Pracademics. Horrible word, interesting concept: people who straddle, however uncomfortably, the worlds of practice and academia. This week, I spent an hour talking through pracademia with fellow pracs Tom Kirk (LSE) and Willem Elbers (Radboud University), who’s editing a Development in Practice double issue on the topic as part of a new initiative to promote pracademia (they were inundated with

Guest post by Enrique Mendizabal of On Think Tanks Just 15% of respondents say it’s getting easier to operate as a think tank, according to the 2023 Think tank state of the sector report. And over 50% of respondents in Latin America & the Caribbean, the USA & Canada, and Africa say it is getting harder to operate. I think

Guest post by Cordelia Lonsdale and Dr Gloria Seruwagi The Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) programme has an explicit impact mission: the research funded through the programme should improve health outcomes for people affected by humanitarian crises. R2HC uses case studies to evaluate not only the outcomes and impacts of funded research, but to understand the processes, activities

Thanks to Irene Guijt for sending over her 2021 chapter (gated, sorry – boooh!) on ‘The urgency for epistemic and political climate justice’, co-authored with Jacobo Ocharan and Velina Petrova for an edited volume, Knowledge for the Anthropocene. Don’t worry about the slightly intimidating title (confession: I always find ‘epistemic’ sending me scuttling back to the dictionary, along with ‘ontological’,

Because I have one foot in the LSE and one in Oxfam, I sometimes get hauled in as a research ‘user’ (makes me sound like I have a drug problem) to review research funding applications and discuss whether, if approved, the research is likely to have much impact on the real world. I have to say, that recent experiences have

One of the most popular posts on FP2P has been ‘How to get a PhD in a year (without giving up the day job)’. It discussed my ‘PhD by published work’, completed in 2011 at Oxford Brookes University, and what a great fit it was for someone well on in their career, or who has grown-up bills to pay. Fast

One particular chapter in How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research felt particularly relevant to me. For some years, I have been working with Exfamer Jane Lonsdale, in Tanzania, Myanmar and now in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where she helps run a big Aussie-funded programme on citizen engagement. I support Jane and the teams she works with by commenting

Edited by a bunch of UK academics (Oxford Brookes and Manchester), this book is a gold mine for anyone interested in research for impact (R4I) – the holy grail (at least in terms of lip service) of much of modern academia. Best thing I’ve read on the subject, with something for more or less everyone, so I’m going to devote

The annual Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report, jointly published since 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), came out this week. The 2010 bit is important – the MPI has now been going long enough to start to identify trends in the nature of more nuanced, holistic (poverty plus) deprivation

Oxfam got some headlines last week with ‘World’s 722 biggest companies ‘making $1tn in windfall profits’’. This is a good example of a ‘killer fact’ – a memorable statistic that summarizes an injustice, in this case a massive windfall for big corporates at a time of global austerity and spiralling food and fuel prices. Here’s my 2019 guide to writing

Been taking a look at Silvia Galandini, Anam Parvez and Nick Gadsby’s new Oxfam new ‘toolkit’ on building public pressure for change on the care economy, by constructing a ‘fresh and compelling narrative about the value of all care’. The toolkit is based on research to understand how the general public across the UK thinks about paid and unpaid care

Spent a half day at ODI recently discussing the reform of the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) – the global ones like World Bank, the regional ones like the Asia or African Development Bank, and the new ones like the BRICs Bank. It was interesting for what was said, but also for what was missing. First what was said: On World