Housing Law expert Professor Helen Carr will deliver a talk on homeless people and their animals in the first of a new series of public lectures to be hosted at the Beaney in Canterbury.
The Beaney is an art gallery, museum, library and cafe situated on Canterbury’s High Street. The lecture series it will host has been organised as part of a new collaboration with the University’s interdisciplinary Centre for Heritage.
Professor Carr will deliver the inaugural lecture in the series on Thursday 28 January at 6pm. Entitled ‘Homeless people and companion animals’, her talk will explore why animals are excluded from current thinking about solutions to social problems. Professor Carr will suggest that our stereo-typical way of viewing the homeless as villains and victims is challenged by examining their relationship with their animals. The lecture will coincide with the museum’s ‘Cardboard Canterbury’ exhibition and will be preceded by drinks and nibbles from 5.15pm, courtesy of the Centre for Heritage.
Professor Carr will also be available at a drop in session at the Beaney on Wednesday 27 January. She will be hoping to explain the obstacles homeless people have to overcome and to explode any myths about who gets housing from the state.
Further public lectures at the Beaney will be delivered on topics that are closely related to its work and collection. Co-Director of the Centre for Heritage, Dr Sophie Vigneron, said: ‘The series will offer members of the public a chance to engage with experts on current local and international issues that are relevant to all. Subsequent lectures will address museums and social justice and the destruction of heritage in the Middle East.’
Dr Vigneron, a Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School and an expert in art and cultural heritage law, will deliver the next public lecture about the looting of cultural artefacts in May 2016.
The lecture series, sponsored by the University’s Public Engagement with Research Fund, will enable academics to communicate their research activities to the wider public.
Dr Vigneron said: ‘The public lectures will be an occasion to listen to public views, concerns and perspectives about research undertaken on Heritage at Kent, which can subsequently help researchers to develop innovative approaches.’
Image credit: Best Friend, CC BY 2.0, Steve Willey