52 weeks of public health research, part 1

Posted by Jean Adams

Sometimes research seems all about words. Grant proposal, papers, presentations, emails, blog posts. This year I thought it might be interesting to try and communicate our lives in public health research using images more than words. So, inspired by similar projects on other themes, I hereby launch the ’52 weeks of public health research’ project.

Each Thursday of 2014 we’ll try and post around four pictures on the Fuse blog that capture our weeks in public health research, from the awe-inspiring to the everyday and mundane. Given that more of the latter than the former exists in my life, I foresee problems compiling 208 images worth posting on my own. So this is going to have to be a group project. Send me an image (or images) with a sentence or two describing what aspect of your week in public health research they sum up and I’ll post them as soon as I can. You don’t have to send four together – we can mix and match images from different people in the same week.

Normal rules apply: images you made yourself are best; if you use someone else’s image please check you’re allowed to first; if anyone’s identifiable in an image, make sure they’re happy for it to be posted; nothing rude; nothing that breaks research confidentiality etc.

Also, this doesn’t mean we wont also be posting words. You word-based posts are, as always, much appreciated.

Here goes. 52 weeks of public health research, part 1:

Trying to catch up on emails during the holidays but getting a bit distracted by knitting and sending parcels.

Packing for skiing and, for the first time in my life, getting the heebie-jeebies from someone else’s story of how dangerous ‘adventurous sports’ are. Stopping to consciously talk myself through the epidemiological principles of how one celebrity ski accident does not make skiing any more or less dangerous for me, or any more or less dangerous than last year. 

Enjoying an early passage in this Christmas present about the self-serving nature of universities providing protection for those who couldn’t thrive elsewhere:

“It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world, not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective colouration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about god, we have our pretences in order to survive.”

Sneaky three-in-one from Martin White: having to work a rainy day of the holidays in order to spend a sunny work day tidying up one of our trees that had fallen on a neighbour's fence.