Current projects

Fathers’ experiences of grief and loss following stillbirth and neonatal death

A review of literature on fathers’ experiences of neonatal/perinatal loss, with plans for an interview/focus group study and exploration of online support forums. Researchers: Martin Robb, Kerry Jones, Sam Murphy.

Fathers’ relationships with their disabled children

An international project using video films made by participants to explore fathers’ relationships with their disabled children and interactions with services. Researchers: Martin Robb and Jonty Rix, with colleagues in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Young fathers, relationships and wellbeing

Exploring the links between young fathers’ experience of family relationships, their relational capability and the impact on their mental health and that of their partners and children. Researchers: Martin Robb and Rod Earle, with colleagues from University of Lincoln and One Plus One.

The SANDWICH trial: what is the clinical and cost effectiveness of ventilation and sedation weaning protocols in critically ill children?

SANDWICH is a UK-wide, NIHR funded trial, which is investigating if a protocol-based intervention to manage sedation and weaning ventilation can reduce the duration of invasive mechanical ventilation and is cost effective compared with usual care in children in Paediatric Intensive Care Units (PICUs). She leads on the process evaluation component of the trial, which is exploring the processes involved in how the intervention is implemented, received and delivered across participating PICUs. The resulting evidence will identify barriers and facilitators to intervention adoption, helping to distinguish between intervention failure and implementation failure. This evidence will not only help to explain trial outcomes, but also determine factors requiring attention if, after the study, the intervention is to be further disseminated to other PICUs and sustained in practice.

Co-investigator: Joanne Jordan.

Parenting at a distance

This is a series of projects linked by the conceptual frame of parenting at a distance. The projects interrogate normative assumptions of parenting as a process of supporting children from dependency to independency and adulthood. The first project to be explored examines experiences of parents and children where the child lives in residential school/care.

Researchers: Lindsay O’Dell, Stephen Leverett, Elizabeth Tilley, Andy Rixon.

Different childhoods

A series of related projects and publications that began in 2004 and continue into the present. The projects are framed around a critical developmental theoretical lens which aims to explore and interrogate normative ideas of childhood and how some children (and families) see themselves or are seen by others, as ‘different’.

These include young carers, language brokers (children who translate for family members, autistic children, children with a health condition such as sickle cell disease, a facial disfigurement or other elements of embodied ‘difference’.

Researchers: Lindsay O’Dell, Charlotte Brownlow (University of Southern Queensland, Australia), Hanna Bertisldotter Rosqvist (Umea University Sweden), Michael Orsini (University of Ottawa, Canada), Francisco Ortega (State University Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Sarah Crafter, Guida de Abreu (Oxford Brookes), Tony Cline (UCL), Aravinda Guntupali.

Critical Autism Network

The Critical Autism Network aims to develop a challenge to dominant understandings of autism as a neurological deficit, instead focusing on autism as an identity that is discursively produced within specific sociocultural contexts.

Researcher: Lindsay O’Dell