Colombian PhD legal scholar Diego Peña is the first to benefit from a new international exchange agreement between Kent Law School and the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá DC.

The reciprocal agreement enables up to three doctoral research students from each institution to study at the partner institution for a period of six to 12 months. It was instigated by Kent Law School Senior Lecturer Dr Luis Eslava with support from the Law School’s Co-Director of Postgraduate Research Professor Donatella Alessandrini, Director of International Programmes Lisa Dickson and Law Lecturer Dr Rose Sydney Parfitt.

Both Kent and Los Andes also share a commitment to promote academic staff mobility opportunities and the development and consolidation of research networks with a view to developing collaborative teaching, joint research projects and joint conferences and seminars.

Diego was keen to take advantage of the opportunity to engage with Kent Law School’s distinctive critical approach to socio-legal research and arrived in September to work under the supervision of Dr Eslava. His thesis is a study of the relationship between urban policy and public law in three Latin American cities: São Paulo, Santiago de Chile and Bogotá.

Diego said: ‘Kent was very attractive to me because I was trying to introduce a critical approach to my thesis. Additionally, I had read a book by Dr Eslava that was very stimulating and useful. He studies the links between local urban development and international law in developing countries that takes Bogotá as an example.’

This latest international exchange agreement is the second to be made available to PhD scholars at Kent Law School; the first agreement signed in May between Kent Law School and the University of Melbourne was also the first PhD student exchange agreement to be made available at Kent.