Careering BEYOND jobs in the environment

Posted on Monday, 9 February 2026 by Richard Holliman

In January 2026, The BEYOND Project held an Environmental Careers Fair at the Milton Keynes Academy (thank you Kristal Watkins). Students from the Academy attended alongside others from St. Paul’s Catholic School and Milton Keynes College.

We made a short video about the event, featuring Jess Blake (MK Academy), Laura Beechey (The Parks Trust), Jonathan Ball (Milton Keynes Council), Karen Thompson (Suez), Vicky Bowskill (Inklusive Nature), Holly Woo (The Open University), and Nick Garcia (Glendale, Landscaping).

The BEYOND Project Careers Fair was filmed and edited by Gerard Giorgi-Coll, and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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My Body, My Life

Posted on Tuesday, 1 May 2018 by Victoria Newton

Dr Victoria Newton and Dr Lesley Hoggart, The Open University.

Challenging abortion stigma through story-telling

MyBody MyLife is an award-winning, multi-media travelling exhibition and website. Together, the exhibition and website aim to break open silences by using real-life stories of abortion. The stories in the exhibition show how easily an unplanned pregnancy can become part of women’s lives, how different women have taken their decision to have an abortion, and what the process was like for them.

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A Walk in the Himalaya

Posted on Monday, 13 November 2017 by Eleni Wood

Eleni Wood, The Open University

In mid-spring this year, I packed my bags for my second field season in north-west Bhutan. Bhutan is a jewel of the Himalaya; the small mountain kingdom is home to fantastic people, herds of yak and even the illusive snow leopard.

The trip’s goal was to study and collect rocks for my PhD research, which would help me investigate the growth and deformation of the mountain range.

It was a trip I definitely didn’t want to forget. It was also the last chance, during my PhD at least, that I would get to capture the magic of the environment on film. So, I squeezed the GoPro Hero 4, chest strap, waterproof casing and a number of batteries into my packing.

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Moving school-university engagement beyond the role of recruiting sergeant

Posted on Monday, 3 April 2017 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Michael Francis.

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Photo: Michael Francis.

“The science faculty in your local university needs you!” could have been the headline on the recent Guardian article about the RCUK-funded School-University Partnership Initiative (SUPI).

There is much to commend in the article and in the activities fellow SUPIs have developed, delivered and assessed over the previous four years.

Is there a problem with the article?

I argue that this article is part of a wider discourse that limits how school-university engagement with research is planned for, enacted, represented and, ultimately, valued. But why should we care?

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Engaging Research: from trainee to trainer

Posted on Tuesday, 28 March 2017 by Richard Holliman

Lucy Garrett, University of Birmingham and Dr Kate Baker, University of Exeter

As participants of the first set of NERC-funded workshops on engaging research in 2015, we were delighted to hear that Richard Holliman and Clare Warren were repeating the workshops at the Open University and wanted us to return as trainers.

It was back in 2015 that we attended the course, learning how to communicate our research more effectively and how to engage stakeholders with our research. This included spending time experimenting with language and using metaphors to explain what our research was about and who could use it in outside of academia.

It was the first time that many of us spent quality time thinking about how our research could be engaged with other researchers, NGOs and industry; an exchange of knowledge that would improve our research quality and increase the impact of our work.

Week 1: l-r, Melanie Stone, Kate Newton, Eleni Wood, Richard Holliman, Rosalinde Nicholls, David Pettifer, Stacy Phillips, Clare Warren, Jasmine Wareham, Slawomir Michniewski, Lucy Garrett, Kate Baker, Janet Sumner, Gerard Giorgi-Coll and Chris Nedza. Photo: Gareth Davies.

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Developing productive partnerships with end-users

Posted on Wednesday, 1 February 2017 by Richard Holliman

Richard Holliman and Clare Warren, The Open University. Photo: Michael Francis.

We’ve just published an open access paper in a new journal called Research for all. (Scroll down for further details about the new journal.)

In the paper, we discuss how we supported future scholars of engaged research through a training programme that included some preparatory and follow-up activities, combined with a week-long residential element (Holliman and Warren, 2017).

In the paper we acknowledge that researchers in the UK are taking on new roles and responsibilities to meet the requirements of an expanded agenda for generating and evidencing social and economic impacts from research.

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Engaging off the board

Posted on Wednesday, 3 August 2016 by Ann Grand

Dr Ann Grand, University of Western Australia

The Snakes and Ladders of Social Media World Tour…
In Australia as elsewhere, researchers are increasingly facing demands to open up and discuss their research in the public sphere. The issue of ‘research with impact’ is also live here – the new National Research and Innovation Agenda includes planning for a pilot impact assessment exercise in 2017.

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Are social media work?

Posted on Wednesday, 29 June 2016 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

Digital media are changing researchers’ roles and simultaneously providing a route for a more engaging relationship with stakeholders throughout the research process. But are they work?

Over the last couple of years I’ve been working with colleagues at the Open University (Ann Grand, now at the University of Western Australia, Trevor Collins and Anne Adams) to explore this issue and how it relates to questions of strategy, operational practices, training, support, and reward and recognition (Holliman et al., 2015).

In attempting to address the overarching question of whether social media are work, we recently published a paper arising from one aspect of a project exploring how university research and professional practices are evolving as researchers engage with stakeholders via digital media to create, share and represent knowledge together (Grand et al., 2016).

In that paper we review the extent to which they are developing multiple identities and functions in their engaged research through digital media. You can access the paper from the following link:

“We muddle our way through”: shared and distributed expertise in digital engagement with research

The title of the paper, “We muddle our way through”

“We muddle our way through” (Grand et al., 2016)

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Appropriating Social Media: Public engagement with science and technology online

Posted on Thursday, 28 April 2016 by Trevor Collins

Trevor Collins, Ken Skeldon, Rick Holliman, Heather Doran and Ann Grand.

Today at the Public Communication of Science and Technology conference we’ll be running a workshop on the use of social media channels to support engaged research. We’ll discuss the challenges and benefits of using social media as part of an engagement strategy, and consider the roles digitally engaged researchers adopt and the motives that drive their activities. Richard Holliman (standing in for Jamie Dorey), Ann Grand, Heather Doran and Ken Skeldon are bringing a set of example scenarios to discuss, along with related case studies that demonstrate how these challenges have been played out in practice. We’re hoping that this session will provide an opportunity to hear about the diverse experiences across the PCST community in order to consider effective practices in a range of contexts.

Resources

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Continuity and change with engaged research

Posted on Thursday, 3 December 2015 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

Embedding strategy, celebrating excellence, transforming practice
In July 2013, colleagues and I at the Open University (OU), UK started this blog and called it Engaging Research. As the University’s Champion for Public Engagement with Research at that time it fell to me to write the first post. I named this after the multi-disciplinary project the small team and I were working on, ‘An open research university’.

In that post I posed a ‘tongue in cheek’ question, “If you’re the University’s Champion for Public Engagement with Research can you tell me how many people it takes to change a university’s research culture?” My answer was a play on an old joke, “I don’t know at the moment, but I do know that those involved really have to want to change.” More than two years on from that first blog post, I can give you a more serious answer to the same question.

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Engaging Research

An Open Research University: Embedding public engagement within the research culture of the OU

Category Archives: Communication

Careering BEYOND jobs in the environment

My Body, My Life

A Walk in the Himalaya

Moving school-university engagement beyond the role of recruiting sergeant

Engaging Research: from trainee to trainer

Appropriating Social Media: Public engagement with science and technology online

Continuity and change with engaged research