Call for Proposals

Dr Steve Kirkwood – Top Tips for Potential SUII-funded Projects

In this guest blog, Dr Steve Kirkwood provides advice from his experience of being a programme lead on one of our Knowledge Exchange programmes. Steve is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh.

Our project

I was the joint lead on a Scottish Universities Insight Institute (SUII)-funded programme in 2017 entitled ‘Developing Restorative Justice in Scotland’. In case you’re not aware, restorative justice is a process for facilitating safe communication between the direct victim of a crime and the person who committed a crime. It is well used in various parts of the world, and the evidence for its effectiveness is relatively strong, however it is little used in Scotland. The purpose of our programme was to explore and share the international evidence on restorative justice with policy makers, practitioners and academics in the Scottish criminal justice scene, with the hope of informing local policy and practice.

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Individual Freedom and the Common Good – Charlie Woods

Individual Freedom and the Common Good

In a recent fascinating article in the New York Times Colin Woodard summarises his analysis of how politics in America today is shaped by the values of the different groups that settled the country; from the Puritan communitarian legacy of the north east ‘Yankeedom’ to the personal sovereignty of ‘Greater Appalachia’. He identifies eleven different ‘nations’ or regions in the US that cross state boundaries and which, in his view, provide a much better guide to today’s political divisions that ‘north-south’ or ‘urban-rural’. At its heart he sees a tension between advancing and protecting individual liberty and promoting the common good.

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Charlie Woods – The Elephant in the Room

Apparently, a picture is worth a thousand words. With this in mind, I was delighted to come across this cartoon (by artist G. Renee Guzlas) to start our presentation at this month’s roadshows around our member universities, to help illustrate what lies behind SUII projects.

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