Ted Schatzki is professor of Geography and Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, USA. He is a world-leading scholar, best known for helping to develop and establish what has come to be known as ‘social practice theory’. He visited the University of Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor September-November 2023 and was hosted by Professor Dale Southerton Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

Understanding social change as it occurs is a tricky endeavor.  When the world metamorphoses as one negotiates its transformations, one might also wonder, Where is all this heading? 

So is the situation today regarding sociodigital change. The dissemination of digital devices, infrastructures, and services across the globe has occasioned myriad changes in communication, work, and transportation, war and peace, governance and business, writing and making, entertainment and socializing, and so on.  These changes are so numerous that it is difficult to keep abreast and to keep track of the problems they throw up.  Further exacerbating this predicament is the thorny challenge of grasping how digitalization might be transforming society at a deeper level.

The result is that emerging problems are unevenly ascertained and haphazardly addressed and that society is ill-equiped to confront more profound challenges. 

Luckily, the University of Bristol boasts several units seeking to cast light on these matters.  Particularly central to the task of grasping the character and scope of sociodigital change is the work of the University’s Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF), which came into existence in the summer of 2022 through a large ESRC grant. 

The staunchly interdisciplinary Centre, which draws academic staff from several faculties and schools, analyzes sociodigital change by asking how sociodigital futures come about, including who or what is shaping them, how such futures emerge in everyday practice, and what their emergence means for widening social-economic inequalities and climate change. The Centre focuses on five domains of sociodigital practice—consuming, caring, learning, moving (people and goods) and organizing—and asks how key technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and augmented/virtual reality are imagined, innovated, and intertwined with them. 

My own recent work explores the digitalization of society and the social changes accompanying this.  I am developing a theory of social form that, in describing key dimensions of change in social phenomena, identifies the central ingredients of sociodigital transformation.  The theory, once developed, should help sort out sociodigital changes and how to confront them.  The Centre shares a focus on sociodigital change. As a result, it and I have begun extensive collaboration.  The collaboration was initially supported by a Benjamin Meeker Distinguished Professor Award in September-November 2023 and will be sustained in the near future by return trips to Bristol in 2024 (supported by the Centre) and a subsequent six month stay in the first half of 2025 funded by a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship. 

Together, the work of the Centre and its ongoing collaboration with external researchers promise to foster greater clairvoyancy and responsiveness vis-à-vis sociodigital changes.  In this way, they sharpen society’s capacity to handle, in real time, what is happening to it. 

Professor Ted Schatzki

Richard Arthur is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University in Ontario. His research interests are in early modern natural philosophy and mathematics, and the foundations of physics, with special attention to the theory of time and the infinite. He visited the University of Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor for September and part of October  2023 at the invitation of Dr. Karim Thébault and Tzuchien Tho to work with them with a view to future research collaboration. 

I was invited to Bristol to discuss two aspects of my research. Karim was primarily interested in my work on time in modern physics, and Tzuchien and I have long-standing interests in common on the natural philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, the great German polymath of the 17th century.

While in Bristol, I gave a Master Class treating both of these topics, “The Problem of Time: from Leibniz to Quantum Gravity”, which consisted of a series of four lectures (Sept. 6^th and 20^th, Oct. 4^th and 11^th), each followed by intensive discussion among faculty and students. These were well attended (impressively so, given that they were voluntary and began before the start of classes!), and it was refreshing to be in the company of such motivated and intelligent students from a variety of backgrounds, in mathematics and physics, as well as philosophy.

On September 21 I gave a departmental seminar in the Philosophy Department in Cotham House,  on “Leibniz and Zeno’s Paradoxes”, which enabled interactions with the wider department including Professor James Ladyman. Then, near the end of my stay, I presented a public lecture, “Time: What’s the Problem?” on October 6^th. This had sold out a few days earlier, and again, I was impressed by the diversity and engagement of the audience. The lecture served as a dry run for a book I am proposing to write on this topic for a general audience.

During my stay, I was able to work with Karim on final corrections to his latest book, which has since come out with Oxford University Press, Time Regained. He and I also discussed future research collaboration on a new proposal for the philosophy of time in modern physics, focusing on local time directed processes. I also made plans with Tzuchien, should I return to Bristol, to host a one- or two-day workshop on the metaphysical implications of the syncategorematic infinite, connecting the history of the idea from its origins in scholastic philosophy, through the work of Leibniz, to its reception in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This was a really valuable experience for me, and I hope also for my hosts. It is one thing to have collaborations with other scholars over email and Zoom, and quite another to establish firm understandings with them through prolonged personal interactions, both by participating in seminars and talks and more informally outside classrooms and lecture halls. My wife Gabriella joined me and we were housed, courtesy of the International Research Development Team, in very comfortable accommodation in Principal’s House, from which vantage point we were able to explore all the delights of the city of Bristol.

Professor Richard Arthur

In Autumn 2023, Dr Laura Pickard, was awarded Bristol International Research Collaboration Activities (BIRCA) funding to host a workshop discussing Composites for High Energy Physics with collaborators from CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Switzerland, the National Composites Centre (NCC) and the Bristol Composites Institute (BCI). 

With thanks to funds from BIRCA, I was able to work with Jo Gildersleve on organising and delivering a collaborative workshop with colleagues from CERN, NCC and BCI. CERN physicists and engineers use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter- fundamental particles, and have a growing interest in harnessing the many benefits of using composite materials in development of their state-of-the-art facilities.

Kicked off by a tour for CERN colleagues of the extensive NCC facilities, and following a welcome from Ole Thomsen, Co-Director of BCI, workshop attendees spent the day discussing three important areas of research of interest to all parties: Cryogenics and Extreme Environment, Truss structures and Microvascular channels and cooling systems. Presentations on these themes from CERN, NCC colleagues and BCI academics set the scene for very productive and useful discussions, which provided further knowledge exchange opportunities as well as time to plan and prioritise ideas for future collaboration. Further presentations highlighted the numerous mechanisms available for collaboration across all of the organisations, including potential sources of funding for future work. CERN and NCC colleagues undertook a tour of the BCI lab during the working lunch, which included observing some members of BCI demonstrating their relevant work. Together with the earlier tour of NCC facilities, this helped to inspire new ideas and thoughts about what might be possible for future work. A working dinner followed the day’s activities which allowed for more discussions, and CERN colleagues also attended the BCI and NCC Annual Conference which took place the next day.

There was a wealth of collaboration opportunities available and many ideas for future work had come to light as a result of the workshop. We enjoyed a fantastic day of fascinating and very productive conversations. Bringing together CERN colleagues with key BCI academics and NCC colleagues has been incredibly useful on all sides and has confirmed our strong desire to work together to build further collaborations.

Dr Diego Alvarez Feito of CERN commented, “I would like to thank the colleagues from BCI and NCC for organising a great workshop! It was a very valuable experience with plenty of enriching discussion, which I believe lays a strong foundation for exciting future collaborations.”

Dr Pickard went onto represent BCI at the CERN Community Meeting for R&D collaboration on Tracking Detector Mechanics on Wednesday 6th December where she met other CERN colleagues as well as those involved in a wider consortium.

Find out more about Dr Pickard’s work on the next generation of fibre composite materials as part of the NEXTCOMP project.

M. V. Ramana is a Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and has been engaged in research about nuclear energy for over two decades. He visited the University of Bristol in September 2023 as a Bristol ‘Next Generation’ Visiting Researcher to consolidate work that advances a range of new perspectives on the safety of atomic energy.

Thanks to support from the Bristol ‘Next Generation’ Visiting Researcher Programme and my host Dr. John Downer (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies), I visited the University of Bristol and the city of Bristol for the first time in September 2023. The main purpose of the visit was to build on our earlier collaboration, which examined safety assessments of nuclear reactors and the nature of knowledge claims about the likelihood of severe accidents. This work was based on a case study of the processes through which the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed the “AP1000 reactor” design. This project brought together our separate backgrounds and resulted in a paper published in the journal Regulation & Governance.  

During my visit, John and I spent hours discussing the contours of a collaborative monograph on the safety of nuclear reactors, and started developing a proposal to be sent to publishers. Although we had been going back and forth over email about how to structure such a monograph, our discussions, which took place over a wide variety of settings—from the School office to coffee shops to walks in Wales over a weekend day trip—really helped us move forward.   

Image: John Downer and M. V. Ramana in Southerndown, Wales 

I also gave a couple of lectures. One was titled “Small Modular Reactors And Other Nuclear Fantasies”, and it built on many papers of mine on the topic of small modular reactors, in particular ones published in Energy Research and Social Science, Science, Technology and Human Values, and in IEEE Access. In my talk, I described how nuclear energy’s declining share of global electricity generation is due to the high costs of building nuclear reactors, and how the nuclear industry hopes to deal with the economic challenges and other problems associated with nuclear power by building what are called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). I then described some of the claimed attributes of SMRs, and explained why these are not realistic expectations. Finally, the talk discussed the broader set of fantasies that are motivating some to support nuclear energy in the face of its lack of economic competitiveness and the obvious risks associated with the technology.

The second lecture was titled “Separating The Inseparable: Civilian Nuclear Energy’s Connections To The Bomb” and it built on my papers published in Nuclear Technology and Science and Global Security, as well as my book The Power of Promise on nuclear energy in India and a forthcoming book on the political economy of nuclear energy to be published by Verso books. In my talk, I traced the history of nuclear power to the beginning of the atomic age, when most knowledgeable people recognized that civilian nuclear programs could be used to produce nuclear weapons. I explained how that changed within a few years, when countries with nuclear technology started a sustained campaign to get the public to think differently about nuclear energy, most notably after President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech in 1953. I then explained why there are deep connections between the two pursuits, in particular the technical overlaps between the processes used to generate nuclear energy and make material for nuclear weapons, interchangeability of personnel, and institutional imperatives. Thus, I concluded, expanding nuclear energy will necessarily increase the risk of nuclear war. 

The lectures were well attended and the questions were interesting and challenging, with the discussion becoming heated on occasion. The presence of a number of young students was gratifying, as was the fact that one of them who attended both my talks went on to post about these on LinkedIn. I also enjoyed meeting many of John’s colleagues and students, in particular Tim Edmunds and Sveta Milyaeva.  

I am grateful to John and the International Research Development Team for making this trip possible.  

Professor M.V. Ramana

Introduction

On Tuesday 31st October, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost of the University of Bristol, Professor Judith Squires, hosted a celebration for University staff involved in international research collaboration activities. Among the attendees were the International Research Development Team and academic staff who have hosted international visiting researchers, as well as colleagues from Bristol University Press (BUP) who champion and support international co-authored publications and the authors, editors and board members who have supported BUP’s mission and contributed to its success and development.

During a set of speeches, Professor Squires thanked attendees for contributing to the University’s international research activities, and introduced the International Research Development Manager Dr Lauren Winch who provided a summary of Bristol’s International Research Development portfolio. Some highlights from her speech are included below.

A brief history of the International Research Development schemes

The International Research Development portfolio of schemes has at its heart an ambition to build a global community of scholars and to enhance the University of Bristol’s international reputation for research excellence and innovation. The portfolio’s flagship scheme, the Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professorships, has its roots way back in the 1970s and has seen various iterations over time whilst remaining true to its core purpose of supporting world-leading, curiosity-driven research. Until relatively recently this scheme sat within the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS). However, following a review in 2019 the IAS was discontinued and this portfolio of activities was re-established as part of the Research Development International team in the Division of Research, Enterprise and Innovation (DREI).

The portfolio is currently managed by Dr Lauren Winch with support from Sarah Watts (secondment cover for the substantive Research Development Officer, Samantha Barlow). It also benefits from the guidance of the Head of Research Development International, Dr Tiernan Williams, and the academic leadership of the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement Professor Agnes Nairn, as well as support from colleagues within DREI.

While the team have retained the flagship Benjamin Meaker scheme, with some tweaks, the wider portfolio has been redeveloped and reimagined in recent years, with a number of new schemes and an enhanced focus on international research development. The Meaker scheme itself continues to attract world-leading scholars from all around the globe to come to Bristol and undertake curiosity-driven research with their University of Bristol hosts as well as engaging with our wider community, both at the University and beyond. In complement to this, in late 2019 a new Bristol ‘Next Generation’ Visiting Researcher Programme was launched, designed to support researchers to undertake blue skies research projects, exploring exciting, innovative new research spaces. Whilst the Meaker scheme is only for distinguished Professors, this new ‘Next Generation’ scheme opened the door for rising stars who might be less senior in their careers but who have shown great potential to become the distinguished Professors and research leaders of the future.

In response to the challenges of the pandemic for international research collaboration and mobility, a new new online collaborative workshops scheme was launched in 2020. This has since evolved into Bristol International Research Collaboration Activities, supporting a range of activities which can be online, in-person, or hybrid.

All of the schemes in the portfolio are intended to catalyse and cultivate ongoing research collaborations which lead to outputs including funding bids and publications. Therefore, in 2021, the Bristol Benjamin Meaker Follow-on Fund was launched to support either reciprocal or return visits, to facilitate further research development and outcomes from Bristol academics and their visitors from either the Meaker or Next Generation schemes building directly on the developments of the original visit.

Celebrating the IRD schemes

The IRD portfolio of funding schemes have led to a wide range of outcomes, including co-authored publications, policy changes, co-supervised PhDs, and real world impact. Over the last four years since the relaunch in late 2019, despite the hiatus in international travel during the peaks of the pandemic, the team has made 56 new awards. Of these, 26 awards have been in the last year alone, showing real growth and appetite among our community to resume international research development activities as we start to emerge from the pandemic. These 56 awards have brought visitors to Bristol from 17 different countries from all six of the populated continents. They have been hosted by University of Bristol academics from five of the six Faculties (and all three of the new Faculties) representing 22 different schools and departments across the University. These curiosity-driven researchers have explored a huge range of topics: from the role of British gospel choirs to the big bang and quantum gravity; from cleft palates to climate change; from Mendelian randomisation to multidimensional child poverty in Pakistan; from decolonising dentistry to dynamics of volcanic systems; and from sacred topographies to supercapacitators.

To date, the schemes have brought over 500 visitors to Bristol representing a wide range of disciplinary and methodological approaches. The current portfolio stands on the shoulders of the fantastic achievements made by the IAS and colleagues who have supported the Meaker scheme in the decades since it first launched. The IRD team were really proud and pleased to be able to bring together award holders from recent years to celebrate the successes of the reimagined IRD portfolio, and to thank each and every one for not only hosting visitors but for actively engaging and collaborating with them, developing exciting, valuable and impactful research and shaping the global research landscape together.

Authors: Lauren Winch and Sarah Watts

On Tuesday 10th October, the current cohort of Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professors and Bristol ‘Next Generation’ Visiting Researchers were invited to join their University of Bristol hosts, the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement, Professor Agnes Nairn, and the International Research Development (IRD) team for afternoon tea. This ‘Meet and Greet’ took place in the Verdon Smith International Seminar Room in Royal Fort House and it was an opportunity to share research projects and create connections.

Professor Nairn welcomed the visiting researchers who had travelled from Portugal, India, Canada and New Zealand. It was fascinating to hear about the range of research projects being undertaken, including:

• The Methodology of Natural Philosophy: From Leibniz to Modern Philosophy of Physics
• New insights into the dynamics of large silicic volcanic systems
• Nanoarchitectonics of Porous Organic Polymer as Heterogeneous Catalytic Assemblies (CatPOPs)
• Artificial Intelligence in healthcare: investigating innovation, safety and liability

It was already a busy day for some of the visiting researchers as Dr Raposo had already delivered a seminar on ‘Health data and personal care robots‘, Dr Mondal had given an earlier talk on ‘Design of Advanced Metalated Porous Orangic Polymer for Heterogeneous Catalysis‘, and Professor Wilson would be giving his public lecture on ‘The Life and Times of Supervolcanoes‘ later that day. It was great to hear about so much activity and engagement during the visits, and everyone seemed to be really positive about the research developments they were making.

You can see the visiting researcher talks and seminars coming up on our Events page. You can also take a look at our current and upcoming visitors on our Visitors page, and can contact the University of Bristol host if you’re interested in finding out more and engaging with the visitor.

From the perspective of the IRD team, it was a real pleasure to meet our visiting researchers and their hosts and finding out more about their collaborative research development – we’re really looking forward to hearing how their projects develop.