On 22nd June 2009 at our Perry Barr City North campus in Birmingham, the Interactive Cultures team attended RESCON09, the first of what looks to be an annual research conference at Birmingham City University. The event may sound like a highly futuristic, evil corporation, but it’s really just an abbreviation of ‘Research Conference’.

Our University does pretty well with research; in the last Research Assessment Exercise we were “placed in a ‘supergroup’ of modern universities spearheading research excellence to the very highest quality”. Birmingham City University is now fully recognised as a ‘rising star’ research institution, with the highest percentage of work rated as world leading compared to any other modern university in the UK.

The aim of the event was to build on this success and to help develop the research culture of the University. Professor David Maguire made these aims clear with an opening address that presented clear targets for the future. In a less formal sense, RESCON09 was really an opportunity for different disciplines to engage with each other and find out more about the work that is going on within the University.

Combining new knowledge from a range of disciplines to real world applications is a major strength for the University. Our colleague Paul Long gave a presentation on the work of the AHRC KTF fellowship and how this knowledge transfer work relates to research, while the rest of the team put together several posters on our work.

Our poster was runner up in the awards for best poster, which was nice.