Surely preparing Britain’s social science community to take the lead in a future of global and interdisciplinary team research isn’t a quest for a mythical beast? Matt Flinders, who heads an ESRC project trying to nurture that leadership, doesn’t think so – but he understands why someone might think it is.

The Wales Centre for Public Policy is helping to inform and shape policy decisions by presenting research evidence directly to government ministers, producing over 120 studies in the last five years – supporting effective policy making and benefiting public services across Wales.

An estimated 312,000 children annually lose a parent to imprisonment in England and Wales. Dr. Shona Minson, is the winner for Outstanding Early Career Impact in the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize 2019.

Autistic individuals are estimated to be seven times more likely than the general population to come into contact with the Criminal Justice System. Dr Chloe Holloway from the University of Nottingham, is one of the finalist for Outstanding Early Career Impact in the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize 2019.

Social anthropologist Chloë Place, a research student at the University of Sussex, had both worked for the National Health Service working with older people with dementia and spent a lot of time living in Andalusia when she became interested in studying approaches to aging in the Andalusian context. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she describes how her ethnographic look at kinship care in a rural Spanish setting influences her perspectives on care elsewhere.

Ranging from jurisprudence to autism, the loss of a baby to the growth of equality in science education, the work of the finalists in the seventh annual Celebrating Impact Prize competition—announced today — represent a broad cross-section of meaningful work from Britain’s social and behavioral researchers.

Psychologist Abby Dunn is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex whose work has focused on parenting, and in particular parenting for those with complex needs. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she examines how mental health practitioners interact with patients who are also parents.

In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, new mother Rosa Daiger von Gleichen describes the exertions required to both work and be a parent. The PhD candidate in social policy at the University of Oxford studies employer-based and public family policies, primarily in the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany, to understand how employers, families and individuals will manage both work and care in the future.

In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, anthropologist Holly Chalcraft from Durham University discusses how the ethnic swap between Greece and Turkey after World War I affects self-identity today.

On April 4 winners were announced in the year’s ESRC Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives. Today we posting the shortlisted and winning essays with Bobby Beaumont, a PhD research at the University of Birmingham, and his essay titled “Playtime in the camps.” Beaumont, whose research focuses on how circus, play and arts-based interventions play out in refugee camps and temporary settlements.

Today Social Science Space completes a series drawn from five winners of Britain’s Economic and Social Science Research Council’s 2018 Impact Prize to learn how they built meaningfulness into their own research and how they measure impact more broadly. We end with Denise Baden of the University of Southampton, winner of the Outstanding Impact in Business and Enterprise prize.

Kevin Bales’ work on modern slavery won his one of Britain’s Economic and Social Science Research Council’s 2018 Impact Prize. We’ve asked him how he built meaningfulness into his own research and how to measure impact more broadly.