Blog archive
How WhatsApp can help you assess the impact your projects
Author: Emma Heywood
In fragile contexts, gathering audience feedback is a challenge. WhatsApp can be an inclusive solution to get in touch with hard-to-reach communities, reflects Emma Heywood, researcher at the University of Sheffield.
Read more on Emma's blog (previously published by Deutsche Welle Akademie)
Image of women's radio listening group in Niger (Source: Emma Heywood)
Writing Colonising Disability
Date: 5 May 2023
Author: Esme Cleall
Colonising Disability (published by Cambridge University Press in 2022) is my attempt to understand how disability was understood in the nineteenth-century British Empire. When I started doing the research that fed into the book, around about ten years ago I had just started as a lecturer in the History of the British empire at the University of Sheffield. Academically speaking, I wanted to build on my doctoral research on nineteenth-century missionary attitudes to gender and race which had been recently published as Missionary Discourses of Difference.
“Make it Grow” Leverages Smartphone Video-Making to Support Community Food Start-ups
Date: 27 April 2023
Author: Pamela Richardson
Make it Grow is an initiative affiliated to the Institute for Sustainable Food and the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Sheffield. Led by Dr Pamela Richardson, Make it Grow supports community groups and NGOs to build capacity and create participatory video proposals, in order to attract funding and small grants for sustainable food initiatives.
Better hybrid workshops: As if people, not screens, mattered: Participatory experiences in Jordan
Date: 28 February 2023
Author: Dorothea Kleine
Most of us have now been to a “hybrid” event. Coming out of (this phase of) the pandemic, hybrid events are popular, as they seem to combine the benefits of online (geographically remote participants can join with ease) with the benefits of in-person (a fuller relational, unmediated, spontaneous experience, with a greater affective dimension) workshops.
Date: 5 July 2022
Author: Brittany Bunce
Index-based agricultural insurance (IBAI) is one of many financial derivatives that are being promoted with the intention of mitigating smallholder vulnerability in the context of climate change, market uncertainty and the rollback of state support to agricultural producers.
Date: 24 June 2022
Author: Emmanuel Sulle
Because the “blue economy” and “green economy” concepts are gaining momentum in Tanzania’s sustainable development plans, citizens need to understand what these terms mean.
Date: 27 May 2022
Author: Amrita Sen
Biodiversity and its conservation have been at the centre-stage of environmental social science scholarship, with a wide range of recent works looking even deeper and exploring into newer conceptual engagements on conservation policies.
Date: 21 April 2022
Author: CwC team
An open-access paper summarising key findings on livelihoods, vulnerability and coping with Covid-19 in rural Mozambique from the 'Livelihood impacts of coping with Coronavirus in rural Africa’ (CwC) research project has just been published in World Development.
Read more: English version / Portuguese version
Date: 21 April 2022
Author: Melissa Gatter
When the participatory action researchers (PARs) on the PPE and Refugees research project entered the training room in Jordan’s Al al-Bayt University in September 2021, they no doubt arrived with expectations on how the training sessions would be conducted.
Date: 6 December 2021
Author: Melissa Gatter
The PPE and Refugees research project, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund, originally emerged in response to the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Date: 13 September 2021
Author: Nicola Banks, Senior Lecturer, Global Development Institute and Dan Brockington, Professor, the University of Sheffield
The last 18 months have been some of the most challenging ever for the UK charitable sector, especially those working in international development. As the dust from 2018’s catastrophic safeguarding scandals began to settle, the Covid-19 pandemic hit globally.
Date: 11 August 2021
Author: Jean-Philippe Venot
There is growing demand for sustainable development policy that is data driven, but our unprecedented and increasing capacity to generate large volumes of quantitative data also requires a much greater consideration of the ways these data are generated and interpreted.
Date: 15 July 2021
Author: Brittany Bunce and Maurice Beseng
In the last two decades, there has been a growing appeal to use data derived from Earth Observation (EO) to support sustainable development policies in Africa, especially in the agricultural sector where there is a lack of reliable and timely information.
Date: 29 June 2021
Authors: Carlos Tobar Tovar (Universidad Javeriana Cali), Stephany Vargas Rojas (Universidad Javeriana Cali), and Melanie Lombard (The University of Sheffield)
The violence that erupted from Colombia’s ongoing national strike took many by surprise. The protests, which started on 28 April in response to proposed tax reforms, have resulted in weeks of social unrest.
Date: 10 June 2021
Author: Dan Brockington
One of the most contentious aspects of the ‘Half-Earth’ proposals and related '30 by 30' campaign is the role of people in proposed conservation plans. Critics, including myself, are concerned by the lack of consideration of people in these plans.
Date: 19 February 2021
Author: Amrita Dasgupta, PhD Candidate, SOAS
The farmers’ protest in India has been ongoing for two months – and with more than half of Indians working on farms, this is a big concern, and a huge national affair.
Date: 15 December 2020
Author: Judith Krauss, the University of Sheffield (UK)
What happens when we combine research with storytelling public engagement? I reflect on a research storytelling workshop conducted at the political ecology conference POLLEN20.
Date: 27 October 2020
Author: Judith Krauss, the University of Sheffield (UK)
At the wonderful, all-virtual, low-carbon and inclusive POLLEN20 conference (22-25 September 2020), the CONVIVA team had the privilege of convening (Laila Thomaz Sandroni, Judith Krauss, Kate Massarella) and contributing to a popular double session on convivial conservation.
Date: 26 October 2020
Author: Dr Sarah Peck, University of Northumbria
The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown new light on our working spaces, and the role, suitability and function of the home as space of work.
Date: 16 September 2020
Author: Judith Krauss (SIID), Stephen Allen (Management), Renee Timmers (Music), Phil Warren (Animal and Plant Sciences) and Matt Watson (Geography)
How important is it to reflect on environmental aspects as part of research integrity and ethics? On 5 June 2020, an online-only workshop supported by the University of Sheffield’s Research Ethics Committee took place to begin answering this crucial, but challenging question.
Date: 28 August 2020
Author: Maha Rafi Atal, Lisa Ann Richey and Dan Brockington
George Clooney is sad. What might an Oscar winning multi-millionaire have to be sad about, you ask? He’s “surprised and saddened” he says, to learn that Nespresso, the coffee brand for whom he has been a public spokesman since 2006, uses child labour at its plantations in Guatemala.
Coronavirus impacts: a difficult year ahead? Initial research findings from the ‘Livelihood impacts of coping with Coronavirus in rural Africa’ (CwC) project
Date: 22 July 2020
Authors: CwC team
We have been setting up our research project on ‘Livelihood impacts of Coping with Covid-19 in rural Africa’ (CwC). We have been following principles including building on established partnerships, co-creating knowledge based on equity, engaging in open, constructive dialogue, and trying our best, but accepting errors are inevitable in these testing times.
Read more: English version / Portuguese version
Date: 17 July 2020
Authors: Megnaa Mehtta and Debjani Bhattacharyya
Since 2007, the Bay of Bengal basin has seen at least 15 major cyclones, including Sidr in 2007, Aila in 2009, Phailin in 2013, Hudhud in 2014, Bulbul in 2019 and Amphan this year.
Date: 15 July 2020
Author: CwC team
How exactly do you ensure in these distanced times that the collaboration and particularly the interaction with research participants is ethically and methodologically sound? We reflect on some important principles in building our joint project.
Read more: English version / Portuguese version
Date: 22 June 2020
Author: co-authored with Irene Guijt
If we agree that evidence-informed policy and practice are good things, we need to think about what kind of research gets commissioned. Some kinds of research are definitely more useful than others.
Date: 15 June 2020
Author: Dorothea Kleine
Since the Covid-19 crisis began, many people involved in the response have been looking to use digital tools in their efforts to help, in countries around the world.