The third in a series of three illustrated podcasts about the history of the Windrush migrants – about how Britain became home, and about how it has often also been a hostile environment in which to live and bring up kids.

The second in a series of three illustrated podcasts about the history of the Windrush migrants – arriving in the imperial ‘mother country’ from British colonies in the Caribbean and looking for work.

The first in a series of three illustrated podcasts about Caribbean migration to Britain after the Windrush – looking at the deep historic connection between the British Isles and the Caribbean, a connection older than Britain itself.

CDT SIS PhD researcher and amateur artist Toby Roberts won the People’s Choice award at the Doctoral College Festival of Research Awards on 10th June 2021. The Research Awards and Director’s Awards are part of the Festival of Doctoral Research which recognises and celebrates exceptional achievements and contributions of the University’s postgraduate researchers.

Creative Representations of Research Competition challenged postgraduate researchers to have fun exploring all the different ways in which they can represent and share the essence of their research.

Port-Cites of the Future

This painting depicts a port-city of the future, with some potential solutions to reducing the negative impacts of ports whilst increasing the local benefits. Some examples of this in the painting are renewable energy, green architecture, shore-to-ship power and circular economy (in this case a greenhouse to capture waste CO2 and heat for agriculture).

Toby started painting at the start of his PhD study as a way to relax and he enjoys painting landscapes and seascapes.

Toby’s research work includes creating a new system of classification for port-cities that includes cargo and passenger ships. “Port-cities have a key role in international trade and provide essential services to the local, regional and national economies. Port-cities can boost manufacturing and growth of port-related industries, contributing jobs to the local area. They can also be popular start- and end-points and destinations for tourist activities, such as cruises. The presence of the port may bring additional opportunities in areas such as employment, renewable energy, circular economy, culture and identity.

Establishing sustainable cities and communities is one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (SDG number 11). Port-cities are vitally important to efforts to encourage sustainability. It is therefore important to gain a greater understanding and critical evaluation of port-cities, what their requirements and challenges are, how they differ and how they can be better utilised to produce more benefits and fewer negative impacts. As a strong focus is placed on understanding the environmental impacts of ports and sustainability, a system to effectively group port-cities by their size and potential impacts is needed.

‘The Southampton System’, combines passenger numbers and cargo tonnage on one axis with urban population on another in a 4 × 4 matrix, creating 16 groupings of port-cities. The Southampton System provides an effective and broader method for port-city classification, enabling more effective future study into, and policy recommendations for, port-cities.”

Research Article

The Southampton System: a new universal standard approach for port-city classification

CDT SIS and CDT SI Cities researchers demonstrated the Fish Passage Marble Run at the Winchester Science Centre on Saturday 5th June 2021 for World Environment Day.

Amelia Holgate, Lewis Dolman and Matt Hatfield of the International Centre for Ecohydraulics Research (ICER) demonstrated how fish navigate the many perils of a river as they migrate to members of the public in the Bio:Space outdoor activity area. In a COVID secure way they engaged with people and talked about their work.

It was nice to see such enthusiasm from kids spanning from around 3 – 12 (ish) in age. They grasped the concept very well and I think the hands-on concept of the marble run made it super fun for them, too.

Amelia Holgate

The event was presented with the University of Southampton’s Nature and Biodiversity Hub, (BioHub). BioHub are always seeking new members with knowledge/interest in nature and biodiversity. To become a BioHub member and be added to the mailing list, please email biohub@soton.ac.uk.

This was the first in person event that the CDT SIS has been involved with since the COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. We are looking forward to getting out again soon to keep engaging with the public about our research.

Dusting the @UoS_ICER marble run off for our first in-person outreach in over a year for #WorldEnvironmentDay @CDTSIS @WinSciCentre @UoS_Engagement pic.twitter.com/Fo2h7Y4QsF

— Lewis Dolman (@LADolman) June 5, 2021

The Festival of Doctoral Research went online this year. In the two-day conference-style event on the 9th and 10th June considering the unique challenges that have faced PGRs this year, celebrating PGRs’ achievements in the face of these, and reflecting upon what PGRs’ experiences during the pandemic mean for their future and that of doctoral research.  ​​​​​​​

The Festival is the key point during the year in which we can come together as a community of PGRs, supervisors and other staff who support doctoral research to recognise the many and varied achievements of postgraduate researchers.

The Doctoral College Awards celebrate the contribution that PGRs make to their research area, school and to wider University community.

This year CDT SIS students found success in several categories:

Research Awards

Research Awards recognise the exceptional contribution of PGRs to a research group, school, faculty or University research strategy

Freya Radford – Awarded for her research into Microplastics – iPhD project title “Microplastics in agricultural soils: Methods, Sources and Fate” in collaboration with Southern Water. This project focuses on the fate and levels of Microplastics in these systems and develop methods to control and reduce the pollution.

Co-author of Validation of a method to quantify microfibres present in aquatic surface microlayers

Director’s Awards

Director’s Special Commendation for exceptional contribution

Freya Radford for consistent contribution to public engagement, education & mentorship

Helen Currie for communicating the importance of equality, diversity & inclusion in research

Research Article

Collective behaviour of the European minnow (Phoxinus phoxinus) is influenced by signals of differing acoustic complexity

Doctoral Research posters

Lewis Dolman – runner up STEMM

Creative Representations of Research

People’s Choice winner: Toby Roberts, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences ‘Port-cities of the future’

Research Article

The Southampton System: a new universal standard approach for port-city classification

Prof. Chris Howls brough the Festival of Doctoral Research to a close:

Thanks to everyone who took the time to enter the competitions and make nominations. This Festival has shown the immense amount of work & success happening at Southampton, it’s truly amazing!

During the early weeks of the pandemic at the University of Southampton, as our teaching went online and we planned for the possible effects of the health crisis, the History department made sure all of its modules were taught by small teams of colleagues.

I found myself having to prepare to co-teach an undergraduate history module about Nelson Mandela and South Africa – topics that were entirely new to me, albeit concerning events that I could remember being reported in the news during my childhood.

This is a short podcast about getting ready to teach on the module … and those memories.

By Christer Petley, summer 2020.

A short introduction to the institution at the centre of the Atlantic slave system. This illustrated lecture was recorded in early 2021 by S&R editor, Christer Petley, as part of the new University of Southampton first-year undergraduate module, Racism and Resistance: Slavery to BLM.

An illustrated overview of the Atlantic slave system, by S&R editor, Christer Petley. This was first recorded earlier in the year for the new University of Southampton first-year undergraduate module, Racism and Resistance: Slavery to BLM.

How to structure your work so that you can write better university or college essays. S&R editor Christer Petley shares ideas, drawn from two decades of teaching students and writing books, about why it is important to think about the organisation and purpose of every paragraph, sentence, or word.

How to avoid them. Advice from an experienced marker of essays about how to avoid the most common mistakes made each year by undergraduate students when they sit down to write.

All students need to know how to do these things, but it is not always easy to know how to argue in a university essay. This short video by S&R editor Christer Petley examines the techniques you have to sharpen in order to construct an academic argument and write a good essay.

Why are the humanities essential to addressing global challenges? How can subjects like History, English, or Philosophy equip you with skills you need to face the future? This short film by S&R editor Christer Petley looks at those questions while taking you on a journey to a world of talking hares and racing tortoises…

Is there such a thing as responsible use of rivers? Neil Edwards of AquaInform Ltd posed this question in his seminar to the CDT postgraduate students on 29th April 2021.

A PDF of the presentation is available below:

Neil Edwards – Responsible use of Rivers- v10final

By Karla de Lima Guedes | iPhD Web Science Student

Thanks to the Web Science CDT training fund, I had the opportunity to attend two National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) training courses: (1) Introduction to NVivo in March/21 and (2) Analysing Literature and Documents with NVivo in April/21. Both courses were held online via Zoom and taught by Dr Sarah Bulloch (second also by Dr Christina Silve) from the Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) Networking Project and University of Surrey. For the ones unfamiliar with NVivo, it is a qualitative data analysis (QDA) computer software which (mainly) helps researchers to organise and analyse unstructured or qualitative data (more functions are presented below).

This first course was a two-day hands on workshop that aimed at providing the participants with an overview of NVivo, e.g. software interface, architecture, and tools, and how it can be used throughout a research project. The second was a two-afternoon workshop that focused on showing the participants how to review literature and analyse documents efficiently and systematically with NVivo in our one-day. The latter course showed me that NVivo is a more than qualitative data analysis computer software but also a project management tool with a large number of functions that can help me to organise my literature review and write the different thesis chapters.

Attending these two courses was a fantastic training opportunity for me because they gave me the opportunity to think about how to organise my data prior to analysis, practise using some of the basic software functions, reflect on how I organise what I am reading and writing, and undertake NVivo tasks using a sample data set. We were encouraged to bring our own research materials to work with on day two of this first course but as this took place before my qualitative data collection, I worked with the data provided by the presenter.

Because I will be collecting data through interviews this year, I needed to better understand how to organise and analyse rich qualitative data. And thanks to these two courses, I now feel more confident about dealing with my data analysis and organising my reading and writing from now onwards. I’m grateful to my Web Science CDT for supporting me through the training fund, and I look forward to incorporating what I learnt from the workshop into my writing. My only regret is not to have learnt how to use NVivo from the beginning of my PhD journey!

By Juljan Krause | iPhD Web Science Student

Earlier this year, I did a 10-week training course in quantum computing and communication with xPRO, the professional development unit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’m proud to say that I graduated with an overall mark of 97/100 and a Professional Certificate that carries a whopping 4.0 Continuing Education Units (CEUs).

The course was divided into two parts: ‘Introduction to Quantum Computing’ and ‘Quantum Computing Algorithms for Cybersecurity, Chemistry, and Optimization’. The course is not for the faint-hearted and requires a solid foundation in quantum mechanics, matrix algebra and logic. To brush up my skills I’d completed two maths and physics online courses on Udemy in preparation for the MIT programme.

And it was straight into Bloch spheres and quantum gates on day one! Each course was split into 4 separate modules. While learning was self-paced, the teaching staff encouraged us to complete each module in about a week’s time or else the workload would just get too heavy. The learning material was a blend of online lectures to watch, material to read and tons of graded activities along the way.

There were about 80 students altogether on this course, most of whom had an engineering or computer science background. MIT uses a one-stop online platform with an integrated discussion board to reach out to fellow learners and MIT teaching staff. Halfway through the course we had a chance to discuss our questions with Prof William D Oliver, the Director of the Programme, in an online webinar.

The first part of the course covered a comprehensive introduction into quantum computing and how it is different from classical computing. We covered engineering perspectives to building quantum quates, how quantum algorithms work and how quantum annealing is different from a universal quantum computer. Week 2 introduced the leading qubit modalities, i.e. the different approaches to picking the right kind of qubit for building a quantum machine. These are trapped ions and superconducting qubits (photons were covered later). Week 3 was about quantum algorithms and how they work in practice while week 4 covered quantum software. We then got to implement the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm ourselves on an IBM quantum cloud computer.

The second part of the course was a detailed introduction to applications. Needless to say, cryptography and Shor’s algorithm, which breaks RSA encryption thanks to efficiently finding the period of a large integer N in polynomial time, were the most prominent topic. If you’re keen to learn to implement Quantum Fourier Transformation protocols on quantum gates this module will be for you! We then ventured into the realm of quantum Hamiltonians and how quantum computing can be applied to optimisation problems, molecule design and cybersecurity.

I loved this course and was massively impressed with how much you can learn in just three months. As with any learning experience, the more time and effort you’re willing to invest the more you’ll get out. The material was difficult in places but not impossibly so and it was greatly rewarding to be doing so well in graded activities. Schrödinger equations, Hamiltonians, phase shifts and Hadamard gates are now my best friends! The most exciting part of the course was definitely the two “exams” at the end for which we got to implement quantum algorithms ourselves: the aforementioned Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm and Grover’s Algorithm, for which we used QASM, the Quantum Assembly Language. I can recommend this course to anyone who’s keen to get a solid, technical foundation of quantum computing and communication. It was super exciting and a great, comprehensive introduction to the field and its applications in industry and research.

Authors: Natalie Jago, Sarah Wright, Brettany K. Hartwell and Rachel Green
Published: 2020
Publication: Educational and Child Psychology

Aims: This study sought to develop a greater understanding of what young people identify as essential components of mental health support.
Rationale: Children and young people’s mental health has been identified as an area of concern and highlighted by the government as a priority area for improvement. In the United Kingdom (UK), increased importance has been placed on capturing their views. However, research suggests this group is not always asked for their views by decision-makers leading to a discrepancy between what is provided and what children and young people want from support. Incorporating the views and perspectives of children and young people in the design of appropriate support approaches is an important way to give them a voice in issues that affect them, as well as ensuring provision is suitable.
Method: A two-round Delphi method was used whereby a panel of young people aged 16-25 who had previously experienced a mental health difficulty rated a series of statements. A consensus level of 75% across the panel was set to include/exclude statements in a final framework of recommendations. To gain feedback on the feasibility and utility of the framework, interviews with adult stakeholders were carried out.
Findings: The competencies identified were used to form a framework of recommendations for practice. The importance of relationships, the need for trust and confidentiality, and the need for further mental health awareness and training were key themes identified.
Conclusions: This study provides a helpful insight into what young people value from mental health support. Implications of the research include a need for further awareness raising of children and young people’s views regarding mental health and larger scale participatory research to expand upon the findings of the current study.

Jago, N., Wright, S., Hartwell, B. K. & Green, R. (2020) Mental Health Beyond the School Gate: Young People’s Perspectives of Mental Health Support Online, and in Home, School and Community Contexts. Educational and Child Psychology, 37(3), 69-85.

Download (pre-publication version)

Many congratulations to the two WSA PGR Alumni who have published articles in the latest issue of Journal of Contemporary Painting (vol. 6 issue 1-2). It is wonderful to see alumni making such a contribution to art criticism. Some details below of both these contributions to scholarship

Feng Jie (2021) ‘Writing from the other side: Critical reflections on the calligraphy of Zhang Qiang’ Journal of Contemporary Painting, Vol. 6, Issue 1-2, pp. 131-148 [available here].

This article presents the specific case of a contemporary practitioner of Chinese calligraphy, Zhang Qiang, a notable figure within the current Avant-garde movement. After outlining aspects of his practice, which has been controversial along gender grounds, the article turns to his specific project of ‘bi-directional’ calligraphy. It is argued this work opens up a more rewarding way into his work as an enquiry into writing, which bears connections with Derrida’s deconstructionist account of writing and trace. However, in a brief exchange at Tate Modern, Zhang offers a form of ‘writing lesson’, which both helps takes us towards the decontructionist account of general writing, yet equally reveals a reliance upon the cultural category of ‘Chinese calligraphy’, which takes us away again—arguably symptomatic of a wider struggle for Chinese contemporary art to gain recognition in the West.

Cheng-Chu Weng (2021) ‘Making minimalism disappear…’  Journal of Contemporary Painting, Vol. 6, Issue 1-2, pp. 149-164 [available here].

‘Making minimalism disappear…’ presents an essay regarding my approach to ‘expansion painting’, and specifically provides a study of another kind of minimalist aesthetic. The account begins with a signature work, Shoji (2015), which is proposed as a way to unfold what expansion painting is. I describe my approach as drawing upon painterly compositional methods but developed through site-specific considerations of architectural spaces, bodies and differing levels of consciousness. The works ‘take place’ when interacting in these layered spaces, or what I refer to as a ‘sense’ of painting space. The article goes on to articulate how—in terms of a western discourse – my works might ‘look’ minimalist but, in fact, are not minimalist art. This article—in representing my practice and providing broader critical analysis—leads us to question an ideology of art history around the enigma of minimalist art, and gives rise instead to another shadowy form of minimalist art. Hence, this article can be said to make minimalism disappear in being haunted by it.

You can also see Cheng-Chu’s PhD practice and contributions to WSA’s PhD researcher community featured on this blog here.