN Funding Workshop

1.00 – 4.00pm, Seminar Room 2 (Hugh Fraser), WolfsonMedicalSchoolBuilding, University of Glasgow

The GHRN are running a half-day workshop to explore available funding opportunities that could facilitate collaborative research projects between academic and practitioner members of the network. The membership of the GHRN are particularly well-placed to contribute to current research agendas relating to the role of human rights in Scotland in the context of the Independence referendum, and we hope that this event will bring about timely collaborations and bids for funding.  A member of the University's research support team, Louise Virdee, has kindly agreed to come and discuss the different funding options available.

Lunch and light refreshments will be provided. 

The workshop is free to members, but places are limited to 50.

To register for this event, please visit: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/5541288142

1 May 2013

‘The Human Rights Question: What sort of Scotland, and what sort of constitutional future?’

10.00 – 4.00pm, GlasgowCity Chambers

How do the independence debate, and the question-mark it has placed over Scotland’s constitutional future, influence human rights protections? Will the debate provide opportunities to further promote and protect human rights, will it provide new threats to human rights, or is it largely an irrelevance or even a distraction from the day-to-day work of those organisations who work for the rights of particular constituencies?

This seminar will examine how those involved in civil society groups are working to promote and protect rights, and consider the extent to which the referendum context affects this work. The seminar will consider questions such as: whether groups conceive of, and articulate their work in human rights terms, or in other terms? To what extent are human rights issues seen as important to the constitutional debate? Are human rights particularly served by one constitutional future or another? How might human rights be useful to articulating a vision of the future that might inform constitutional development in Scotland, whether through an on-going development of devolution, or an alternative constitutional future?

The seminar is organised collaboratively by The Scottish Constitutional Futures Forum, the Human Rights Consortium Scotland, the Glasgow Human Rights Network, and the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network and follows on from another seminar in March 2013 and a seminar organised by the Human Rights Consortium Scotland in December 2012.

To register for this event, please visit: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/5386404882

2.  Funding Opportunities

Kelvin Smith PhD Scholarship Scheme 2013/14

‘Health and educational impacts of socio-ethnic migration and neighbourhood dynamics in Scotland’

The fully-funded scheme supports new partnerships between members of staff and offers outstanding research students both from home and abroad the opportunity to undertake doctoral training in the context of cutting edge interdisciplinary projects.

The ethnic/religious composition of our cities and neighbourhoods is diverse and rapidly changing, with profound implications for social justice and cohesion. Current immigration policy, for example, with its far-reaching impacts on education and employment, is underpinned by a particular set of perceptions about ethnicity and the long-term effect of assimilation. Such policies are set against a backdrop of sociological concerns about how society perceives and integrates immigrant communities, and how contours of disadvantage fall along racial and religious lines, and persist down generations. For example, Devine et al. (2000) argue that discrimination towards early-twentieth-century Catholic immigrants became embedded, to the extent that these socio-religious divisions remain a source of disadvantage.

Much of this debate, however, is based on anecdotal evidence, small-sample/short-run case studies, or on area/group averages which are vulnerable to the Ecological Fallacy (using group-level results to make false inferences about individuals within those groups). Migration flows of individuals from particular ethnic/social backgrounds remain poorly understood at micro-spatial-scales and there is very little reliable evidence on the implications for long-term wellbeing.

This project will achieve a step-change in the scientific rigour applied to ethnicity research. Applying cutting-edge quantitative techniques to a unique combination of high-quality Scottish datasets, we shall open-up new avenues for ethnicity/inequality-research, and develop novel social-statistical methods that will have applications in other contexts. We shall follow 270,000 individuals over a twenty-year period, linking the greatly-underutilised Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS) to a rich combination of data on neighbourhood composition, health, house prices and education. This will allow us to map-out the individual life-trajectories and health outcomes of persons identified as Catholic in 1991, compare these trajectories with those of persons from different ethnic/religious backgrounds, and shed light on questions about the extent to which long-term discrepancies in social mobility and health outcomes are driven by ethnicity/religion and/or neighbourhood effects.

If you are interested in applying for this scholarship, please contact Professor Gwilym Pryce (gwilym.pryce@glasgow.ac.uk) for more details.

2.  Resources

The Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) website, http://www.poverty.ac.uk, is a free educational resource for academics, students, NGOs and policy makers interested in evidence-based research on poverty and social exclusion in the UK. It is a comprehensive research tool, containing information on: methodology, conducting original and ethical research, research findings, international surveys, as well as up-to-date articles and a searchable digest of news stories and reports on welfare, poverty, inequality and more. It will also be publish the results of two major surveys over the next few weeks.

This website is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, (ESRC) and is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-WattUniversity, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York, working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.

OPPORTUNITIES TO TAKE PART

Join in the Poverty and Social Exclusion attitudes to necessities survey at www.poverty.ac.uk/take-part.

  • Contact the PSE if you are interested in writing an article for the website.
  • Follow and tweet comments @PSE2010
  • Register to post comments on the website

The PSE are keen to hear from students and educators about what they would like to see on the PSE website, including any specific research papers they would like to suggest for inclusion. The PSE are also in the process of adding links on the PSE website to other organisations and projects researching poverty and social exclusion so if you have suggestions, again, do contact the PSE.

If you have an announcement for an event or resource which may be of interest to other members of GHRN, please send them to GHRNadmin@glasgow.ac.uk for inclusion in the bulletin.

 

http://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/glasgowhumanrightsnetwork/