Research - Durham University

Latest research news
- Parents should be allowed to make informed choices over infant bed-sharing, says child sleep expert
  
  Parents should be given more information and be encouraged to make informed choices to minimise the risks of infant bed-sharing, a child sleep expert has said.
- Brain frontal lobes not sole centre of human intelligence
  
  Human intelligence cannot be explained by the size of the brain’s frontal lobes, say researchers.
- Museum find proves exotic ‘big cat’ prowled British countryside a century ago
  
  The rediscovery of a mystery animal in a museum’s underground storeroom proves that a non-native ‘big cat’ prowled the British countryside at the turn of the last century.
- New fracking research led by Durham University finds it is “not significant” in causing earthquakes
  
  A new study of hundreds of thousands of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) operations has found that the process has only caused earth tremors that could be felt on the surface in three cases.

Research is at the core of Durham University. It shapes and inspires the disciplinary structure of our departments, several of which lead the UK - and even the world - in their fields. Research leads the content and development of our teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and creates new cross-disciplinary programmes through our centres and institutes. In partnership with policy-makers, industry, healthcare and education, Durham's cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research shapes local, national and international agendas.

Links to recent research highlights and to the Research Office and other units and schemes that support our research can be found on this page.

Forthcoming research seminars

Research Seminar: Professor Harry Daniels

23rd May 2012, 13:00, School of Education, Room ED134

Everyday Matters that Matter

This presentation will focus on the mediational properties of everydayness Discourse may mediate human action in different ways. There is visible (Bernstein, 2000) or explicit (Wertsch, 2007) mediation in which the deliberate incorporation of signs into human action is seen as a means of reorganising that action. This contrasts with invisible or implicit mediation that involves signs, especially natural language, whose primary function is IN communications which are part of a pre-existing, independent stream of communicative action that becomes integrated with other forms of goal-directed behaviour (Wertsch, 2007). Invisible semiotic mediation occurs in discourse embedded in everyday ordinary activities of a social subject's life.
I will discuss and illustrate these matters with examples drawn from empirical research

Contact sheena.smith@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.

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