WOULD YOU BENEFIT FROM A RISK MANAGEMENT TRAINING SESSION?

Do you need assistance in identifying, articulating, analysing and assessing a risk?

• Does your team/School/Department have its own risk register?
• Do you feel there is an opportunity left undiscovered?
• Do you want to demonstrate better-informed decisions about opportunities and be able to constructively address patterns of risk?
• Have you considered becoming a risk champion for your team/school/department?

The University Risk and Compliance Team are offering risk management awareness sessions these are available via a 1-1 meeting, group workshop or through one of us attending your team meetings. One thing for sure is we can help strengthen best practice and support you in delivering good risk management. Awareness sessions can be tailored for your areas.

Engaging in risk management ensures we remain robust and effective in both identifying and managing key risks across the University which may prevent us from achieving our strategic aims and priorities.

The University may be impacted by changes in higher education and in the economy but by continuing to raise awareness, embed good practices we ensure we;

Maintain good risk management, control and governance
Provide VFM
Ensure the management and quality assurance of data

For further information – you can email us at

riskandcompliance@kent.ac.uk, alternatively visit our web page which can be found under Staff Finance section or telephone 01227 816481.

On Friday 18 May there was lively debate when 70 participants attended the Gender, Sexuality and the Sensory symposium hosted by the Gender, Sexuality and Culture and the Visual and Sensory research clusters with Feminist Theory journal.

With the turn to affect, the rise of various new materialisms and increasing interest in the non- or more-than representational approaches, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have increasingly explored the significance of affect, atmosphere, mood, and the sensory to the contemporary workings of social life and relations.

Speakers from the Universities of Kent, Leicester, Cambridge, Middlesex, Goldsmiths and UCL addressed what significance explorations of the sensory have for contemporary analysis of gender, sex and sexuality and, in turn, how contemporary gender, feminist and queer theories can, and are, contributing to intellectual, practice-based, and activist engagements with the sensory. During the breaks, attendees explored the ideas at a feminist craftivism workshop.

One of the organisers, Dr Carolyn Pedwell, said ‘We were delighted to bring together at Kent such a dynamic group of speakers and delegates from across the UK to explore the critical links between gender, sexuality and the sensory. The diverse talks were extremely stimulating, as were the many questions and comments from participants, which made for a wonderfully engaging and generative atmosphere’

There are some seats (£15) available for a day trip by coach to the beautiful historic University city of Cambridge. This takes place on Sat 3 June, leaving Canterbury campus (main bus stop near Keynes College) at 09.00 and returning back onto campus at around 18.45.

Students and staff welcome. You are free to do as you like in Cambridge, but will be given advice about walks, museums etc.

Please buy tickets in advance of the trip, which is organised annually by the University Chaplaincy, at:

http://store.kent.ac.uk/product-catalogue/events/chaplaincy-trips/cambridge-trip

Tickets are also available in person from s.c.e.laird@kent.ac.uk

Take advantage of Kent Sport’s half-price one-month Gold membership this summer and experience our wide range of superb facilities. All University of Kent students (or anyone in full-time education, 16+) is entitled to the junior rate of £27* per month. One-month membership for adults is £34.50.

Soak up some rays playing on the outdoor tennis courts or build up a sweat in the air-conditioned fitness suite. Feel the wind on your face by hiring a bike from the Cycle Hub, included with your membership. Summer membership also offers unlimited access to our sports facilities including the fitness suite, squash courts, all outdoor facilities and entry to all fitness and dance classes.

To purchase your membership, visit the Sports Centre or Pavilion receptions from Thursday 1 June. Membership is available to use for one month from purchase date. See terms and conditions for more information.

*To apply for the junior rate please bring with you proof of full-time education (student card etc.).

To stay up to date with Kent Sport news, events and special offers, Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter UniKentSports.

Further to Calliope, the debut solo album from Sarah Dacey (soprano) and Belinda Jones (piano), featuring new works by British composers, released on the 26th March by the School of Music and Fine Art’s Foundry Studios, two tracks were subsequently broadcast on Radio 3 on prime time Saturday morning. You can listen to what they say here, at about 2 hours 20mins in.

The album is available on Spotify and Amazon.

Singer, arranger and composer Sarah Dacey, is best known for being a member of one of the UK’s most groundbreaking groups, Juice Vocal Ensemble. She is Assistant Lecturer in Music Performance and freelance classical singer at SMFA. Since her studies at York University and the RAM (where she met Belinda), Sarah has worked at the forefront of the contemporary music scene, premiering works at the ROH and Tête à Tête Opera Festival and singing with contemporary music groups such as The Riot Ensemble. This CD is her debut solo album and features songs by some of the UK’s finest composers – Kerry Andrew, Roger Marsh, Bushra El-Turk, Cecilia McDowall, Rob Fokkens, SMFA’s Duncan MacLeod and Geoffrey Hannan.

The subject matter of the songs is eclectic, including a song from a chipmunk who’s upset about having their stash of nuts stolen, poems about fruit, an absurd nursery tale of naughty children being turned into donkeys, a japanese ghost story and the diary entries of a schizophrenia sufferer. This showcase of Sarah and Belinda’s performance partnership is a wonderful example of the breadth of 21st century vocal repertoire available that’s seldom published or recorded. For more information and contact details, please visit www.sarahdacey.com

Louise Frith and Gina May have written a new publication entitled ‘The Student’s Guide to Peer Mentoring’. It explains the vital role peer mentors play in higher education and gives lots of practical examples of how student mentors can improve their practice. The book also helps mentors to recognise and reflect on the skills that they are developing in the role.

The book is the culmination of Louise and Gina’s work on a collaborative module delivered through the Kent Study Plus programme.

You can read more about the contents of the book on the publisher’s website.

A team of 10 Kent alumni and students volunteered at the Catching Lives Day Centre in Canterbury on Saturday 20 May as part of a new initiative in partnership with Kent Union. Kent Gives Back enables graduates and students to work together for a local community cause and help people and projects that matter to them. It’s also a fun and rewarding way for alumni and students to share stories about their experiences at and after Kent!

Volunteers ran social activities with clients and helped centre staff to clean and organise the facilities.

Alumna Jessica Farnham (Rutherford 2002) said of the experience: ‘It was great to work with students and fellow alumni and be able to make a very small difference to a fantastic cause by interacting with the service users. I can’t wait to get involved again for future projects’.

The Development Office coordinated the event, in collaboration with Kent Union, and there are plans for future projects in the Canterbury and Medway areas.
Got a project you think Kent Gives Back could help with? Contact Volunteer Management Officer Kasia Senyszyn at alumni@kent.ac.uk.

Dr Vikki Janke, Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of English Language & Linguistics, will be delivering a guest lecture at the Sign Language Colloquium at the Max Planck Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen on 9 June 2017, on the role of gesture and the acquisition of sign language as a second language.

Vikki will be presenting work undertaken with Dr Chloe Marshall (Institute of Education, UCL), which examines what learners of sign language start out with in terms of their manual gesture, by gathering data from 30 sign-naïve gesturers on an elicitation task requiring them to locate objects in space using their hands and no voice. Their results suggest that a key challenge when learning to express locative relations in sign is to reduce from a potentially very large set of handshapes rather than to supplement a restricted one.

Having detailed knowledge of what learners start out with in terms of their gestural inventories allows identification of contenders for both negative and positive transfer. Thus, by providing an intricate illustration of gesturers’ potential toolkit, this study establishes further connections between what a learner produces when acquiring sign and the source from which the production first stemmed. A positive outcome is that teachers might better anticipate and potentially circumvent confounds that hinder learning whilst exploiting those aspects of gesture that can bootstrap learning.

Further details of the Sign Language Colloquium and the full programme are available at: www.ru.nl/mlc/public-outreach/public-outreach-0/@1094031/sign-language-colloquium-june-9th-2017/

The University has launched a new 24/7 security service at the Medway campus. The new security team will be patrolling the Pembroke and dockyard sites to keep our students, staff and visitors safe.

The team will be based in the Medway building and can be contacted at any time on the phone numbers below.

Emergencies:

• 3333 (if dialling from a University landline)
• 01227 823333 (if dialling from a mobile or external landline)

General enquiries:

• 3300 (if dialling from a University landline)
• 01227 823300 (if dialling from a mobile or external landline)

The team will be working closely with other security teams from Greenwich University, Canterbury Christ Church University and Historic Dockyard, Chatham to provide a quality security service that meets the needs of our communities.

And don’t forget that the SafeZone App is available and can be used to contact the team for both security and first aid emergencies saving the need to remember or dial any phone numbers. Please see the SafeZone webpage for more details.

The Security Supervisor, Mick Miles, is available Monday to Friday during the day at the Medway building (next to reception) to answer any queries you may have about the security service at the Medway campus.

Dr Reshmi Dutta-Flanders, Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English Language & Linguistics, has just published a new book The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction: A Linguistic Stylistic Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Reshmi introduces readers to linguistic stylistic analysis and combines both literary and linguistic analysis to explore suspense in crime fiction. Employing critical linguistics, discourse analysis and functional grammar, it demonstrates that suspense in plot-based stories is created through non-linear, causative presentation of the narrative. She investigates how plot sequence is manipulated to ensure the reader cannot resolve the order of events until the end of the tale. From two-dimensional circumstantial detection in mystery stories to three-dimensional re-evaluation of offender orientation, she uses a linguistic-based stylistic framework to analyse offender motive.

She also employs a discourse-based frame analysis to examine the plot structure of crime stories for micro context and set-up scenarios, demonstrating that it is the unravelling of these devices that creates the suspense in murder mysteries and thrillers alike. Finally, she shows how grammaticisation of the offending-self reveals an embedded diegetic space in the offender engagement discourse, provoking an intellectual and affective response and reshaping our overall outlook of the crime in the story. The book will appeal to researchers and students from literary and non-literary backgrounds looking for theoretical and practical advice on the linguistic stylistic approach to reading texts.

For full details of the book, please see the publishers webpage.