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University of Glasgow research has resulted in a significant change to environmental and development policy at the highest levels of government in Egypt, with tangible grounded benefits for local populations in the regions affected. Briggs and Sharp, in close collaboration with Egyptian colleagues, have substantially shifted the priorities of Egyptian environmental management to include the knowledge, needs and priorities of local people, and especially to increase participation and recognition of women.
Professor Nicholas Cronk, has in collaboration with others, created an app which is an enhanced edition of Voltaire's Candide, freely available, for use on tablets. Candide is a timeless and universal text with perennial appeal, and this digital edition renders it accessible to a wide variety of new readers. Cronk has been encouraging engagement with Voltaire's texts through more traditional channels but this latest innovation has won new readers for Voltaire, especially among a young generation often more familiar with new media than with traditional books. The app, with its dual level of annotations, illustrations, manuscript images, commentaries, and the Polyadès recording, has been well received by a wide range of readers, and functions in a curatorial capacity to preserve an important work of French classical literary heritage in a new, sustainable format. The Candide app represents a revolutionary tool for both independent learning, and also for classroom teaching.
Dr Tony Crook's research on knowledge-practices solved a long-standing theoretical problem in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Key insights have been developed into a working method for knowledge exchange - `Pacific Connections' - with application for national and international policy contexts that confront misunderstandings between Euro-American and Pacific knowledges.
The EU is the second largest international donor of development assistance to the Pacific region, contributing €665m between 2008-2013. Through on-going collaborations, and a series of EU-funded workshops and high level roundtables, involving EU and European Commission policy makers and diplomatic counterparts from a range of Pacific states, Dr Crook is implementing `Pacific Connections' as the method by which social science research is informing and enabling European external actions to more effectively connect to Pacific concerns. As a consequence of Dr Crook's work, Europe's capacity and ability to more effectively engage its Pacific partners has been significantly enhanced.
Birthing tales by lay people and medical practitioners abound in all cultures. On her research website for both non-specialist and academic readers, Valerie Worth-Stylianou provides important early modern French sources in a portal accessible to a broad and interdisciplinary audience. This central information source on the history of midwifery is supplemented by her English translation (2013) of key medical texts. In 2012 she co-organised an international conference in Oxford for historians, social scientists and contemporary health practitioners to investigate, through the prism of history, societies' changing attitudes to the physical and cultural phenomenon of birth; this enabled practising midwife delegates to reflect on their current work methods and feed historical insights back into their midwifery practices.