̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - social science

̽��ֱ��social scientist who inadvertently became a poet

cg605 — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 10:29:49 +0000

At the age of thirteen Mona Jebril found herself stranded in Gaza, becoming a refugee for the second time in her life. Her talent and determination brought her to Cambridge where she became the first Gates Cambridge Scholar from the Gaza Strip. She completed her PhD in education in 2017. Today she is using the arts to give a voice to those in areas of conflict.

Carrying Tasers increases police use of force, study finds

fpjl2 — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:01:49 +0000

A new study has found that London police officers visibly armed with electroshock ‘Taser’ weapons used force 48% more often, and were more likely to be assaulted, than those on unarmed shifts.

However, while use of force can include everything from restraint and handcuffing to CS spray, the Tasers themselves were only fired twice during the year-long study period.

Criminologists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge say the findings suggest that Tasers can trigger the ‘weapons effect’: a psychological phenomenon in which sight of a weapon increases aggressive behaviour.

While the ‘weapons effect’ has been repeatedly demonstrated in simulated conditions over the last forty years, this is one of the largest studies to show it “in the field” and the first to reveal the effect in law enforcement.

Researchers say their findings, published today in the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour, may well apply to policing situations in which other forms of weaponry – including the lethal variety – are involved.

“We found that officers are more likely to be assaulted when carrying electroshock weaponry, and more likely to apply force,” said lead researcher Dr Barak Ariel from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“It is well established that the visual cue of a weapon can stimulate aggression. While our research does not pierce the ‘black box’ of decision-making, the only difference between our two study conditions was the presence of a Taser device.”

“There was no increase in injury of suspects or complaints, suggesting it was not the police instigating hostilities. ̽��ֱ��presence of Tasers appears to provoke a pattern where suspects become more aggressive toward officers, who in turn respond more forcefully,” he said.

̽��ֱ��City of London force is responsible for policing the ‘Square Mile’ business district in the centre of London. It also holds national responsibility for economic crime and prioritises counter-terrorism, violent crime and public order due to its central location.

̽��ֱ��force was the first in England and Wales to test “extended deployment” of Tasers – described as “conducted energy devices” in UK policing – to frontline officers. During the rollout, police chiefs allowed Ariel and colleagues to conduct a major experiment.

Between June 2016 and June 2017 the researchers randomly allocated 400 frontline shifts a Taser-carrying officer and compared the results to an equal number of unarmed shifts over the same period. A total of 5,981 incidents occurred during the study.

Use of force by police carrying Tasers was 48% higher than the officers on unarmed shifts. In what researchers call a “contagion effect”, even those unarmed officers accompanying Taser carriers on ‘treatment’ shifts used force 19% more often than those on Taser-free ‘control’ shifts.

Six physical assaults against police were recorded during shifts with Taser-carrying officers, compared to just three on the unarmed ‘control’ shifts. While the numbers are small, assaults against officers are rare, and researchers argue that this doubling is significant.

Despite the increased hostility uncovered by the study, actual use of electroshock weapons was minimal over the study period, with just nine “deholsterings” – only two of which resulted in electric shocks applied to a suspect.

“ ̽��ֱ��City of London police rarely discharged Tasers during the study. Yet the very presence of the weapon led to increased hostility between the police and public,” said Ariel.

̽��ֱ��weapons effect was first shown by psychologist Leonard Berkowitz in 1967, in a laboratory experiment involving the administering of electric shocks in the presence of a rifle – an experiment that Ariel points out has been replicated 78 times.

“For many, a weapon is a deterrence. However, some individuals interpret the sight of a weapon as an aggressive cue – a threat that creates a hostile environment,” Ariel said.

“ ̽��ֱ��response is consequently a ‘fight or flight’ dilemma that can result in a behavioural manifestation of aggression and assault. This is what we think we are seeing in our Taser experiment.”

“It would not be surprising to find that serious or violent offenders fit this criteria, especially young males – the very type of suspect that is regularly in direct contact with frontline police.”

Half a million police officers in the United States regularly carry Tasers, and electroshock weapons are now becoming part of frontline policing across the UK.

̽��ֱ��study author’s offer a simple solution to bypass the weapons effect: conceal the Tasers. “ ̽��ֱ��relatively inexpensive policy change of keeping Tasers hidden from sight should not limit efficacy, but could reduce the weapons effect we see in the study,” said Ariel.

“This conclusion could be generalised to all types of police armoury, including the lethal firearms carried by police officers. If the presence of weapons can lead to aggression by suspects, so its concealment should be able to reduce aggression and increase officer safety,” he said.

Study co-author Chief Superintendent David Lawes, from the City of London Police, said: “Following the findings of the study, we are exploring whether a simple holster change or weapon position move will nullify the weapons effect issue shown in the experiment. We have also updated our training package for officers carrying Tasers to make them aware of the findings.”

“ ̽��ֱ��use of Tasers have been a proportionate and sensible introduction to policing against a backdrop of unsophisticated terror attacks and an increase in violent crime across London.

“ ̽��ֱ��City of London Police seeks to ensure that any major changes to policy are supported by an evidence base and we wanted to be confident that an extension of Taser deployments to our frontline responders was the right thing to do for both our officers and the public they serve.

“A number of other forces are interested in replicating the study to add to the evidence base and see whether the experiment produces the same results outside of London.

“Across our force, we will continue to use evidence to define how we target problems, which tactics we should use and how we can ensure policing is efficient and safer for both the general public and our officers.”

Cambridge experiment with City of London police found that, while rarely deployed, just the presence of electroshock devices led to greater overall hostility in police-public interactions – an example of what researchers call the ‘weapons effect’.

̽��ֱ��presence of Tasers appears to provoke a pattern where suspects become more aggressive toward officers, who in turn respond more forcefully

Barak Ariel

City of London Police

A City of London police officer armed with a Taser

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Preparing social scientists for the world of big data

jeh98 — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 09:40:39 +0000

This month sees the first cohort of students completing their courses and starting work placements with the Cambridge Undergraduate Quantitative Methods Centre (CUQM). Established last year in the Department of Sociology, the Centre is dedicated to improving the provision of quantitative methods training to social science and humanities undergraduates in Cambridge.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK is already way ahead of many other countries in the availability of large datasets that can be used to inform both policy and social science research,” says Burchell. “Over the next few decades – the career span of current undergraduates – we are likely to see huge advances in the use of quantitative data including datasets that can only by analysed with big data techniques.”

̽��ֱ��increasing ubiquity of big data in the social sciences stems not just from the increasing use of massive datasets in areas such as education and economics, but also to a rise in the use of ‘messier’ data – anything from the way that people engage with Twitter and Facebook, to the public records held by government agencies across Europe – which often require data ‘cleaning’ before statistical analysis can be carried out.

According to Burchell, big data is providing a huge resource that is currently underutilised, which is one of the motivations for establishing the Centre.

“We now have access to a lot of large datasets collected either at a British or a European level, but we lack people with the skills to make use of it. It’s been a bigger problem in the UK than in other countries because a lot of our school kids specialise and give up doing maths at a younger age, and there’s this idea that if you were good at numbers you’d end up doing physics or natural sciences and if you weren’t good at numbers you’d end up doing social science,” Burchell explains.

“But even if you don’t end up doing statistical analyses yourself, it’s important to understand how they’re relevant – where numbers are useful and where they can be misleading,” he adds.

Rather than increasing the basic statistical skills of all students in certain disciplines – which has been tried before in many universities – the Centre has focused on providing more advanced expertise to a proportion of undergraduates across many social science disciplines.

Some subjects, such as Psychology and Economics, already have all students graduating with good levels of quantitative skills. CUQM aims to increase the proportion of graduates leaving Cambridge with these advanced skills in the other social sciences, better preparing them to work with large datasets themselves or to understand how others draw conclusions from them.

“These skills will become increasingly vital for careers in social science research, but they will also make students much more employable in most other sectors as well,” says Burchell. ̽��ֱ��Centre also works to find placements for students with organisations like YouGov, so that they can experience how statistics skills will be relevant in the workplace.

̽��ֱ��first year’s activities have been open to students of archaeology, biological anthropology, education, history, land economy, linguistics, politics, social anthropology and sociology. In the coming year, the Centre will extend the exposure to statistics in the social science courses at Cambridge, as well as introducing more examples of quantitative methods into the teaching of these disciplines. CUQM also aims to provide optional vacation courses to those students who currently don’t have a quantitative data analysis component to their degree, thus preparing more social scientists to engage with the world of big data.

CUQM is part of a wider initiative to train social scientists in research methods at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��Social Science Research Methods Centre, for instance, complements the work of CUQM by teaching quantitative methods to graduate students, post-docs and lecturers.

@CamQuantMethods

̽��ֱ��UK lags behind other countries in preparing social scientists for the world of big data, says Dr Brendan Burchell, Director of a new centre set up to teach undergraduates the advanced quantitative skills they will need to work with massive datasets.

Over the next few decades – the career span of current undergraduates – we are likely to see huge advances in the use of quantitative data

Brendan Burchell

KamiPhuc

Big_Data_Prob

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Mandatory arrest in domestic violence call-outs causes early death in victims

fpjl2 — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 09:56:56 +0000

New research from a major ‘randomised’ US crime study conducted 23 years ago finds that domestic violence victims whose partners were arrested on common assault charges – mostly without causing injury – were 64% more likely to have died early, compared to victims whose partners were warned but not removed by police.

Among African-American victims, arrest increased early mortality by a staggering 98% – as opposed to white victims, whose mortality was increased from arrest by just 9%.

̽��ֱ��research also found that employed victims suffered the worst effects of their partners’ arrests. Employed black victims with arrested partners suffered a death rate over four times higher than those whose partner received a warning, which is given at the scene and does not create a criminal record. No such link was found in white victims.

̽��ֱ��vast majority of victim deaths following the Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment were not murders, accidents or suicides. ̽��ֱ��victims died from common causes of death such as heart disease, cancer and other internal illnesses.

̽��ֱ��study’s authors say that causes are currently unknown but such health impacts are consistent with chronic stress that could have been amplified by partner arrest. They call for a “robust review” of UK and US mandatory arrest policies in domestic violence cases.

“It remains to be seen whether democracies can accept these facts as they are, rather than as we might wish them to be,” said Professor Lawrence Sherman from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Institute of Criminology, who authored the study with his colleague Heather M. Harris from ̽��ֱ�� of Maryland.

“ ̽��ֱ��fact that there has never been a fair test of the benefits and harms of so-called ‘positive action’ policy in the UK means that British police can only be guided by US evidence. That evidence clearly indicates more death than life results in at least one large sample.”

“If the current policy is to be continued in the UK, the moral burden of proof now lies with those who wish to continue this mass arrest policy.”

̽��ֱ��findings will be announced in the US today and presented in the UK this Wednesday at the winter meeting of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing. They will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Experimental Criminology.

Previous studies have shown post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) to be prevalent in victims of domestic violence, and that low but chronic PTSS has been linked to premature death from coronary heart disease and other health problems. ̽��ֱ��authors observed that the impact of seeing a partner arrested could create a traumatic event for the victim, one that raises their risk of death. An arrest may cause more trauma in concentrated black poverty areas than in white working-class neighbourhoods, for reasons not yet understood.

̽��ֱ��exact cause of these surprising results still remains a ‘medical mystery,’ say the study’s authors . But, whatever the explanation, the harmful effects of mandatory arrest poses a challenge to policies that have “been on the books” in most US states and across the UK for decades, they say.

“ ̽��ֱ��evidence shows that black women are dying at a much higher rate than white women from a policy that was intended to protect all victims of domestic violence, regardless of race,” said Sherman. “It is now clear that a pro-arrest policy has failed to protect all victims, and that a robust review of these policies is urgently needed.”

“Because all the victims had an equal chance of having their partners arrested by random assignment, there is no other likely explanation for this difference except that it was caused by seeing their partners arrested.”

̽��ֱ��Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment took place between 1987 and 1988, with support from the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the US Department of Justice. Sherman, who led the study, described it as “arguably the most rigorous test ever conducted of the effects of arrest”.

̽��ֱ��experiment enrolled 1,125 victims of domestic violence whose average age was 30 years. Each case was the subject of an equal probability ‘lottery’ of random assignment. Two-thirds of the suspects were arrested with immediate jailing. One-third received a warning at the scene with no arrest. In 2012-13, Sherman and Harris searched state and national records for the names of every one of the victims.

̽��ֱ��record search showed that a total of 91 victims had died. Of these, 70 had been in the group whose partners were arrested, compared to 21 whose partners had been warned. This translated into 93 deaths per 1,000 victims in the arrest group, versus 57 deaths per 1000 in the warned group. For the 791 black victims (who were 70% of the sample), the rates were 98 per 1,000 for arrest, versus 50 per 1,000 for the warned group.

“These differences are too large to be due to chance,” Sherman said. “They are also too large to be ignored.”

Over 100,000 arrests are made each year in England and Wales for domestic abuse, with most cases not proceeding to prosecution. ̽��ֱ��cost is substantial, at fifteen to twenty per cent of all arrests police make. Sherman, who has long-campaigned for ‘evidence-based’ policing, said that the “only way proof can be attained is for one or more UK police agencies, or perhaps the College of Policing, to conduct the same experiment that the Milwaukee Police undertook in 1987-88”.

Cambridge criminologist follows up on landmark US domestic violence arrest experiment and finds that black victims who had partners arrested rather than warned were twice as likely to die young. Researchers call for UK police to conduct similar experiments so that arrest policy can be based on evidence.

It remains to be seen whether democracies can accept these facts as they are, rather than as we might wish them to be

Lawrence Sherman

Screenshots from TV report on the original Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment that took place in 1987-88

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What shape will universities take in the future?

amb206 — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:03:53 +0000

Children born this year will enter university in or around 2030. ̽��ֱ��offspring of children born this year will arrive at university-age in the middle of the 21^st century. By this time, much is likely to have changed about the ways in which teaching and research take place: a greater use of technology as a tool for teaching and learning is one obvious example. Predicting what universities will look like in the coming decades requires an even greater leap of imagination: will the institutions we know today even exist in the same shape and form?

̽��ֱ��Future ̽��ֱ��, a conference taking place at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� later this week, will tackle some of the big questions surrounding the future of higher education, not simply in response to the current pressures on funding, but also in terms of the sweeping changes affecting the ways in which we live our lives. In particular, it will look at the vital role and contribution of the arts, humanities and social sciences within an environment that is in danger of dominance by an increasing emphasis on science and technology – and ask how the humanities and related disciplines are responding to the challenges and changes of the digital age.

̽��ֱ��three-day forum, generously funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, is being staged by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, and convened by CRASSH director, Professor Mary Jacobus. It is the second of two conferences looking at the way in which the humanities engage with the wider world on many different levels. This week’s conference also marks the 10^th anniversary of CRASSH as a thriving hub dedicated to the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and perspectives, not simply within Cambridge but also globally.

̽��ֱ��event will bring leading figures in academia and policy-making together with graduate and post-doctoral researchers at the start of their careers. In a series of panels, discussions and debates on a range of broad themes, they will look at the ways in which the study of the humanities engages with, and enriches, people’s lives by encouraging a creative dialogue that crosses boundaries and enhances cultural understanding. ̽��ֱ��themes embrace aspects of language, literature, archaeology, history, art history, music and more - and will be discussed from perspectives that include such pressing issues such as human rights, the need for a sustainable built environment, and the preservation of endangered languages.

“ ̽��ֱ��conference will provide a forum for conversations about topics that affect us all and represent aspects of our lives that reach far beyond the current crisis in humanities funding into the nature of our society,” said Professor Jacobus.

̽��ֱ��event’s key note speakers will be the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, Director of the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, on “ ̽��ֱ��Pharmacology of Mind: Digital Technologies and the Conditional ̽��ֱ��”, and Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy and a specialist in law and international relations, on “ ̽��ֱ��Impact of International History”. Leaders in their field, these speakers will offer perspectives that will prompt an exploration of lines of thought about the fundamental human questions underlying knowledge and education.

Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz will take part in a panel discussion on “ ̽��ֱ��Fate of the Humanities” along with the President of the Mellon Foundation, Don Randel. Other eminent speakers include Stefan Collini and Simon Schaffer ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge), Marina Warner (Essex ̽��ֱ��), Joseph Koerner (Harvard ̽��ֱ��), Richard Sennett (NYU and LSE) and Debjani Ganguli (ANU). “We hope that the contribution of these speakers will generate lively audience discussion,” said Professor Jacobus.

Discussions about the importance of music and art, and their role within the life of universities in for both theoretical and practice-based study, will be complemented by musical improvisation at the West Road Concert Hall at the end of the first day. ̽��ֱ��conference will conclude with a discussion about the role of the art museum in a university setting at the Fitzwilliam Museum featuring the Director of the Tate Museums, Sir Nicholas Serota, and the Director of the Courtauld Institute, Deborah Swallow, with the conversation chaired by Timothy Potts, director of the Museum, .

̽��ֱ��Future ̽��ֱ�� takes place from 30 June to 2 July. For details of the conference programme, including registration and booking for Improvisation in the Round at the West Road Concert Hall on 30 June and the Fitzwilliam Museum Panel Discussion on 2 July, go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1321/.

A conference at CRASSH later this week will address some big and highly topical questions.

̽��ֱ��conference will provide a forum for conversations about topics that affect us all and represent aspects of our lives that reach far beyond the current crisis in humanities funding.

Professor Mary Jacobus

Gnuckx from Flickr Creative commons

Writing, Sunset, Italy.

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Wealthier, but not necessarily healthier

bjb42 — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most famous and influential mantras of Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser – that wealthier nations are also healthier – has been called into question by a new study.

̽��ֱ��research, by a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge-led team of social scientists, examined data from 22 countries to test the widely-accepted principle that stimulating economic growth will automatically improve public health levels, particularly in the developing world.

̽��ֱ��"wealthier is healthier" theory has been a guiding formula for both individual health ministries and many of the global financial bodies that support international development for almost 15 years.

It was first coined in a highly influential 1996 paper co-authored by Lawrence Summers, now Director of the US National Economic Council and a key Presidential adviser. This drew convincing parallels between the poor health of people in the developing world and their countries' economic performance.

Writing in the July issue of the journal Social Science and Medicine, however, the new report's authors argue that the principle over-simplifies the question of how to improve living standards in developing nations.

Drawing on almost 50 years' worth of data, they identified cases where the health of a population had worsened, even as a country's national income was on the rise. These anomalies occurred, the study suggests, because underlying issues of poverty and inequality had been left unresolved by policy-makers more concerned with overall economic growth.

" ̽��ֱ��'wealthier is healthier' argument is the idea that if you have economic growth, you are acquiring the resources that will help society's health to improve as a whole," Dr. Larry King, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge's Department of Sociology and one of the report's lead authors, said.

"Our study found that wealth is not enough. If policy-makers want to improve health, they need to look more closely at the impact that they are having on individual living standards as well."

" ̽��ֱ��current economic crisis has led to great concern among politicians, central banks and international financial organisations for restoring high rates of growth. According to these results, focusing on growth rather than poverty reduction and reducing inequality may lead to substantial loss of life."

̽��ֱ��paper suggests that the more subtle relationship between poverty, inequality and health has been written out of the policies of many leading financial organisations in favour of the "wealthier is healthier" principle.

Summers' original thesis has, indeed, been backed up by a body of subsequent research which agrees that health will automatically improve as a by-product of economic growth.

Researchers claim that this is not just because wealthier countries have more to spend on public health services and other social programmes; but because people living there can afford a healthier lifestyle and better medical care.

While the theory has been hugely popular, Dr. King and colleagues could find no prior research examining whether the wealth-to-health cause and effect pattern changes in cases where there is serious social inequality or a widening rich-poor divide. Tellingly, they also found that most previous work had focused on developed countries over relatively short periods of time.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge-led study was unique in this regard, examining the effects of poverty and inequality in 22 Latin American countries from 1960 to 2007.

It tested three standard measures of public health - life expectancy, infant mortality rates and tuberculosis mortality rates - against GDP per capita as a measure of economic growth. In addition, however, the researchers also fed information about poverty rates and income inequality into a series of statistical models to test their impact on the "wealthier is healthier" pattern.

̽��ֱ��initial results appeared to vindicate the traditional theory. Consistent with previous studies, the team found that income per capita has a profound effect on health. Each 1% rise in GDP was associated with a 1.17% reduction in infant mortality and an overall increase in life expectancy of about 22 days.

When that relationship between wealth and health was tested across the entire time period, however, a subtly different pattern emerged. During periods when inequality widened, for example, the study found that a 1% rise in GDP led to a much lower decrease in infant mortality rates of just 0.92% and had no effect at all on tuberculosis mortality rates or life expectancy.

At times when inequality in the same countries was narrowing, a rise in wealth had a much more profound effect. During those periods, a 1% increase in GDP was associable with a 1.51% fall in child mortality and a 1.79% drop in TB mortality, while average life expectancy improved by 51 days.

Similarly, where the sample countries experienced a rise both in GDP and poverty levels, economic growth had no effect on life expectancy or TB mortality and only a modest impact on infant deaths. All sets of data improved dramatically, however, during periods of falling poverty.

"Does wealthier mean healthier? Our view is it very much depends," Dr. King added. " ̽��ֱ��implication here is that health depends on how rising income is distributed. Many of the poorest people in society would agree - perhaps it is time that those making the policies which affect their lives listened."

One of the most famous and influential mantras of Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser – that wealthier nations are also healthier – has been called into question by a new study.

̽��ֱ��'wealthier is healthier' argument is the idea that if you have economic growth, you are acquiring the resources that will help society's health to improve as a whole.

Dr. Larry King

Images_of_Money

Money

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Researchers get serious about kids’ stuff

bjb42 — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��institute, which is a joint venture of the Faculty of Education and Homerton College, is being formally launched this week and will aim to study the messages and ideas that children pick up from books and other cultural sources in broader terms than ever before.

Alongside time-honoured classics in poetry and prose; films, television, comics and computer games will all be treated as "texts" in their own right, worthy of serious academic attention. In addition, researchers hope to examine emerging forms of youth media, such as blogs and fan fiction.

̽��ֱ��first programme of talks and seminars will cover subjects including Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House On ̽��ֱ��Prairie", pre-school picture books, interpretations of "Hamlet" for younger audiences and the "Twilight" saga by Stephenie Meyer, whose fantasy tales of vampire romance have scored a major hit with teenagers all over the world.

A scattering of similar institutes already exists in the UK, but the founders of the Cambridge centre believe that it will prove unique, both in terms of its scope and because of the fresh approaches they are taking to researching children's literature.

In particular, they will aim to bridge an existing divide between scholars who discuss children's and youth culture from a literary perspective, and those who adopt a more scientific method by treating it as a social science with links to areas like education and psychology.

Although children's literature is sometimes regarded as a "soft" subject both within and outside higher education, researchers argue that it is of huge importance in shaping young people's development and deserves to be taken seriously.

Academics contend that books, films and other media reach children in a way that their teachers and parents simply cannot, providing them with ideologies that many carry through to adulthood. At its best, they argue, children's literature can help them to become thoughtful and imaginative citizens, but it can also be mishandled and actively isolate them from the adult world.

Professor Maria Nikolajeva, who will be the centre's first director, said: "Everybody can remember a book or a film from their childhood that played a role in shaping the way they understand the world around them. For children, these are often secret and sacred places that they can go to and we need to study them if we want to improve their education and development."

"It's easy to say that these things are just kids' fashions or that they're trash, but I don't believe that's good enough. If what we regard as trash is popular with young people, we need to know why and whether, as researchers and teachers, we can offer them something that addresses the same needs but also deals with these themes in a critical and ethical way."

̽��ֱ��Centre will comprise about a dozen researchers, all of whom are already members of the Education Faculty at Cambridge. Together, they will cover texts which represent the widest possible range of ages, from pre-school picture-books through to teenage fiction.

̽��ֱ��Faculty's current teaching and research programme covers material including ABC books, folk and fairytales, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island", Philippa Pearce's classic "Tom's Midnight Garden" and more recent offerings by writers such as JK Rowling and Philip Pullman.

Scholars are, however, equally interested in the representation of young people in films and video games - particularly where, as in the case of "Harry Potter", they are spin-offs from an earlier set of novels. Along with other media, such as comics, they argue that these play as significant a role in shaping and reinforcing children's sense of identity as the books themselves.

Other initiatives are also being planned, including an international conference in the autumn entitled " ̽��ֱ��Emergent Adult", which will focus on teenage literature and present some of the latest findings on how it informs young people's views on issues such as gender, ethnicity and sexuality.

̽��ֱ��conference will aim to make use of recent research in neuroscience concerning teenagers' cognitive, psychological and emotional behaviour, which can enhance scholars' understanding of how readers absorb the messages and representations in books such as the "Twilight" series.

"Studying this can help us deal with questions which are important not only for the children themselves, but for adults as well," Professor Nikolajeva added. "Many of our PGCE students already tell us that when they go into a classroom for the first time, there are things that they understand and can apply because they have studied children's books or films and grasped their meaning, significance and appeal."

Further information about the new ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Centre for Children's Literature can be found by clicking on the link to the right of this page.

A new centre for the study of children's literature, which will analyse material ranging from classics such as Alice In Wonderland to Disney films and video games, is opening at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��.

It's easy to say that these things are just kids' fashions or that they're trash, but I don't believe that's good enough. If what we regard as trash is popular with young people, we need to know why and whether, as researchers and teachers, we can offer them something that addresses the same needs but also deals with these themes in a critical and ethical way.

Professor Maria Nikolajeva

Twilight literature

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