Kent Union Essentials shop on Canterbury campus is closed today (Tuesday 31 July) for stock-taking. The Park Wood Essentials shop is open as usual until 20.00 today.
Monthly Archives: July 2018
Sense and Sensibility – book your tickets now
Following on from their very popular 2016 production of Pride & Prejudice, the University of Kent Players are proud to present Sense & Sensibility at the Gulbenkian Theatre from 6-8 September.
The University of Kent Players is largely made up of current and former members of staff, so come along and support them in this lively production of a much-loved Jane Austen classic. A fun evening is guaranteed to be had by all!
Tickets are on sale now either from the Gulbenkian box office.
£12 adults
£10 concessions
August exams
For all information regarding August re-sits please visit our webpage.
Sports Ready Clinic
Did you know ALL Kent staff and students can get Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation treatments for ONLY £10!?
The Sports Ready Clinic based in Medway Park is a student run clinic offering assessments, treatments, rehabilitation and injury prevention to ALL University of Kent staff and students and offer 50% DISCOUNT. And School of Sport and Exercise Sciences get access for FREE!
So whether you’re suffering with an annoying everyday niggle, struggling to start or progress your training or wanting to prevent injuries get in touch, were here to help.
To book an appointment, please contact sportinjury@kent.ac.uk and we can get you booked in!
To keep up to date with the latest events and offers, follow @SRCKent on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or visit our website for more information.
Inaugural hearing of the Airspace Tribunal in London
Kent Law School Professor Nick Grief will be sharing his expertise in international airspace law and human rights at the inaugural hearing of the Airspace Tribunal in London.
The Airspace Tribunal is an innovative research collaboration between Professor Grief https://www.kent.ac.uk/law/people/academic/Grief,_Nick.html and visual artist Shona Illingworth https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/staff/staff-profiles/fineart/3Illingworth.html (Reader in Fine Art at Kent’s School of Music and Fine Art). Its aim is to consider a new human right to protect peoples’ freedom to exist without physical or psychological threat from above.
The Airspace Tribunal is inviting representations from experts across a broad range of disciplines and lived experience, such as human rights, contemporary warfare, new media, environmental change, neuropsychology, conflict and forced migration. Together with Professor Grief and Shona Illingworth, speakers will include: Martin A Conway, cognitive neuropsychologist and expert on human memory and the law; Conor Gearty, professor of human rights law who has published extensively on terrorism, civil liberties and human rights; Andrew Hoskins, media sociologist known for his work on media, memory and conflict; Maya Mamish, psychologist researching integration and well-being of Syrian youth affected by armed conflict and displacement; and William Merrin, a specialist in digital media and author of Digital War.
The Tribunal’s inaugural hearing in September will also see the launch of Topologies of Air, a body of work by Shona Illingworth (commissioned by The Wapping Project) that features an immersive, multi-screen sound and video installation examining the impact of accelerating geopolitical, technological and environmental change on the composition, nature and use of airspace.
The event, supported by the University of Kent, The Wapping Project and Doughty Street Chambers, will be held at Doughty Street Chambers in Doughty Street from 10am – 4.30pm on Friday 21 September. Anybody interested in attending is asked to register online via the Eventbrite page (places are very limited).
Continued success for Kent’s European Summer Schools
The University’s 2018 European Summer Schools, at its postgraduate centres in Paris and Brussels, have reported another successful year.
Launched in 2013, the two-week summer school programme is built on Kent’s specialist knowledge and international reputation as the UK’s European university by offering a number of undergraduate students and external applicants the opportunity to participate in academic sessions and cultural activities in these two world-renowned European capitals.
This year, students at the University’s Brussels School of International Studies (BSIS) explored the theme of ‘Europe and the World’, which drew upon the academic strengths of the school. Within this context, various sub-themes were also covered; these included migration and the refugee response, the European Union’s (EU) relationship with emerging powers, and its response to the global economic crisis. Students participated in a series of guest lectures, seminars and debates delivered by academics, policy-makers, diplomats and European civil servants.
Students at Kent’s Paris School of Arts and Culture, located in historic Montparnasse, explored the theme of ‘Revolutions’. This allowed them to gain a greater understanding of how French culture has long been at the centre of innovation in the fields of architecture, film, literature, art and philosophy
Students spent two weeks in Paris in an interdisciplinary environment, attending seminars given by expert academics from Kent and visiting important sites and museums related to the programme. These included the Pompidou Centre, the Picasso Museum and the Jardin des Plantes.
Sophie Punt, Summer School Co-ordinator at the University, described this year as ‘one of the best to date with more students than ever before signing up’. It was successful in many respects she said but ‘overall this year’s schools have provided students with not only enhanced intercultural and analytical skills, but also provided them with an opportunity to see Europe and its role in the world from a range of different perspectives’. Looking ahead we are hoping to run a summer school at our Rome centre for 2019 which will draw on the expertise in Arts and History-based studies in the eternal city.
We would like to extend our thanks to the generous supporters of the schools including the Student Projects Fund for their generous contribution towards the scholarships.
New open access publication on mechanisms in medicine
Jon Williamson, Professor of Reasoning, Inference and Scientific Method, and Dr Michael Wilde, Lecturer in Philosophy, both from the Department of Philosophy, have contributed to the book Evaluating Evidence of Mechanisms in Medicine (Springer, 2018), co-authored with Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Christian Wallmann, Brendan Clarke, Phyllis Illari, Michael P Kelly, Charles Norell, Federica Russo and Beth Shaw. (Veli-Pekka, Christian, Phyllis and Federica are all former postdocs from the Department of Philosophy at Kent.) The book has been made freely available for all through Open Access.
Evidence-based medicine seeks to achieve improved health outcomes by making evidence explicit, and also by developing explicit methods for evaluating it. To date, evidence-based medicine has largely focused on evidence of association produced by clinical studies. As such, it has tended to overlook evidence of pathophysiological mechanisms and evidence of the mechanisms of action of interventions.
This book is the first to develop explicit methods for evaluating evidence of mechanisms in the field of medicine. It explains why it can be important to make this evidence explicit, and describes how to take such evidence into account in the evidence appraisal process. It develops procedures for seeking evidence of mechanisms, for evaluating evidence of mechanisms, and for combining this evaluation with evidence of association in order to yield an overall assessment of effectiveness.
The book offers a useful guide for all those whose work involves evaluating evidence in the health sciences, including those who need to determine the effectiveness of health interventions and those who need to ascertain the effects of environmental exposures.
The book follows on from Jon’s Leverhulme-funded project on Grading Evidence of Mechanisms in Physics and Biology, and also his AHRC project on Evaluating Evidence in Medicine.
For more details, to either purchase a hard copy or read free online, please see the publisher’s page.
2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award announced
The 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction has just been awarded to Anne Charnok’s Dreams Before the Start of Time (47North 2017), a novel set in London in the near future. Infertility is a thing of the past, and artificial wombs eliminate the struggles of pregnancy, and men and women can create children independently. But the novel asks what does it mean to be a parent? A child? A family?
Dr Paul March-Russell, Specialist Associate Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature and editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction was on the panel of judges for the award.
Paul praised the winning title: ‘I’m delighted that this quiet, beautifully written novel has received one of the genre’s highest accolades. It eschews melodrama and sensation for a methodically thought-out narrative which is all the more human and profound.’
Further details of the Arthur C. Clarke Award are available at: www.clarkeaward.com
Matthew Whittingham publishes PhD thesis
Kent alumnus Dr Matthew Whittingham, who completed his doctorate in the Department of Philosophy, has published his thesis as The Self and Social Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Matthew’s book is concerned with the human individual and her relationship with the communities of which she is a member. It argues against the traditional atomistic view that individuals are essentially independent of the social relations into which they enter, and instead argues for the holistic view that we are essentially social beings who cannot exist apart from normative communities.
Matthew’s PhD was supervised by Professor Sean Sayers.
To find out more about the book, please see the publisher’s webpage here.
Fires near Athens
Our thoughts are very much with all those affected by the fires near Athens.
We have written to all our current Greek students, those studying at our Athens centre, our alumni living in Greece and our Greek institutional partners to express our condolences and asking our students to contact us if they are affected.
Dr Anthony Manning | Dean for Internationalisation