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• Prof Jeremy Niven, Dean of the Sussex Researcher School
• Dr Samuel Knafo, Reader in International Relations
• Dominika Varga, 3MT winner 2023
• Dr Priscilla Mensah, Director of Research Development at Nelson Mandela University

3MT 2024 Results

• Winner: Sunisha Neupane (Institute of Development Studies) - मातृत्व र संघर्षका कथा [Stories of Motherhood and Resilience] - Researching maternal health and care in rural Nepal
• 2nd Place: Emily Whelan (Psychology) - Seeing Sounds and Tasting Colors: The Sweet and Sour of Synaesthesia
• People's Choice Award: Leonard Chimanda Joseph (Law, Politics and Sociology) - Two homes, no home: the Global Compact on Refugees vis-à-vis 50 years of refugees in Kigoma villages, Tanzania

Deborah Upchurch (Education & Social Work)

Reclaiming Reading: A collaborative action research project

Over 25% of children in England leave primary school unable to read to the expected standard and worst affected are those already at socioeconomic disadvantage. Current educational policy reduces reading to a set of skills and fails to take into account the importance of reading engagement. This research explores how agentive social reading groups can raise reader engagement for primary aged children in disadvantaged contexts. The resulting rich, highly contextualised data gathered during Spring 2024 illustrates both the immediate and exponential impact of school-based action research and it’s potential to challenge educational policy.

Leonard Chimanda Joseph (Law, Politics and Sociology)

Two homes, no home: the Global Compact on Refugees vis-à-vis 50 years of refugees in Kigoma villages, Tanzania

Burundian refugees are in Kigoma villages in Tanzania since 1972; more than fifty years now suffering from predicaments such as statelessness, poor access to labour market and stigma. Using decolonial theory of knowledge, third world approach (es) to international law in particular; this study seeks to examine the role of the United Nations Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) in identifying durable solutions that enhance the resilience of refugees who are self-settled in Kigoma villages in Tanzania. Adopted by the United Nations in 2018, the GCR reflects the current international legal obligations by states on offering solutions to refugees.

Sunisha Neupane (Institute for Development Studies)

मातृत्व र संघर्षका कथा [Stories of Motherhood and Resilience] - Researching maternal health and care in rural Nepal

Every day, nearly 800 women die from preventable pregnancy and childbirth-related causes, with 95% of these deaths occurring in low and middle-income countries. While the maternal mortality rate has significantly declined since the 1990s, disparities persist. In Nepal, women in remote areas continue to face inadequate care and higher mortality rates. My PhD research investigates the reasons behind this disparity. Over 13 months of ethnographic and participatory fieldwork in a 4000-meter-high mountain village in Nepal, I followed 16 pregnant women. My results show what maternity care means to them and uncover the barriers to maternal healthcare they encounter.

Emily Whelan (Psychology)

Seeing Sounds and Tasting Colors: The Sweet and Sour of Synaesthesia

Have you ever experienced a blending of senses, like tasting colours or seeing sounds? This fascinating phenomenon is known as synaesthesia. My research explores how synaesthetes, their relatives, and experts in colour and spatial fields may perceive and remember things differently. By comparing their abilities, we aim to uncover whether unique perceptual strengths in synaesthesia stem from the condition itself or from a blend of cognitive factors. This study could reveal how our brains connect perception, memory, and imagination, shedding light on the extraordinary ways our senses intertwine and influence each other.

Dolores Teixeira de Brito (Global Studies)

Voluntary Sustainability Standards: to what extent do they work?

I am researching the effectiveness of Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) in Global Supply Chains, with a focus on inequalities in Global Value Chains (GVCs). To explore these issues, I have chosen the açaí berry sector in the Brazilian Amazon. I collected my data through interviews with harvesters, companies and other actors. My analysis centres on understanding how VSS initiatives green value chains in a sector at its early stage of internationalization. I focus on the perspective of harvesters using the Global Value Chain framework.

Edward Langley (Global Studies)

Bullshit jobs and financialisation in neoliberal Britain

‘Bullshit jobs’ should not exist under efficient capitalism. David Graeber (2018) attributed their rise to financialisation: rent-seeking has dominated in neoliberal, post-industrial economies with work evolving accordingly. However the proportion of those employed in financial services has remained stable over recent decades, indicating the possibility of other neoliberal culprits.

My research- analysing macroeconomic data and conducting worker’s surveys- investigates whether Britain may hold some answers, specifically whether its expanding services sector has geared the economy away from producing utility for society and instead towards maintaining institutions and power structures which serve the interests of global capital.

Video Transcript

I ask you to remember a memorable time that you stand on the Brighton beach. You may be transported back to a sunny day, hearing seagulls, watching the waves and a pier in the distance as you spend time with your friends and family.

Memories have this amazing power to evoke rich stories within us.

Today I will share how our minds craft these stories. Traditionally, in the lab, memories are studied by asking people to remember a list of objects like: ice cream, beach ball, sun cream. But there is a big gap between these lab studies and rich real-life memories. 

With my experiments, I aim to breach this gap by using video games that capture the real life much better than watching the person looking for shells on the beach. With this, I can study how real world knowledge influences is making new memories. In our daily lives, we rely on our knowledge and expectations to understand and remember situations.

However, we often underestimate how much our expectations shape what we remember. In fact, my research shows that expectations can be stored memories. For example, imagine this situation where you are packing for the beach about to grab a sun cream but the sound of your doorbell interrupts you. 

Later you realise you left the house without the sun cream, mistakenly remembering packing it. Sounds familiar? Turns out that our minds sometimes create false memories that align with our expectations I found that people often misremember this person leaving the beach, with a collection of shells, despite the video being interrupted before she found one.

High expectations can fill in the gaps in our memories, creating the coherent story that follows a logical sequence of events. With clear beginnings and ends. So how does our brain make these coherent memories?

By measuring brain activity, we show that brain regions involved in perception, knowledge and prediction, all work in synchrony to piece together the puzzle of a known end situation. When we expect a situation is about to reach and end, our brain creates this coherent story, writing the whole experience into our memory. Breaching lab and real-life contrast is not only crucial for understanding how we make memory in the wild, but also to identify the processes that breakdown in memory disorders like Alzheimer's disease.

Furthermore, evidence that memories can be influenced by expectations, has implications for real world situations, like the justice peace, where accurate memories matter. And with that, I would like to leave you with a final thought - that our minds are the architects that shapes the gnar of the our lives.

Thank you.