Collaborate or die? Interdisciplinary work holds great promise but goal-oriented assumptions must be challenged.

Collaboration holds great promise for social science disciplines, but simply replicating practices from STEM disciplines will not necessarily lead to greater quality research. Each discipline has its own language and set of assumptions, argues Jenny Lewis and ground work must be done to set the stage for a successful exchange of ideas. Disciplines that rest on strongly contested knowledge bases need to work harder to collaborate. Much more needs to be done to understand what type of collaborative structures help social science academics produce not just more research but high quality research

Barriers to research collaboration: are social scientists constrained by their desire for autonomy?

Researchers everywhere are being pushed to collaborate. Individual academics are being urged to join teams, small teams are encouraged to merge with others to become bigger teams, and institution-wide and inter-institutional collaborations are spreading. With potential benefits including increased chances of funding, visibility, and impact, why, asks Jenny M. Lewis, are social scientists not embracing collaboration more? Might it be the value they place on their autonomy, the freedom to pursue their own ideas and choose which topics to work on, that is constraining them? Researcher interviews suggest it may actually be time pressures and managerial constraints that are bounding autonomy, crowding out space to develop collaborations

A network approach for researching partnerships in health

BACKGROUND: The last decade has witnessed a significant move towards new modes of governing that are based on coordination and collaboration. In particular, local level partnerships have been widely introduced around the world. There are few comprehensive approaches for researching the effects of these partnerships. The aim of this paper is to outline a network approach that combines structure and agency based explanations to research partnerships in health. Network research based on two Primary Care Partnerships (PCPs) in Victoria is used to demonstrate the utility of this approach. The paper examines multiple types of ties between people (structure), and the use and value of relationships to partners (agency), using interviews with the people involved in two PCPs – one in metropolitan Melbourne and one in a rural area. RESULTS: Network maps of ties based on work, strategic information and policy advice, show that there are many strong connections in both PCPs. Not surprisingly, PCP staff are central and highly connected. Of more interest are the ties that are dependent on these dedicated partnership staff, as they reveal which actors become weakly linked or disconnected without them. Network measures indicate that work ties are the most dispersed and strategic information ties are the most concentrated around fewer people. Divisions of general practice are weakly linked, while local government officials and Department of Human Services (DHS) regional staff appear to play important bridging roles. Finally, the relationships between partners have changed and improved, and most of those interviewed value their new or improved links with partners. CONCLUSION: Improving service coordination and health promotion planning requires engaging people and building strong relationships. Mapping ties is a useful means for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of partnerships, and network analysis indicates concentration and dispersion, the importance of particular individuals, and the points at which they will fragment. A narrative approach adds an assessment of whether the partnerships are being used and valued. The approach outlined here, which examines structure and agency as separate but related explanations, has much to offer in examining partnerships

Translating Epic from an Unfamiliar Language: Gilgamesh Retold

This submission seeks to address my own relationship to translating epic from an unfamiliar language (‘creative’ translation) and to present an up-to-date assessment of the place of ‘creative’ translation’ in twenty-first-century literary discourse. As I am unable to decipher cuneiform, I based my creative submission, Gilgamesh Retold, mainly on the scholarly translation by Assyriologist Andrew George (The Epic ofGilgamesh, 2003) and describe it as ‘a response’ to the ancient epic. My view was that any retelling of Gilgamesh should primarily honour its original purpose as a story and have widespread public appeal. It was the momentum of the story combined with the vitality and freshness of the storytelling (prosody) that were my main concerns. My engagement with Arabic, another script fundamentally different from our own Roman alphabet, came about through my work with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh, working from word-for-word translations in Arabic. In this case, my approach followed Ezra Pound’s advice to stay true to the poet’s ‘meaning’ through using plain language and translucent imagery. My first chapter addresses the evolution and continuing impact of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and includes close readings and comparisons of Andrew George’s translation with ‘creative’ versions by David Ferry and Edwin Morgan. My second chapter compares Homer’s Iliad with ‘creative’ versions by George Chapman, Alexander Pope, and Christopher Logue (who dismissed‘scholarly’ translations as ‘unpoetic’). My third chapter explores how both these approaches have fed into my own practice as a poet and translator, and gives a detailed analysis of my retelling of Gilgamesh

FJM v United Kingdom: the Taming of Article 8?

Both domestic and Strasbourg jurisprudence make it clear that, where a social landlord seeks their tenant’s eviction, the right to respect for the home in ECHR art.8 accords the resident occupier a right to have the proportionality of that eviction assessed by a court. The key question for the Strasbourg Court in FJM was whether this procedural dimension to art.8 also applies where a private party seeks an eviction...AHR