Professor Averil Macdonald OBE shares 10 Top Tips for Success

Since our last event, seven of the Science Schools at Kent have been awarded Athena SWAN Bronze Awards, and the initiative itself has expanded to include all disciplines, professional service staff in Schools, and wider gender issues including trans students and staff. This year’s annual Athena SWAN Awareness Day is a celebration of our achievements to date and an invitation to wider staff to think about becoming involved. The theme is: Sharing and Building Success. The Athena SWAN initiative facilitates organisational and personal success, and participants can gain insight into how these can be achieved.

The Athena SWAN initiative is also about recognising advancement of gender equality: representation, progression and success for all. This is something we are committed to, and by pursuing this agenda, we create the best working environment for all staff. This event will cover themes relevant to staff across the Faculties and Professional Service departments.

Professor Averil Macdonald OBE (leading influencer on engaging under-represented groups with science) will speak, Tracey Lamb EDI Manager will open the event, a panel discussion will spark debate, and the workshops are designed to inform or provide practical help.

A draft programme is already available and we invite you to join us in the Grimond Foyer at 12.00. The event will run until 15.45 and includes lunch.

We welcome all staff – men and women; Academic Schools and Professional Services; Medway and Canterbury based – to attend the event.

To find out more, and register for the event, go to http://www.kent.ac.uk/human-resources/athenaswan/awareness-days/index2016.html.

Mathilde Poizat-Amar, lecturer in French from the Department of Modern Languages, has received a funding award from the Association Victor Segalen and the Society of French Studies for a conference on Victor Segalen. The conference will take place at the University of Kent on 22 April 2016.

Victor Segalen (1878-1919) is a French writer, poet, doctor and archaeologist who wrote extensively on his travels to French Polynesia and China and contributed to shift the understanding of exoticism and the Otherness at the beginning of the 20th century.

This one-day conference aims at inviting established scholars and early-career scholars to question and think about the relevance of segalenian studies almost 100 years after he died. How do we read, how do we think with Segalen in 2016? The communications will deepen knowledge and explore new ways of thinking about Segalen’s work, and thinking with his work. They will focus on the following aspects of his writing:

• Legacy of Victor Segalen
• Distance, heterogeneity and exoticism
• The Other, the Elsewhere and the Self
• Reality and Imagination
• The Body
• Text and critical theory
• Origins and destinations
• Poetics of the text

Please send a 300-word abstract (in English or French) with a short biography by the 15 January 2016 to this address: conferencevictorsegalen@gmail.com. Communications should not exceed 20 minutes.

Further details and the full call for papers is available at: www.fabula.org/actualites/journee-d-etude-victor-segalen_69405.php

This January, Lets Play welcomes back the Medway Staff Cup for its second year and this time it’s even bigger and better.

How it works:
Staff for different departments compete against each other in a different activity each month. Competitions are held on the first Thursday of every month, kicking off in January with Table Tennis and finishing up with a Quiz and presentation evening in September.

The Staff Cup runs in similar fashion to the Canterbury VC’s Cup in that teams earn points in each competition to go towards their overall Cup score.

Not only is it an opportunity for your department to stay active, it also is a great opportunity for team cohesion and a chance to get to know other departments around campus in a fun and friendly environment.

To enter your department or find out more information email letsplay@kent.ac.uk before the 18 December.