Projects in 2011

Enduring Love? Couple relationships in the 21st century

Investigators: Jacqui Gabb (Senior Lecturer, OU Faculty of Social Sciences), Janet Fink (Senior Lecturer, OU Faculty of Social Sciencces), Jane McCarthy (Reader, OU Faculty of Social Sciences), Martina Klett-Davies (Research Associate, OU Faculty of Social Sciences)

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Family Troubles?

How far are difficult or painful events a general feature of family lives, how do troubled families normalise their lives, and when do ‘changes’ and ‘troubles’ become ‘harm’? And how do ‘family’ discourses and practices re/create such divisions and perspectives?

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Creating Publics

The project emerges out work undertaken under the auspices of CCIG’s Publics Research Programme and the recognition that there is a need to bring contemporary research on public mediation to bear on the public engagement agenda.

Acknowledging that opportunities to perform publicly are both increasingly diverse as well as more and more unevenly available, the project investigates the current drive for publicly engaging social science research by exploring what is at stake in different contexts and experimenting with new approaches to practice.

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Oecumene: Citizenship After Orientalism

This project, led by Prof Engin Isin, is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (Institutions, values, beliefs and behaviour ERC-AG-SH2). The project focuses on the interaction between two controversial and contested concepts: citizenship – the process by which belonging is recognised and enacted – and orientalism – the assertion of the superiority of western culture over its eastern counterparts.

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Governing by Inspection

Governing by Inspection: School Inspection and Education Governance in Scotland, England and Sweden

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Enduring Love?

The Enduring Love? project is a mixed methods study on long-term adult couple relationships. The findings will add an important dimension to understandings of personal and family lives in contemporary society.

Increasing knowledge on how long-term relationships work and the emotional and practical relationship work that goes into sustaining them, will facilitate more effective points of intervention, informing the improvement of policy making, governance and support services, and relationship education.

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Gender and Intra-Household Entitlements (GeNix): A Cross-National Longitudinal Analysis

Investigators: Susan Himmelweit (Professor, OU Faculty of Social Sciences), Jerome De Henau (Lecturer, OU Faculty of Social Sciences), Cristina Santos (Lecturer, OU Faculty of Social Sciences) and Zeenat Soobedar (Research Associate, OU Faculty of Social Sciences)

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Community participation and social inclusion: The work of Community Mobilisers in Milton Keynes

Investigators: Deb Drake (Lecturer, OU Faculty of Social Sciences), Kate Smith (Curriculum Manager, OU Faculty of Social Sciences), Katy Simmons (OU Faculty of Education and Language Studies)