CASS researchers win prestigious British Academy awards

Two senior researchers in the College of Arts and Social Sciences have been awarded prestigious grants by the British Academy.

Dr Suzanne Zeedyk, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology and Andrea Ross, a senior lecturer in the School of Law, have been awarded more than £150,000 in total in British Academy Research Development Awards.

Both projects were deemed to have the potential to make a significant difference to their fields.

Ms Ross will be investigating how linking sustainable development indicators more closely to strategies and legal obligations can improve the way sustainable development policies are developed, used and monitored.

Dr Zeedyk plans to write a book exploring the central role that imitation plays in our ability to establish connections with other people. It will build on her extensive research on the subject over the past five years and could impact on a range of societal challenges from reducing youth violence to promoting mental health.

A developmental psychologist with an initial focus on infant communication, Dr Zeedyk has expanded her research to encompass the development of interventions where communication has become impaired, for example in cases of autism, deafblindness, dementia and severe early neglect in childhood.

"I've had the opportunity to work with researchers, clinicians, musicians and charitable organisations and what we have learned is that interconnection between people is an essential aspect of our psychological and biological composition," she explained.

"Humans are evolutionarily and neurally endowed with the capacity to engage sympathetically with one another and when denied the opportunity to do so our emotional, cognitive and physical health declines.

"Even more intriguingly, simply by intensifying the sense of interconnection, for example through imitation, relationships between people and even an individual's sense of self worth can be transformed. Imitation increases our empathy."

Dr Zeedyk believes there is a growing interest in this topic. She is frequently asked to give talks to a variety of audiences including police officers, health care professionals, teachers, politicians, charities and parents.

"I can start the story from a number of different places, to suit the needs of the group, but I am essentially telling the same story," she said. "I might ostensibly be speaking about infant communication or children with autism or adults with dementia or the problems of violence in society or nurturing abandoned children in Romania but at its core it is all the same story - that the positive mental and physical health of individuals and societies depends on strong social relationships.

"What I want to do in the book is bring together evidence that now exists in a whole range of domains where people are looking at imitation, for example in infants, adults, communicative impairments, comedy, primates and even bullying. There are large literatures in each of these areas but they rarely overlap, I want to illuminate the links that draw them together."

While Dr Zeedyk's work is aimed ultimately at creating a more empathetic society Ms Ross is hoping to use her BARDA grant to help build a more sustainable one.

An environmental lawyer, Ms Ross is a leading authority on approaches to sustainable development governance in the UK.

""While it is generally accepted that sustainable development is a good thing there remains no consensus on its exact meaning," she explained. "Even in the UK where there is an official Strategy for sustainable development there is still plenty of room for disagreement.

"I believe the answer is to focus on being 'more sustainable' and that the law is central to this. Law provides the tools for transparent policy making, a framework for action, rights and responsibilities, and the means for enforcing these."

She believes indicators, which cover all aspects of the UK's vision of sustainable development such as GDP, infant mortality rates and percentage of energy from renewables for example are also vital.

"It is essential that the legal tools and indicators reflect the vision set out in the strategy, and serve to support and reinforce each other. This is not the case at the moment.

"My previous work found that statutory procedural obligations are often separated from substantive outcomes while statutory substantive duties are so vague that there is no way of measuring success, failure or progress. For example, there is a danger that impact assessments can turn into one off box ticking exercises. Similarly, indicators often have little or no relevance for policy and decision making.

"The aim is to work with regulators and policy makers to identify specific opportunities where greater interdependence between strategy, legal duties and procedures and indicators would promote more effective implementation of the sustainable development strategy."

The findings from the research will be used to bring together scientists and social scientists working on indicators to further interdisciplinary study into the implementation of sustainable development.