The University has launched a new Leadership Bulletin designed to give an overview of key developments. The Bulletin is distributed to all members of the Leadership Forum to cascade to staff in schools and professional service departments. If you haven’t received your copy yet, you can read the bulletin online .

The latest issue contains a message on the strategy refresh from the Vice-Chancellor. Senate has now agreed the draft of ‘Kent 2025’ should be submitted to Council on 5 October for discussion and approval. Senate also took note of the emerging sub-strategies on Education, Research and Innovation and Engagement and our Civic Mission. Copies of all these papers are available on the Strategy Refresh pages.

In addition, the Bulletin also includes an update on Executive Group meetings including a discussion by the Extended Executive Group on our recruitment position which is significantly lower than anticipated. Work is currently underway to assess the subsequent impact on the University’s budget. Once the situation becomes clearer, we will let staff know and also update the Finance 2018/19 budget FAQs which have been developed to help explain our current budget position.

If you have any enquiries about the new publication, please contact Megan Wells, Policy Officer in the Office of the Vice-Chancellor – M.M.Wells@kent.ac.uk.

Dr Rocio von Jungenfeld from the School of Engineering and Digital Arts (EDA) will exhibit her ‘zones of flow (iii)’ exhibition at the BEYOND Festival taking place in Karlsruhe, Germany from 3 – 7 October.

The “zones of flow (iii)” artwork is a photo-sensitive audio-visual installation that investigates the fluid connections between people, sea and land. It uses a video projection depicting water surfaces mapped onto a 2.5m paper-boat covered in light-dependent-resistors (LDR) which send signals to light-emitting-diodes (LED) inside smaller paper-boats. These small paper-boats are scattered across the floor serving as metaphorical water surface.

zone of flow (iii) exhibition

Dr von Jungenfeld has previously exhibited the work in the Studio 3 Gallery in the School of Arts and worked with local schools to use the project as a means to teach young people about basic electronics and their use in the arts. This project has been produced in collaboration with the EDA’s Technical Support Team and research students.

In the coming year, she plans to take the project to more schools in Kent and public exhibitions across the UK to help celebrate the UK’s coastal heritage and relationship with the sea, and how it influences our perception of time and space.

Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia, Lecturer in Italian in the Department of Modern Languages, has given an online lecture entitled ‘Making Madness Visible: Early Italian Psychiatric Photography’ for the University of Kent’s Think Kent series, which is now available on YouTube.

The 19th century saw the birth of psychiatry, photography and also Italy as a unified country. Their histories are curiously intertwined. While Italy was a young country, struggling to unify the provision of psychiatric health care across the peninsula, psychiatry was itself having a hard time, struggling to give visibility to its object – madness – and to its clinical practice, locked up, as it was, behind the walls of the asylum. Photography came to the rescue, enabling psychiatrists to make madness visible, in the portraits of the patients, and to advertise its clinical practice as a well organised, orderly and scientific endeavour.

The Think Kent lectures are a series of TED talk-style lectures produced with the intention of raising awareness of the research and teaching expertise of Kent academics and the international impact of their work. 

Watch the talk on YouTube here.

Park Wood Student Hub Now open for business!

 Standing in the heart of Park Wood, the new Student Hub opened its doors on Arrivals weekend, literally! Taking advantage of the brilliant sunshine the new look Woody’s Bar threw open it’s bi-fold doors to the outside seating area, with hungry students and parents trying out the modern international street food menu. Campus Coffee, designed, delivered and developed by students, quickly proved popular serving great tasting coffee with a conscience, with profits helping support students at Kent. Campus Coffee will continue to evolve and we’re excited to see it roll out across other Kent Union outlets

 Kent Union Officers had lobbied on behalf of students to improve the student space on campus. Aaron Thompson, the Union President, gave an impassioned speech on behalf of students at the opening “It’s amazing, it looks incredible and I can’t wait for students and staff to come back to campus and use it! It looks completely different and I think that the students of Park Wood will love it”.

 As well as Woody’s, there is a larger, more accessible SU Shop everything from warm morning pastries, fresh fruit and veg, to late night snacks and drinks. The self-service tills mean students can beat the queues and get on with their day. The SU Shop is open from 8am-midnight weekdays.

Two much anticipated dance studios, named after Misty Copeland (first African American Principal Ballet Dancer) and Vicky Featherstone (influential in British Theatre), are fully equipped providing the first campus studios for student groups.

Replacing the Park Wood study mobile, the 25 PC’s in the new Student Hub quiet area is expected to be popular with the 2,000 plus Park Wood students and links onto a social space for students and staff. Designed to be a calmer environment this space, opening onto a balcony will be bookable for student groups in the evening for their events/socials and/or fundraising activity.

View KTV’s coverage of the opening here.

The KentVision Change Session Programme continues …

There’s another two areas in the spotlight through October:

Does PGT administration feature in your everyday?

Is assessment or results processing always on your to do list?

If the answer is yes to either of the above questions, then you are most welcome at one or both of the upcoming Change Sessions. One session will focus specifically on PGT administration, while the other will dive straight into the vast depths of assessment and results processing.

Sign up is open now, so please visit our Change Session pages to find out more about either session and sign up – there’s several dates to choose from, so don’t delay if you would like your pick of the dates.

It doesn’t matter how much you already know about KentVision, each session is as valuable as you choose to make it. The sessions introduce KentVision, share a great deal of interesting information and even provide demonstrations in some cases. Yet they offer even more value as a chance for you to engage and ask us all the things you just haven’t quite found an answer to yet! (KentVision related things of course). So even if you already know a great deal, come along, ask questions, take in other attendees questions and look forward to KentVision in the knowledge you have prepared.

This won’t be the end of the Change Session programme, we’ll stay in touch, but if curiosity strikes you can always catch up on past topics or check up on future Change Session activity here. With a specific focus in mind, all sessions explore the need for change, illuminate opportunities, address challenges and encourage open discussion. Each attendee will leave more prepared both to move onto KentVision system training and to welcome the arrival of KentVision.

Kent Law School is delighted to announce the appointment of three new Professors of Law: Professor Erika Rackley, who took up her post earlier this month; and Professor Diamond Ashiagbor and Professor Rosemary Hunter, both of whom will join the School in October.

 Professor Ashiagbor was previously Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has research interests in labour/employment law; regional integration (the European Union and the African Union); labour law, trade and development; human rights, equality and multiculturalism; economic sociology of law; socio-legal studies; law and the humanities.

 Professor Hunter is re-joining Kent Law School after four years at Queen Mary University of London. Her areas of expertise are broadly in feminist legal studies and socio-legal studies, with a particular focus on family law, judging and the judiciary, and access to justice. She is well known as one of the founders of the Feminist Judgments Projects, in which participants rewrite judgments in existing cases from a feminist perspective, imagining how a feminist judge might have decided the case if she had been sitting on the bench at the same time as the original judges. She is also one of the editors of the online journal feminists@law.

 Professor Rackley joins Kent Law School from the University of Birmingham – twenty years after she first started at Kent as a postgraduate research student. Her research focuses law, gender and feminism, with a particular focus on judicial diversity and the nature of judging, feminist legal history and image-based sexual abuse (including ‘revenge porn’). Her scholarship has shaped legislation and policy in the UK and has been widely cited by senior members of the national and international judiciary