At the end of last year, the Division of Law, Society and Social Justice brought together staff, students, and University partners to celebrate their contribution to public engagement at the LSSJ Social Impact Week. The programme, which took place at the beginning of November, gave colleagues the chance to connect and learn from each other’s successes through a series of interactive sessions and was also attended by the University’s Vice Chancellor Professor Karen Cox.
The programme featured updates and insights from across the Division, including the Philosophy team and Social Work practitioners and their partners. There was also a panel event on celebrating and planning impact and a Heritage Stakeholders’ Day in the Moot Court attended by the Lord Mayor. The annual Tucker Millward Memorial Lecture, which this year featured guest speaker Her Honour Judge Sarah Davies, was also part of the programme, with the theme ‘chipping away at the glass ceiling’.
An event highlight was a talk hosted by Dr Kirsty Horsey on the recent review of Surrogacy Law. Working with Surrogacy UK (the largest non-profit surrogacy organisation in the UK), Dr Horsey’s research has led to substantial changes in the oversight and regulation of surrogacy in the UK, and to Government policy relating to surrogacy as a form of family creation.
The week also saw the Centre for Child Protection celebrate their 10th anniversary and host their Annual Conference. Since 2012, through a suite of interactive, innovative child protection simulations, the Centre has been keeping children safe by educating a multi-professional group of child protection workers and young people in the UK and beyond.
The event was a collaborative effort between academic and professional services teams, including our Research Excellence team who helped to record and live stream the sessions to make them more accessible to those who couldn’t attend on the day.
Speakers from the event posing for a photo.At the University of Kent, we have pledged to be a leading civic university by 2025, to serve the communities around us and to help them flourish in every possible way. That’s a mission and a vision that fills us with great excitement and pride. However, we can only do this by working fully in partnership with our staff, students, members of our local, national or global communities, partners and businesses. Find out more about our public engagement activity.