The Grierson Award nominated film Public House which premiered in October 2015 at the BFI London Film Festival, and is directed by award-winning artist Sarah Turner, Reader in Fine Art and Director of Research in the School of Music and Fine Art, is being screened at Tate Britain on 11 July.

It is also previewing in the Changing London forum at the ICA on July 12.

Both events are followed by a Q&A conversation with the Director.

This genre-blending documentary of spoken word / text/ opera/ film was funded by a production award from Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) and a research award from the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent.

Additionally, Public House will be screening at 20.00 on Sunday 21 August 2016 in Hackney Wick as part of The Floating Cinema’s summer programme, Another Country. The film will be the closing feature film of the Hackney Wick weekender, which explores how, as the city gentrifies at a giddying rate, new spaces are appearing and old ones are fading away.

View Sarah’s talk about Public House.

To find out more about Public House see this related post.

Sent in by j.seaman@kent.ac.uk

The Safeguarding Students Policy, approved by the Executive Group, is now available on the University’s Governance webpages. The policy outlines the University’s approach to safeguarding students within the University.

If you have a safeguarding concern, please read the policy carefully and contact the Designated Safeguarding Officer (DSO) within your School or Department. A list of the University’s current DSOs can be found in the Policies section of the Student Services website (under Safeguarding).

Sent in by: jh836@kent.ac.uk

Acclaimed contemporary visual artist and School of Music and Fine Art Lecturer, Adam Chodzko is one of a group of 26 artists and estates selected by DACS Foundation to participate in the Art360 project; a hugely ambitious public project to support the sustainability and dynamism of artists profiles for future generations.

DACS Foundation promotes visual arts for the public benefit by making grants, providing education and training, organising exhibitions and carrying out vital research. Dedicated to the physical and intellectual preservation of the UK’s cultural heritage, making artistic works and archives accessible to today’s public and to future generations, the Foundation champions a new and encompassing perspective on the value of visual art and artists to society through public participation in education, exhibitions, publications and research opportunities.

The total £200,000 award made to artists includes direct investment in each of the artists with additional investment in the production of film interviews, directed by artist and filmmaker David Bickerstaff. Over the course of three years, the action research project will work with 100 modern and contemporary artists offering each artist or estate up to £6,000 investment in obtaining the best technical services and expert advice that is relevant to their circumstances and requirements to begin securing the material and ephemeral aspects of their legacy.

Chodzko says: ‘I am currently solely responsible for my own archive. I can’t delegate it to someone else because I need to be present for every aspect of its cataloguing in order to ensure the accuracy, relationships and significance of its parts through how they connect to the whole body of work.’

Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Exhibiting internationally since 1991, Chodzko works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions.

Sent in by: j.seaman@kent.ac.uk

Chris Morrison, Copyright and Licensing Compliance Officer at the University of Kent, has co-authored the second edition of Copyright and E-Learning: A guide for practitioners by Dr Jane Secker (Facet).

The book has been comprehensively updated following changes to UK copyright in 2014 and reflects the insights from Chris and Jane’s work on copyright literacy. This involves communicating messages about copyright in context and framing it as part of a set of wider digital and information literacies that are essential to teaching, learning and researching in the 21st century.

You can read more about the book here and the way in which an appreciation of risk and empathy can help alleviate some of the anxieties around copyright.

Chris also blogs about work he is doing to promote copyright literacy at Kent and invites anyone interested in this area to get in touch to join the Kent copyright community of practice.

The University is renowned for its world leading research and academic excellence. Its Centre for Heuristics and Logistics Optimisation (CHLO), located within Kent Business School, is delighted to have partnered recently with a local company, Parker Steel, on a 30-month Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project.

Parker Steel is one of the UK’s leading steel stockholders and processors and has sites in various locations across the south east. Still a family run business, the company employs over 600 staff. Their processing facilities have grown significantly with over 30 state of the art machines across their sites. Parker Steel has a fleet of over 60-strong purpose built vehicles and arctic trailers, travelling over 30,000km every day transporting steel to England and Wales.

The KTP project, part funded by Innovate UK, will develop a robust and intelligent scheduling tool and evaluate strategic logistical scenarios. Routing and locational analysis expertise will be provided from a team of five academics within CHLO, enabling Parker Steel to gain a more efficient logistics operation. This much needed expertise is pivotal to the expansion of Parker Steel’s business enabling the company to reach new geographical areas within the UK.

KTPs are a UK-wide Government programme helping businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity through better use of knowledge, technology and skills that reside within the UK academic knowledge base. In addition to academic input, the partnership will recruit a recently qualified postgraduate to deliver the project.

The introduction to Parker Steel was made by Kent Business School and the partnership was developed with the support of KTP staff within the University’s Innovation & Enterprise Department.

Sent in by: entmarketing@kent.ac.uk

Two members of staff from Kent Hospitality are cycling 300 miles from Manchester to Exeter in conjunction with TUCO (The University Caterers Organisation) to raise money for charity.

From 22 to 25 July, Adam Hames (Keynes Food and Beverage Manager) and Chris Terry (Darwin Food and Beverage Manager) will cycle 75 miles a day to reach the annual TUCO Conference which is being held in Exeter this year.

Chris said: ‘We’re really excited to be doing this for great charities that mean a lot to us individually, our families and so many others. Neither of us has ever done anything like this before, we’re not professional cyclists by any means and this will push us to our physical limits. It will be worthwhile though and we’re looking forward to arriving at the 2016 TUCO Conference!’

Adam and Chris are raising money for Leukaemia Cancer Society and Pilgrim’s Hospice respectively. University staff can support them by donating via their Just Giving webpages.

At our meeting on Friday 1 July, the Council of the University discussed the implications of the EU referendum.

The Council is the University’s governing body, and its members are from a wide range of backgrounds, including business, industry, law, media and public services, as well as representatives from all parts of the University.

We were united in endorsing the Vice-Chancellor’s commitment, and that of her staff, to support staff and students through this very difficult and uncertain time, as set out in her message sent to the University community on 24 June.

We also re-affirmed the importance of Kent’s status as the UK’s European University. We share the University’s pride in this identity, and its determination to remain an outward-facing, international institution.

This is at the heart of Kent’s future, and the Council is unequivocal in its support.

Sir David Warren
Chair of the University Council

The University held elections for three of the four staff positions on Council in June 2016. For the first time, an online system was used for the nominations and the elections, and this proved to be a success.

There were two available positions on Council for academic and research staff and five expressions of interest were received. After an election where 432 members of staff took part, Dr Owen Lyne from the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science, and Professor John Fitzpatrick, from Kent Law School, were elected. There was a very good response rate of 41% for this election.

There was one available position on Council for a member of the University’s staff from Grades 1 to 6 and eight expressions of interest were received for this position. Charlotte Guy from the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, was elected with 19% of the votes cast after a very close election. Again, there was a good response rate of 32% for the election, with 461 members of staff taking part.

All three will serve as members of Council from 1 August 2016 until 31 July 2019, joining Mark Ellis from the School of Engineering and Digital Arts, who was elected last year as a member of the University’s staff from Grades 7 and above.

Further information on the University Council, its membership and terms of reference, is available on the University Governance webpages.

The Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent is holding a screening of the award-winning documentary, ‘Two Worlds Colliding’ with a talk afterwards by the film’s director, Tasha Hubbard. The screening event takes place on Monday 11th July 2016, from 13.00-15.00 in Grimond Building, Lecture Theatre 3. The film is free and all are welcome.

Tasha Hubbard’s documentary chronicles the story of Darrell Night, an Indigenous man who was dumped by two police officers in a barren field on the outskirts of Saskatoon in January 2000, during -20° C temperatures. He found shelter at a nearby power station and survived the ordeal, but he was stunned to hear that the frozen body of another Indigenous man was discovered in the same area. Days later, another victim, also Indigenous, was found.

This film is an inquiry into what came to be known as Saskatoon’s infamous ‘freezing deaths’ and the schism between a fearful, mistrustful Indigenous community and a police force that must come to terms with a shocking secret.

Tasha Hubbard is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She teaches indigenous literatures, as well as classes in first-year English as part of the Aboriginal Student Achievement Program. Her current film and academic work focuses on Indigenous creative representation of the Buffalo and on recovering historic Indigenous stories. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker; her solo writing/directing project Two Worlds Colliding (2004) won a Canada Award at the Geminis and a Golden Sheaf Award and she recently released the animated short film Buffalo Calling, 2013.

School of Music and Fine Art Lecturer Shona Illingworth is among the six artists shortlisted for the 2016 Jarman award for moving image art, with her work Westbound, which explores ideas of human emotion and memory.

The £10,000 art prize, named after Kent based artist and film-maker Derek Jarman, who died in 1994, is in its ninth year, and honours UK artists working with film, video and moving image in all its forms and keeping Jarman’s ‘spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation’ alive. The work of this year’s nominees spans short films, animations, YouTube collages and multi-screen installations. All six shortlisted artists will be commissioned to produce new work for Channel 4’s short film series Random Acts and their art will tour 11 galleries around the UK.

Artist Shona Illingworth is Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Music and Fine Art. She works across sound, film, video, photography, drawing and painting. Major works using moving image and/or sound, take the form of gallery based and site specific installation. Her work combines interdisciplinary research (particularly with emerging neuropsychological models of memory and critical approaches to memory studies) with publicly engaged practice. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, the Wellcome Collection, London, the National Museum, Tirana and Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Toronto and she has received high profile commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery, London and Channel 4 Television. For more information click https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/staff/staff-profiles/school/4Illingworth.html

For a short extract from Westbound click here: https://vimeo.com/167875207

For further info see: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/17/women-film-makers-dominate-jarman-award-shortlist-for-2016