Research is far more expensive than many people may think. The reason for this is the huge overheads universities charge to cover the cost of their buildings and pay the wages of the many managers and admin staff that they employ.
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MSc in Digital and Social Media Marketing
Thinking about a career in Digital Marketing? Looking to make the move into Marketing but don’t know where to start? Then Lancaster University’s new MSc Digital and Social Media Marketing is for you!
Continue readingReflections on my Masters degree – 10 years on
October 2024 marks the 10 year anniversary of what is perhaps the proudest achievement of my academic life.
In 2014 I submitted my Masters dissertation after what had been a trying two years of studying part-time while holding down an extremely stressful full-time job as a senior writer at a healthcare PR agency based in Whitstable. My family was also going through an intense period of trauma, the repercussions of which are still being felt to this day.
To make matters worse, I was being bullied at work by my boss (the business owner) who took quite badly to the news that I might want to leave my job, and so started a campaign of harassment against me. This culminated in the colleagues in my shared office being moved downstairs to leave me in an office on my own as some sort of ‘punishment’ for daring to suggest that I might want to leave.
It was a very tough time indeed.
Continue readingThe gender debate in 825 words
There is a debate raging at the heart of modern society. It is based on two key questions:
- What is a woman?
- What is a man?
There are two main perspectives in this debate:
1) Scientific view: Sex is binary. It is based on chromosomes and our ability to produce ‘gametes’ (i.e. eggs and sperm). It is based on thousands/millions of years of evolution. Our bodies are fundamentally ‘sexed’. We may be able to change certain physical appearances relating to our bodies, but we are still biologically either one sex or the other – male or female.[1]
2) Gender identity view: Sex is not binary, but a spectrum. It is not something that can be measured, but rather, it is something that we ‘know’. It is personal to us, and only we can ever know it. It is part of our personal identity. Some people may feel as though they don’t fit in their bodies – they don’t feel comfortable with the sex/gender they were assigned at birth. In these cases people may declare that they are of a different gender and so ‘change’ their sex.
Continue readingA sector in crisis: a systematic analysis of care home websites in Lancashire, UK
Back in 2022 I conducted some research into the digital marketing practices of care homes in Lancashire, UK. Such is the slow pace of academic publishing, I have decided to publish what I found here on my website (July 2024), in the hope that authorities might use this report as a motivator for change. While some of the examples I found in 2022 have been updated, I notice that many still have not changed some two years later. This is incredibly worrying, especially given the legal ramifications, and impact on patient choice.
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