About School

Introduction

The School of Applied Community and Health Studies (SACHS) was formed in 2004 following a review of Faculty organisation and structure. The impetus for change and collaboration came from three established Centres, Deaf Studies, Exercise Nutrition and Health Sciences (ENHS), Norah Fry Research Centre (NFRC) with the opportunity to incorporate the newly formed Centre for Hearing and Balance Studies (CHBS). The School further developed its interests in counselling and communication skills through the formation of the Personal and Professional Development.  From 1st August 2010 ENHS and NFRC moved from SACHS into the School for Policy Studies, as part of the Faculty restructuring process.   

The rationale for the formation of the School identified the administrative benefits of a collaborative approach to research and teaching. The School has developed a centralised approach to finance and other administrative processes. It has developed a collaborative approach to academic administration of teaching and learning and research. The School continues to remain united in a commitment to applied research which is value driven and founded on equality of opportunity.

The Centres within SACHS take a dynamic approach to specific aspect of policy, culture and professional practice. A recurrent theme is “difference” and the diverse approaches to the applied study of differences.

Philosophy

The Man who mistook his School for a Hat
A Sachs Approach
With grateful thanks to Professor Jim Kyle
December 2005

“Since many of the conditions chronicled by him are incurable, the force driving his tales is not the race for a remedy but the patient's striving to maintain his or her identity in a world utterly changed by the disorder” Steve Silberman, 2002

Perhaps the first analysis of SACHS is rather like the reviews of the other Sacks’ groundbreaking work - the challenge of difference in the face of the need for the establishment of identity. A second analysis however, shows the strength of that diversity and the potential for exploitation of a model of mutual respect for identity, culture, experience, language and then the potential contribution to the richness of academic life.

“Sacks provided the most vivid descriptions we have of the organic capacity for recovery and adaptation that inspired the modern age of network computing. In a book called The Executive Brain, Elkhonon Goldberg marvels at the parallels between the recent evolution of the higher, distributed cortical functions and the growth curve of digital networks: "Computer hardware has evolved from mainframe computers to personal computers to network personal computers ... a gradual departure from a predominantly modular to a predominantly distributed pattern of organization reshaped the digital world." He puzzles over the fact that this "unconscious recapitulation" seems not to have been "guided by the knowledge of neuroscience." Steve Silberman, 2002

What is significant about this quotation taken from a review of the work of Oliver Sacks is its identification of the current change from centralisation to empowerment and in networks from vertical structures to horizontal ones. In effect, the concept of the highly specialised academic department with fixed boundaries of knowledge (a discipline) is gradually being subsumed by the need to create flexible interactions in order to respond to and in order to initiate the search for real world solutions. Instead of seeking uniformity of approach, effective problem solvers are looking to integrate widely different points of views and sets of expertise.

While this problem solving approach is now well established in industry and in ‘the real world’, academic structures creak and rarely bend when new issues require this multi-modal approach.

A perfect example of the nature of this problem is in the study and understanding of difference itself. Every individual is different and yet strives to be recognised for their similarities to others. These others form into groups and seek an identity – and then define that identity by its distance from other groups. The conundrum is “how is it that individuals wish to be accepted by others on the basis of their shared difference from the other groups”.
This is the essence of the SACHS core question.