Yearly Archives: 2015

Dear Google: open letter on transparency in ‘right to be forgotten’

Eighty top academics including Eerke Boiten from the School of Computing and Alan Mckenna from Kent Law School have signed an open letter to Google, arguing for more public scrutiny over its handling of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests. The letter was featured in the Guardian and stated that since The European Court of Justice ruled that Google is responsible for removing links to outdated, irrelevant or misrepresentative information on search results for individuals, it has received 250,000 requests to do so.

For full story with working links see http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/news.html?view=655

Sonia Boyce, OBE: Visting Artists Talk at the School of Music and Fine Art

The final lecture for this academic year in the series of Visiting Artist Talks at the School of Music and Fine Art will take place next week on Thursday, 21st May, 17.30-18.30 with the artist Sonia Boyce, MBE in The Clocktower Building Lecture Theatre, The School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, Chatham Historic Dockyard, Kent ME4 4TE.

Sonia Boyce, MBE, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist, living and working in London. She is Professor at Middlesex University and Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London.

Working across a range of media including photography, installation, text and improvised collaborations. Boyce came to prominence as part of the Black British cultural renaissance of the 1980s. Her work explores the experiences of being a black woman living in a white society, and how religion, politics and sexual politics form that experience.

‘In the broadest sense, my research interests lie in art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this burgeoning field. Since the 1990s my own art practice has relied on working with other people in collaborative and participatory situations, often demanding of those collaborators spontaneity and unrehearsed performative actions…I recoup the remains of these performative gestures “ the leftovers, the documentation“ to make the art works..’

Sonia Boyce was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, 2007, for services to art.

EDA to raise STEM awareness to local teachers at Kent and Medway STEMFest 2015

Students and staff from EDA look forward to exhibiting at Kent and Medway STEMFest 2015 in order to raise awareness of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

Kent and Medway STEMFest 2015 takes place on Thursday 4 June at the University of Greenwich, Chatham Campus. The event enables teachers of STEM and careers advisors to learn more about the organisations and individuals that support the development of these subjects in Kent and Medway schools.

For more details, see http://www.mebp.org/

Skepsi to hold its 8th conference on ‘Disgust’

Skepsi will be holding its 8th annual conference later in the month, under the theme ‘Disgust’. The event will be held over two days, 29 and 30 May 2015.

Skepsi is a peer-reviewed online journal produced within the School of European Culture and Languages (SECL). It is run by our PhD/MA candidates, with the support of established and early career academics, and commits to publishing the work of postgraduate students and emerging scholars.

Disgust has received growing critical attention among researchers in fields as varied as literature, philosophy of art, biology, psychology or gender studies. It is universally experienced even if the object of disgust can vary greatly according to the cultures. With the neurosciences increasingly gaining attention from the humanities for their project of explaining cognitive states and processes with reference to the material brain, it is opportune to reflect upon those experiences that strike the pit of the stomach before the head. Key research questions that will concern us are: Why is disgust so appealing? What is the relationship between physical and moral disgust? Can disgust be explained with the help of the theory of evolution? How is the rhetoric of disgust mobilised in far-right ideologies?.

Registration for the event costs £10, which includes a wine reception. For details of how to register, and the full conference programme, please see the page here: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/skepsi/

Dr Sophia Labadi finalises a draft UNESCO policy on World Heritage and Sustainable Development

Dr. Sophia Labadi has just finalized for UNESCO a draft policy on World Heritage and Sustainable Development, to be presented to and discussed by the World Heritage Committee at its 39th Session in Bonn, Germany, in 2015. This policy took two years to draft; it saw the involvement of experts from all over the world.

The overall goal of such a policy would be to assist States Parties, practitioners, institutions, communities and networks, through appropriate guidance, to harness the potential of World Heritage properties, and heritage in general, to contribute to sustainable development, and ensure that their conservation and management strategies are appropriately aligned with broader sustainable development objectives.

The process leading to the development of a sustainable development policy reflects a general trend to make the World Heritage Convention more relevant to challenges of the 21st century, and to align itself with other multilateral environmental agreements. It is also part of the broader efforts by UNESCO to integrate culture into the UN’s Post 2015 sustainable development agenda, which is to be agreed in September this year.

Paul March-Russell publishes on modernism in sci-fi

Dr Paul March-Russell from the Department of Comparative Literature has just published a new book, Modernism and Science-Fiction (Palgrave, 2015).

The book asks to what extent can the future-oriented narratives of science fiction, emerging alongside modernism during the last years of the 19th century, be described as ‘modernist’? To what extent did modernism, responding to the scientific and technological breakthroughs of Darwin, Edison and Einstein, draw upon a grammar of ideas and images that we would call ‘science fiction’? It pursues these questions through a wide-ranging series of examples, drawn from literature, film and the visual arts in Britain, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Americas, from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) to J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973). The book challenges how high and low culture has been mapped in the 20th century.

Paul’s title joins several others in the Modernism and series to be written by staff from the School of European Culture and Language. These include Modernism and Nihilism (2011) by Professor Shane Weller, Modernism and Perversion (2011) by Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, and Modernism and Style (2011) by Professor Ben Hutchinson.

For more details on the book, please see the publisher’s webpage.

Writing opportunity for new student blog

The university’s publishing team are launching a new blog next academic year for the benefit of prospective students. Current Kent students can write about aspects of student, extra-curricular or academic life to really give prospective students an insight into life here at the university. The blog is a fantastic way to hone your writings skills, write about your experiences of being a student at Kent and offer invaluable insights for the benefit of others thinking of studying here.

For more information and to apply to be a student blogger, go to:  http://www.kent.ac.uk/courses/blog/index.html

Author Emmi Itranta to read at Kent

Finnish science-fiction author Emmi Itäranta will be giving a reading of her book Memory of Water (Harper Voyager, 2014) for the Centre of Modern European Literature on 21 May.

Born and raised in Finland, but now resident in Kent, Emmi Itäranta is a graduate of the University of Kent. Memory of Water was her debut novel, published in Finland in 2011, and won both the Kalevi Jäntti Award and the Nuori Aleksis Award. It tells the story of a dystopian world, where water is the most valuable commodity.

The English translation, prepared by the author herself, was published in 2014 and has been short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Kitschies. Adam Roberts, reviewing the book in The Guardian, described it as a ‘poetic and melancholy debut’ and also wrote of its ‘flawless English’ translation.

The reading will begin at 17.00 in Keynes College, Seminar Room 4. For more details, please see the SECL events webpage.

The Kent Sport survey extension ends Wednesday 20 May!

With a £100 Amazon voucher up for grabs, Kent Sport has offered an extension on our survey for those who weren’t able to get their comments in on time. But that extension ends Wednesday 20 May!

Take the Kent Sport survey by Wednesday 20 May at 17.00 and you will be in the running to win a £100 Amazon voucher.

All are invited to enter, Kent Sport members, non-members, staff and students to complete the survey.

If you have any queries regarding the survey, please speak to reception or email sportsenquiries@kent.ac.uk.

Staff Tennis Tournament

Join University staff for a singles tennis tournament on Saturday 30 May from 13.00 to 17.00 hosted by Kent Sport. It’s free to enter!

Contact our Sports Development by Wednesday 27 May stating your playing ability (beginning, intermediate or advance).

Email sportsdevelopment@kent.ac.uk to book your place.