In August this year the University’s Cabot Institute for the Environment hosted Bristol-based artist Luke Jerram’s Gaia in the Great Hall of the Wills Memorial Building. Measuring seven metres in diameter, Gaia features incredibly detailed NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface, providing a unique opportunity to see our planet on this scale, floating in three dimensions. Image copyright: Ben Birchall/PA images.
The University of Bristol has declared a climate emergency. We hear from just some of Bristol’s experts about what’s happening.
University of Bristol alumnus and Co-Founder and Operations Lead at LettUs Grow Jack Farmer is an expert in controlled environmental agriculture.
‘We want to enable new business models for local growers and play a key part in creating a non-wasteful food supply chain by supporting alternative, resilient food production’
Professor Rich Pancost, Head of School – Earth Sciences, Cabot Institute for the Environment talks about the University of Bristol’s response to climate emergency.
On 17 April 2019 the University of Bristol became the first university in the world to declare a climate emergency. It enshrines our institutional obligation to address the climatic, ecological and wider environmental threats posed to our planet and our society.
The University has been at the forefront of exploring and solving these challenges for decades, both through our world-leading research exemplified by the Cabot Institute for the Environment and our education via the Sustainable Futures theme. Some of our environmentally focused Schools – including Civil Engineering, Geographical Sciences and Earth Sciences – are ranked among the very best in the world. Many of us contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, including the most recent report that highlighted the dire consequences of failing to limit warming to 1.5˚C.
‘Rather than ignore what’s happening we can, in our different areas of expertise, work together on sustainable solutions for all.’
We must do more. Just like our pledges in 2015 when Bristol was the European Green Capital, the Climate Emergency Declaration recognises that our University’s impact on our city and planet transcends its research and educational mission. We are an employer, a procurer and a consumer; our academics fly across the world and our students fly to us; we consume food, energy, water and minerals. We are part of the problem and we must be part of the solution. In particular, the Declaration renewed our commitment to become carbon neutral by 2030. But what does that mean? How will we do that? We know it will be messy and complex, just as our decision to divest from fossil fuels was. Not all companies that hold fossil fuel assets are the same; in fact, many are critically involved with obtaining the resources needed for a post-fossil fuel electrical future. But then, we must ensure that our own efforts for carbon neutrality do not simply shift the environmental burdens to other countries nor hinder their own development.
We do not have all of the answers yet. Consequently, I consider the Declaration to be a call for a renewed, self-critical, demanding and collaborative conversation about the future of our University. It is an opportunity for dialogue between all of us – staff, students, alumni, partners and stakeholders across our institution, city and the world. It will embrace every aspect of our organisation and it will lean on our own world-leading expertise and potential for innovation.
Sir David Attenborough, Broadcaster and Naturalist, Honorary Alumnus and winner of the 2019 Bristol Alumni Award for Lifetime Achievement discusses the scale of our climate emergency.
The fact is that the world is under greater pressure than it has ever been, and it’s not just in my lifetime but since human beings existed. This is the first time ever in the history of homo sapiens that we have the power, wittingly or unwittingly, to actually transform the world. Or to destroy it. Or to protect it. It’s very very important and our children and our grandchildren will either be thanking us or blaming us.
The problem is huge. I mean this is a problem that has never been faced by human beings before, ever. Because the world is one. And everybody – everybody in the world – has now got to get together and sort things out. The history of humanity is of disaster, is of arguing and quarrelling, of wars, of going and conquering other people and clinging on to the land. That’s got to come to an end. And we’ve all got to do something, because we’ve got a common disaster. If I had to give one piece of advice to people today it would be to get engaged. Come together and do something about it.
Bristol should be proud of the contribution it’s making towards getting the message out there about what’s happening to our planet, about the situation our natural world is facing as a consequence of what we’re doing to it.
I think there is time to do something about what’s occurring, but that can only happen if people understand that the world is in danger. If we have an obligation to our children, our grandchildren and further generations then it is time we took that seriously. If the films that the BBC Natural History Unit have made – with the help of the University of Bristol – are getting the message out there, then we can be proud of that.
Jack Farmer, University of Bristol Alumnus (BSc 2015), Co-Founder and Operations Lead at LettUs Grow and expert in environment agriculture tells us about how his company is tackling some of the greatest global challenges.
I co-founded LettUs Grow in 2015 with fellow alumni Ben Crowther and Charlie Guy, aiming to help tackle some of the greatest challenges facing the world today: carbon emissions, environmental pollution, and food security.
With the current population growth, we will need to feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050.1 To do so it’s estimated that we must increase food production by 70 per cent, with the added challenges of having 25 per cent less farmland, degraded soils and an ever more unstable climate. Our existing methods of agriculture are not suitable for this new paradigm. This is before we even consider the food wasted in supply chains each year – 90,000 tonnes in the UK alone. With LettUs Grow we believe that by empowering anyone to grow food within controlled environments, we can tackle some of these issues head-on. We take a collaborative approach and have built a team comprising plant scientists, engineers, developers, creatives, and business experts.
We believe we are part of the solution and are working with other local businesses to address the issues that face us all as part of this climate emergency.
We design modular, ‘aeroponic’ products that improve the efficiency, sustainability and ROI of both indoor and greenhouse agriculture. This involves generating a mist around plant roots, which grow much faster and healthier as a result. Facility costs are driven down and farmers can achieve an average of 70 per cent increase in growth across a range of crops, when compared to conventional hydroponic technology. Our systems use very little water and as we operate in controlled environments there is no need for the use of pesticides. Crucially, this soil-free growing takes the pressure of growing delicate crops off the land and improves global access to nutrition – even in areas with very high or low temperatures. At LettUs Grow we’ve used our combined plant science and engineering expertise to mature this aeroponics technology and make it much easier to use.
Over the next few years, we’re excited to explore new crop varieties and expand our global impact. We want to enable new business models for local growers and play a key part in creating a non-wasteful food supply chain by supporting alternative, resilient food production. To drive consumer behaviour change we need a multi-pronged approach and LettUs Grow is proud to be part of that change.
Reference 1. Springman et al (2018). Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits. Nature 562, 519–525.
Dr Alix Dietzel, Lecturer in Global Ethics, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) and specialist in Climate Change and Global Justice considers the ethical dimensions of climate emergency.
In our bid to act now against the current climate emergency, we must not neglect the ethical dimensions of climate change. A focus on justice needs to be included in the conversation. Climate change will bring suffering to communities, individuals and ecosystems and those least responsible for the problem will suffer the most.1
Those least responsible include people living in the Global South and economically disadvantaged people living within wealthier countries, who have very low emissions and at the same time have little adaptive capacity to climate change. And, of course, future generations, who have done nothing to contribute to climate change. The fact that that these people will suffer more than the wealthiest individuals in the world, who contribute most to climate change, presents a profound case of injustice.
My research focuses on climate justice and the evaluation of the global political response to climate change. This approach allows me to understand and assess the complexities of state (UNFCCC, Paris Agreement) and substate (cities, NGOs, corporations, individuals) responses to climate change and make suggestions for reform that are grounded in both ethical considerations and policy analysis.
My work has a focus on human rights and where responsibilities for taking action actually lie.
I analyse policy documents, outcomes and negotiations taking place at the global level. I consider both state and non-state actors to get a sense of what responses are working, who’s doing best in terms of acting justly (protecting human rights, making fair decisions) and what can be adapted and replicated.
What my research is showing is that at the sub-state level organisations are more ambitious and creative and it’s this area which gives me hope. States have trouble making just decisions at the global level. For example, if you think about the Paris Agreement negotiations, we had over 200 parties trying to agree on a way forward for addressing climate change, so it was inevitable that any measures were going to be ‘watered down’ and somewhat conservative in their approach. Otherwise, not every state in the world could have come to an agreement.
‘We need to humanise the global climate change problem. We need to get away from the idea that we’re somehow separate and remember to include a focus on human rights as part of this debate.’
Cities, by comparison, have a much easier time implementing change than states. City mayors and councils can make decisions on transport, new buildings, food supply, and so on and all these changes can make a very big difference. So, for the University of Bristol and the City of Bristol to announce a climate emergency is a good thing, because it shows potential for movement forward at a local level at least.
Universities can also join together in their thinking as they have many aspects in common – such as academic travel and waste management.
You only have to look at the We Are Still In group in the USA to see how sub-state action can be effective. Despite President Trump declaring the USA no longer part of the Paris Agreement, We Are Still In signatories, including cities, corporations, and individuals, represent a constituency of more than half of all Americans and taken together they represent $6.2 trillion, a bigger economy than any nation other than the USA or China. That is a powerful sub-state group of people pressing for increased ambition on climate change.
However, we need to ensure that the voices from the Global South are also heard. We are not alone in Western countries in heading for a 3-4 degree Celsius rise in temperature.2 Countries and communities in the Global South will also need technology, funding and research and we need to understand the social systems that scientists are pushing technology into. A green transition will only be just if we understand the global effects of such a transition.
Those living in the Global South struggle to have their voices heard in global negotiations.
They often do not have the resources to send a large team of English-speaking representatives who can attend all of the important side-events and discussions. Even when they do, their voices are often overpowered by richer nations. In addition, activists in the Global South often don’t have the funds for the substate work they want to do. We also need to understand global supply chains and the repercussions of the so-called ‘green economy’. If we encourage people to switch to electric cars, what is happening to the scrap metal of the petrol ones?
Where are the lithium batteries for the electric cars coming from, where is it being mined and under what circumstances? What is extracting it doing to the earth? We can no longer look at ‘greening’ in isolation. Bad supply chains and slave labour conditions are unacceptable from a climate justice perspective.
Right now, we are at a critical crunch point with climate change and it can no longer be ignored. Paying attention to just decision-making and fair global action is a critical part of understanding how to move forward. I’m proud to work at a university that is willing to push boundaries and take ambitious action.
References
1. Dietzel, A. (2019). Global Justice and Climate Governance: Bridging Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
2. CAT. (2019). The CAT Thermometer. Available online at: climateactiontracker.org/ global/cat-thermometer [last accessed 30 July 2019].
Above left to right: Dr Radha Giridharan, senior paediatric neurologist; Dr Arthur Rose; Thomas Robb; Dr Geetha Chari, paediatric neurologist and epileptologist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.
Emeritus Professor of Neurology and Paediatrics Dr Arthur Rose (MBChB 1957) tells Nonesuch why he still finds his alma mater inspiring.
Dr Arthur Rose first came to Bristol in 1951, and the University and the city have remained in his heart and mind ever since. Following an esteemed medical career – including winning the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Child Neurology Society – Dr Rose currently resides in New York City where he is still active at State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.
‘As a child Holocaust survivor, and subsequently as a refugee from the communist regime in Poland, I have a debt of gratitude to the British people and to the University of Bristol, for the education I received there at no cost to me. The seven years I spent in Bristol, as a student and house physician, were some of the happiest of my life and I look back at that period with great pleasure and gratitude. While studying hard at Bristol I was also able to participate in the many social and sports activities offered by the Students’ Union. I made lifelong friends and took advantage of all opportunities that I could, including spending time as a visiting student at the Copenhagen Medical School and at St Bart’s in London. My Bristol degree opened many academic doors for me including at Harvard, Montreal Neurological Institute, Columbia University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.’
I am thankful for my Bristol education and grateful for the scholarship that paid for it.
At just 12 years of age Arthur lost his parents, aunts and uncles during the Holocaust. He and his sister only survived the war by being hidden by Christian friends of their parents. Eventually Arthur and his sister were able to join a group of Jewish orphans who were allowed to leave communist Poland and emigrate to the UK. The siblings went to stay with a relative in London. Having joined school in the UK with no English and his schooling prior to that ‘in a shambles’ due to the war, it is remarkable how dedicated and tenacious Arthur was about furthering his education. On leaving school in the UK at the age of 16 Arthur joined an importing business, but it didn’t inspire him. His relationship with two Polish relatives, a gynaecologist and a urologist, helped him decide on a career in medicine. With fierce determination Arthur applied himself to acquiring the necessary A-level grades in Physics, Chemistry and Biology by attending a summer cram course and a year of technical college. After multiple rejections Arthur was accepted by the University of Bristol Medical School where he was awarded full fees and a maintenance scholarship.
After completing his medical degree at Bristol Dr Rose worked as a senior house officer in a children’s hospital in London before travelling to the USA for further training. In Boston his interest in paediatric neurology flourished. After finishing his paediatric and neurology residency, and three postgraduate research fellowship years, Dr Rose was appointed to the faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. There, his federally supported research focused on the neurological disorders of newborn infants caused by neurotoxic agents. In 1975 he was invited to organise the Division of Paediatric Neurology at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. He remained there as Professor of Neurology and Paediatrics for 40 years. Dr Rose is acknowledged as one of the leading experts in this area, both in terms of clinical research and as a clinician.
Since 2007, Dr Rose has funded an exchange programme for medical students, between the University of Bristol and SUNY Downstate. Each year one Bristol medical student gets to spend eight weeks at SUNY Downstate and one student from SUNY Downstate spends eight weeks at Bristol. One of the recent recipients Thomas Robb has told Nonesuch how much he valued the experience and what he learned about Dr Rose’s speciality of paediatric neurology.
In addition to funding the scholarship programme Dr Rose has also committed a legacy to support the Master of Research programme at Bristol. ‘I am delighted to be leaving a legacy for the MRes at Bristol. I find this programme to be highly innovative, well-structured and ideal for ambitious students interested in an academic career.’
Thomas Robb (BSc 2014, MBChB 2019)
‘Getting accepted onto Dr Rose’s paediatric neurology scholarship programme was a wonderful experience for me. There’s just no way I would have had this chance otherwise, I could never have funded it myself.
I’m so grateful for this opportunity and I was treated so well. I’d never been to New York either, so it was fantastic to be based there. It’s quite rare for a student from the UK to get to do American hospital visits and the US medical system is completely different.
I spent six weeks in paediatric neurology and two weeks in adult neurology and got to be involved in the day-to-day working life including seeing patients on the ward. While working with Dr Rose I saw rare things I’d never seen before. Paediatrics is always a puzzle because children cannot really explain what they’re feeling in the way that an adult can. You also need to work with the child’s family and their fears and expectations.
The teaching at SUNY Downstate was excellent. We had case studies to test our knowledge every morning for about an hour before we set off on ward rounds. Everyone there was so willing to teach and share knowledge. I learned so much because the staff there were so keen to work with me. I’ve really been encouraged to learn more, research more, read more and it’s confirmed my interest in neurology.
Dr Rose is a very inspiring person and passionate about people taking up paediatric neurology. I will try to replicate his kindness and generosity towards me, towards others I meet in life.’
You can join Arthur and others like him in supporting vital medical research and giving a gift in your Will by getting in touch with us today. Nicola Giblin Planned Giving Officer, Development and Alumni Relations Office University of Bristol, 1 Cathedral Square, Trinity Street, College Green, Bristol BS1 5DD. T: +44 (0)117 428 4411 E: nicola.giblin@bristol.ac.uk.
International Development Ethnographer and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, Tigist Grieve, is researching marginalised voices in rural Ethiopia in an effort to explain the ongoing difficulties in achieving education for all globally.
In a year where we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of men landing on the Moon, we still can’t achieve access to education for all across the globe.1 I continually ask myself, why not? How is it so hard? We make it complicated by not listening and by not understanding other people’s perspectives. Why is it the trend to look at people living in poverty from a deficit point of view? My work as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow has given me the opportunity to build on my years of PhD research, which focuses on improving the educational outcomes and empowerment of adolescent girls in Ethiopia. I want to bring those voices of marginalised adolescent girls to the ongoing debate of gender and empowerment, while recognising the effort and resilience that goes unnoticed when we have a deficit-based perspective about certain categories of people.
I want to inspire people to go where others would never expect them to by engaging with relevant stakeholders in Ethiopia and beyond.
In particular, my work is about seeing the social, engaging and responding to local voices. In the words of the writer Arundhati Roy ‘There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.’
My inspiration for examining voice is the inspiring work of Robert Chambers, author of Rural Development: Putting the Last First. I am listening to the everyday lived experience of people. My work is about voice – the voices of children, of women, of the resources-strapped communities in rural areas. Really, international development policy to date hasn’t given adequate space to hear them, it’s not informed by their experiences or by their voices.2 Even where there is a claim for ‘voices of the poor’ it is proxy voices where the privileged few speak on their behalf from a position of assumption.
My work is focused on disseminating my research findings back to target communities in Ethiopia, to spark constructive debate about rural schooling and development. I want to do this in a way that challenges policy makers, development practitioners, donors, teachers, researchers and communities themselves.
I’m researching within two communities in Ethiopia, a peri-urban and rural, chosen because they are under the same local authority, but with considerable geographical differences. I believe there’s a misconception that certain communities don’t understand the value of education, but we need to research why, looking at policy, political economy, culture, social pressure. For example, despite the increasing enrolment, school attendance is very poor, not because education is not valued but because the expectation that children will be working around their homes and farms is greater. Girls’ attendance is much lower than boys because societal pressure is higher on girls. Boys have much better autonomy in how they use their time while girls in rural areas are time-poor. My work confirms the importance of recognising the difficulty of transforming gender relations through schooling alone.
We need to make informed decisions through lessons learned from quality research. The joy of being a researcher at the University of Bristol is the opportunity to collaborate with world-leading multi-disciplinary teams interested in developing ideas to meet the global challenges of development.
In analysing categories of children and childhood experiences, I’ve discovered that children are highly mobile in search of opportunities for them and their families, starting from a very young age. My research showed that the ultimate question in rural Ethiopia is ‘Who is this child to me?’ 16 per cent of children in households in my area of research are not in their biological families and relatedness matters in this culture. This context is so important in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has such a huge population of children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic.3 The concept of family is a complex one and undertheorised in the context of Ethiopia. If you’re related to the head of the household, you have access to better resources.
I’m also looking at issues such as access to water and autonomy of reproductive health (or lack of). These also play a part in preventing girls from obtaining an education. A school without a water source or toilet facilities is not hospitable to children, even less so to adolescent girls dealing with menstruation. Climate change also has a part to play in water scarcity issues, with the African continent identified as one of the parts of the world most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.4
The University’s second cohort of 15 Vice-Chancellor’s Fellows started in the academic year 2018-19, joining the 12 from 2017-18. Alumni and friends have contributed funding for six of the Fellows to date. For more information on the Fellows see our dedicated web page.
References
1 UIS. (2018). One in Five Children, Adolescents and Youth is Out of School. [Available online at: uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs48-one-five-children-adolescents-youth-out-school-2018-en.pdf.] (last accessed 23.08.19).
2 Brock, K. and McGee R., (eds) (2002). Knowing Poverty: critical reflections on participatory research and policy. Earthscan.
3 Unicef. (2016). For Every Child, End AIDS: Seventh Stocktaking Report, 2016.
4 Serdeczny, O., Adams, S., Baarsch, F., Coumou, D., Robinson, A., Hare, B., Schaeffer, M., Perrette, M., Reinhardt, J. (2016). Climate change impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa: from physical changes to their social repercussions. Regional Environmental Change. 1-16.
How the University’s new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus will be working with local communities in the surrounding area.
The University of Bristol is one of six civic universities created in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. As our Chancellor Sir Paul Nurse noted in his installation ceremony, ‘civic universities draw their origins and their strengths from being embedded in their local communities’. As work continues apace on our new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus near Temple Meads train station, we look at how the University is already engaging with local communities in Bristol and how plans are afoot for this integration to be a key part of the new campus. The campus is being built close to complex communities in east and south Bristol, some of which experience multiple deprivation. It will be near to Barton Hill, an area where 77 languages are spoken and home to the Barton Hill Settlement, a community centre originally established by the University back in 1911.
In late 2019, the Barton Hill Settlement will be building a micro-settlement, made out of shipping containers, which will include office space and small residential units. The University will be renting a space to create a ‘micro-campus’, a place for teaching, research and outreach and where we can build new projects in collaboration with other partners based at the Settlement and in the surrounding areas. It will be an opportunity to pilot some of our activities for the new campus.
Pilot projects in the area, funded by a newly established Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus Public Engagement Fund, kicked off in summer 2019. These include a partnership with the Nilaari Agency working on mental health services in ethnic minority communities, a digital engineering project for schoolchildren and a business planning workshop delivered by SETsquared Bristol.
‘Partnering with the University of Bristol has meant we’ve been able to use our community engagement experience and local expertise to complement the discipline of academic research. This would usually be beyond our means as a small third sector street agency.’ – Nilaari Agency
Bristol’s new campus will be an inclusive place of research, education and collaboration, bringing together expertise and experience from a wide range of sectors and parts of society. It will offer a model for similar city-university collaborations worldwide. The public realm of the new campus will have welcoming and inclusive civic spaces with programmes to serve the local community, including a programme of activities in the evenings and weekends called Twilight Temple Quarter.
Not only are we designing digital and physical infrastructure across the campus with inclusivity in mind, we are developing an innovative and flexible undergraduate programme specifically aimed at local students without conventional qualifications and new initiatives to recruit a broader range of staff to the University. The spaces on the campus will include the Bristol Rooms, a ground floor space offering hotdesking to civic partners, social enterprises and community groups to work with us on research questions, student internships and big civic challenges.
‘So much information was covered so comprehensively but clearly. I felt like this session was really helpful and a very efficient use of my time.’ – Participant in SETsquared Bristol’s Jump Start your Business Plan
We are creating a socially responsible and sustainable campus that ensures a wide range of individuals and communities have opportunities to participate in, and shape, research, education and wider university life.
The Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus Public Engagement Fund has been generously kickstarted by The Lennox Hannay Charitable Trust. Any alumni and friends who are interested in supporting Civic Engagement projects are welcome to get in touch. These are projects where even small donations can have a real and identifiable impact. To get involved and for the latest news visit: bristol.ac.uk/temple-quarter-campus. E: alumni@bristol.ac.uk T: +44 (0) 117 394 1046
Ellie Wright is a current University of Bristol student, taking an MSc conversion course in Experimental Psychology. She partook in the Science of Happiness pilot in 2018 and has found it informative and transformative.
Originally interested from the perspective of supporting her patients as a Health Care Assistant and future psychologist, Ellie was surprised that as she learned through practice in the happiness hubs, she also enjoyed some of the benefits these behaviours had on her own thinking.
‘My motivation for taking the Science of Happiness course was to learn the evidence base behind what does and does not make us happy. I enjoyed looking at how positive early interventions in clinical and nonclinical populations can promote happiness and perhaps even prevent the onset of mental health conditions. An equally important part of this was understanding what we don’t yet know. The content has informed a critical approach I can take forward and that will hopefully benefit what I can offer to future research and clinical practice.
The course covers Philosophy, Economics, Politics, Neuroscience, Psychology – it’s varied and fun. The course uses data from studies to challenge our thinking around what makes us happy. In the lectures, Professor Hood really enjoys myth busting. For example, he explained the evidence behind why we may perceive that we’re happier sitting on our own plugged into our earphones on the daily commute, but how data suggests we are happier connecting with someone else. We learned about critical thinking, such as how to ascertain if a study needs to be repeated to be more robust. I gained insight into gathering and assessing data, looking at the size of the study, the methods used and who funded it. This is exciting! It nudges us to discover research problems and think about what more we might find out in the future with different study designs. It’s been easy to apply the skills learned to other courses. They’re skills for life and they’re transferrable.
This course has reminded me how to make time for fun in my life and how to have fun learning.
We looked at why the Happiness Hacks are important. Take sleep, for example. There’s a study in Nature magazine1 that shows how people deprived of enough sleep for just a week change their body language because their tiredness makes them hypersensitive. In turn this body language makes other people less likely to trust them, a perception whose impact can facilitate social isolation and loneliness for people with poor sleep. But this finding needs to be repeated!
The Happiness Hacks are about noticing automatic behaviours and disrupting these by building healthy habits. Accountability and peer support are what make those good habits stick, which is what happens in the weekly support hubs and are a key part of the Science of Happiness course.
This course promotes a love of learning – or what Professor Hood might describe as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Flow’. Not worrying about conventional exams, I feel, has a big role to play in this.’
Your University continues to support its staff and students in their health and wellbeing. A full list of services available to students is available at bristol.ac.uk/students/wellbeing/.
References
1. Simon, E. & Walker, M. (2018). Sleep loss causes social withdrawal and loneliness. Nature.
How Professor Bruce Hood is tackling the growing issues in mental health and wellbeing among students at Bristol.
Bruce Hood, Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society, tells us about his Science of Happiness course, which looks at rethinking the way we think, combined with practical applications to think more positively. This applied research project will include contacting participants at regular intervals over three years, to map changes in attitudes and behaviours. Following a successful pilot in 2018, from October 2019 this course will be available to all incoming students at Bristol as an accredited module.
The course is structured to run for 12 weeks as a weekly hour-long lecture by Professor Hood and an additional weekly hour-long peer support hub hosted by a trained mentor. Around 300 students are expected to sign up to the course each term. Rather than focus on assignments or exams, students are expected to do project work, attend their hubs and participate in Happiness Hacks to try them out. Other universities have already expressed interest in working with Bristol and Professor Hood to replicate this programme and a pilot in Bristol schools is happening this autumn.
‘From my own experience in recent years it’s become noticeable that students are no longer coming to me as their tutor to discuss ideas and what interests them in the field of psychology. Rather they are showing up in a state of stress and anxiety about how to get good grades, how to pass their exams, what they need to do to excel. While assessment is of course important it appears it’s taken over and a lot of the joy has disappeared from learning. Stress and anxiety among university students is not new. I wrote a paper over 30 years ago 1 on homesickness in students going to university and how there’s a spike in depression at this time. But it’s becoming a burgeoning problem and people are much more vocal about it now. So why is that?
Fifty-three per cent of students arriving at university have self-reported mental health issues before even getting there
Reasons are multiple. There’s a big shift in what students expect. In the UK school system they’re given such tight direction that they can then struggle when faced with the challenges of independent thinking at university. Uncertainty also leads to stress and we are in a time of peak uncertainty, with factors such as geopolitical instability, climate change and the transition to a digital world. Fifty-three per cent of students arriving at university have self-reported mental health issues before even getting there2 and the latest ONS statistics show that rates of mental health issues are rapidly on the increase.3
So what, if anything, can be done? There’s a belief that people with issues regarding mental health and unhappiness are genetically predisposed to it, but that’s not the full picture. Fifty per cent of what influences happiness is genetic factors, 10 per cent is circumstantial – for example winning the lottery or being the victim of a traffic accident– and 40 per cent is intentional activities such as exercising and getting enough sleep.4 My aim with the Science of Happiness course is to look at misconceptions around happiness, to examine how and why we think the way we do, to get the students to really think long and hard about the true meaning of happiness and how we define it, and then to put the Happiness Hacks into practice.
The intention is that it will make the students taking it more resilient and better able to deal with life
I must stress that this course is not a therapeutic one, although students may benefit by self-reflecting and by participating in the Happiness Hacks. The intention is that it will make the students taking it more resilient and better able to deal with life, understanding that success is not necessarily the same as happiness and that having different moods is important. That said, one interesting factor that emerged from the pilot programme was that the biggest fans of the course were our international students, particularly those from Asia. They often can’t talk about anxiety and stress at home in their culture. But because the Science of Happiness is a science course and looks at data and statistics, they felt ‘allowed’ to attend it and they felt liberated by what they learned.
So what is happiness, how do we define it and how do we achieve it? There are three components to wellbeing and happiness, which are: positive emotions, engagement and living a meaningful life. Psychological science shows that we have misconceptions about happiness, that our expectations around it can be detrimental to us and that certain factors can positively influence our happiness.
This is what I examine with the students taking my course, to overcome biases and put strategies into place to become happier. There are proven benefits to being happy, which have a positive effect on society. Happy people are more productive, more creative, more generous and have better relationships.5 Happiness can even predict health. For instance, a 2017 study showed that if you infect test subjects with the flu virus, the happier people fight it off better.6
Since the end of World War II, GDP has been a country’s measurement of success and one which I believe is possibly the worst way of measuring. We need to think about what’s more valuable to society, because we’re very individualistic in the Western world. We could do well to look at Bhutan, which since 1971 has rejected GDP as the only way to measure progress. In 1972 King Jigme Singye Wangchuck declared that ‘Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product’, giving equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing. We’ve lost track of the real values in life, we have a warped notion of self and we’re not asking ourselves if we feel purposeful and valued. At a time when anxiety and stress are on the increase globally and transecting age brackets and socio-economic backgrounds, refocusing on what Aristotle called Eudaimonia – translated as wellbeing – can only be a good thing.’
Happiness Hacks
Practical ways to feel more positive7.
1. Savouring – taking time to savour the things you enjoy.
2. Gratitude – expressing gratitude for people and things.
3. Social Connection – making real-life connections with strangers.
4. Kindness – increasing your acts of kindness.
5. Exercise – increasing your physical activity.
6. Attention – combat mind wandering.
7. Sleep – ensure at least seven hours per night.
1 Fisher, S. & Hood, B. (1987). The transition to university: a longitudinal study of psychological disturbance, absent-mindedness and vulnerability to homesickness. British Journal of Psychology, 78, 425-441.
2 Afterline (2018). Union Futures: Being Well, Doing Well [online]. Available at bristolsu.org.uk/articles/being-well-doing-well-results-released [Accessed 10.07.19].
3 Office of National Statistics UK (ONS), 2018. Counts and percentages of adults with a mental illness, by occupation, age, sex and ethnicity, between May and July 2012 to 2017. ONS.
4 Brickman P., Coates D., Janoff-Bulman R. Lottery winners and accident victims – is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (1978). 36, 917-927.
5 O’Malley, M. N., & Andrews, L. (1983). The effect of mood and incentives on helping: Are there somethings money can’t buy? Motivation and Emotion, 7(2), 179-189.
6 Ayling K., Fairclough L., Tighe P., Todd I., Halliday V., Garibaldi J., Royal S., Hamed A., Buchanan H., Vedhara K., (2017). Positive mood on the day of influenza vaccination predicts vaccine effectiveness: A prospective observational cohort study. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.
7 Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect – Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin, 131, 803-855.
