Athena SWAN has expanded its reach and now included Professional Services staff in creating a better work environment for everyone. We want to invite all members of staff to join us: we need your input to make sure we focus on the right things that will make a difference.

Therefore we would like to invite you to ‘Athena SWAN Progressing together with Professional Services’ event at the Medway Campus.

Date: 28 November
Time: 12:00 to 14:00
Location: M2-28

Agenda:
12:00 – 12:30 Lunch
12:30 – 12:45 Welcome from Anne-Marie Baker (Athena SWAN Project Manager)
12:45 – 13:30 Panel Discussion – Featuring a selection of our own PS staff
13:30 – 13:45 Wrap Up and Close

Find out more about the event and register here. Please circulate this invitation to your colleagues! If you have any questions please email: athenaswan@kent.ac.uk

STOP PRESS: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND WILL BE REARRANGED FOR THE NEW YEAR.

On Saturday 10th November, the School of European Culture & Languages welcomed over 70 prospective students and their families to Kent for an inspiring day of taster lectures and seminars. Held in conjunction with other schools in the Faculty of Humanities, prospective students were able to experience seminars in their chosen subjects, including a wide range of joint honours options within the School and across the Faculty.

Student Ambassadors from all subject areas within the School were on hand to welcome guests and speak with students and their parents. Staff from each subject area led discussions on a range of subjects including: “Should fiction be censored?”, “Visualising the Roman city”, “An Introduction to Mandarin”, “Language in the media”, and “Why French is (a bit) like Cockney”, amongst many others, giving visitors an insight into the expertise of academic staff and the areas of study that they might encounter on their chosen degree programme.

Parents were able to attend a question and answer session hosted by Director of Admissions Dr Heide Kunzelmann, covering important topics such as student support, accommodation and employability.

Attendees were welcomed by Head of School Professor Shane Weller, who said: ‘we were delighted to welcome so many visitors to the School of European Culture and Languages today. Our Humanities at Kent Days are an important way in which we help applicants gather as much information as possible as they make important decisions about their future, and I was pleased to see so many prospective students taking advantage of the opportunity to visit us. We look forward to staying in touch and welcoming many of them to Kent in September next year.’

Dr Axel Stähler, Reader in Comparative Literature for the Department of Comparative Literature, has recently published a book titled Zionism, the German Empire, and Africa (De Gruyter, November 2018).

Zionism, the German Empire, and Africa explores the impact on the self-perception and culture of early Zionism of contemporary constructions of racial difference and of the experience of colonialism in imperial Germany. More specifically, interrogating in a comparative analysis material that draws from a range of cultural sources, the book situates the short-lived but influential Zionist satirical magazine Schlemiel (1903–07) in an extensive network of nodal clusters of varying and shifting significance and with differently developed strains of cohesion or juncture that roughly encompasses the three decades from 1890 to 1920.

To find out more, please see click here

Dr Sophia Labadi, Senior Lecturer in Heritage and Archaeology for the Department of Classical and Archaeological Studies, has recently been awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellows grant of £247,947 for a project entitled ‘Rethinking Heritage for Development: International Framework, Local Impacts’.

Heritage is marginalised from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and such marginalisation is problematic. Heritage can provide new models of development that cannot be realised with such exclusion. This marginalisation will continue, unless issues preventing the recognition of heritage are understood and addressed.

Dr Labadi’s research aims to understand why heritage has been marginalised from the SDGs and innovative models addressing the identified shortcomings will then be proposed. To address this aim, this project assesses international narratives on heritage for development, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. It then analyses the successes and failures of all projects on heritage for development funded through the Millennium Development Goals (that preceded the SDGs) in Africa.

Congratulations to Dr Labadi on her achievement.

For more information on the AHRC Leadership Fellow grant, please see here.

A session reflecting on the tensions emerging from a debate about proposed changes to the legal gender recognition process will be co-hosted by Kent Law School’s Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality (CLGS) on Saturday 24 November.

Beyond the Gender Agenda will be co-hosted jointly with the Future of Legal Gender (FLaG) project from 14.00 to 16.00 in the CLGS Common Room in Eliot College on Kent’s Canterbury campus. The session takes place within the context of conflict over the meaning and value of gender and in the wake of the Government’s consultation process on how best to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004.

FLaG’s Principal Investigator, Professor Davina Cooper (King’s College London) and Kent Law School Lecturer Dr Flora Renz, a Co-Investigator for FLaG, will begin the session with a short introduction to the GRA consultation and the FLaG project. They will also address key legal issues and wider gender politics. This will be followed by a moderated discussion with all attendees.

The session is free to attend, but anyone interested in coming is asked to register via Eventbrite.

FLaG is a three-year project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, that aims to critically explore different ways of reforming legal gender. In addition to Dr Renz, Co-Investigators include Kent Law School Professor Emily Grabham and Professor Elizabeth Peel (Loughborough University).

As well as exploring whether people should have a female/male legal status assigned at birth, FLaG also seeks to determine how the way that female/male and other gender categories used in UK law could be changed. People interested in expressing their views are invited to contribute to a FLaG project survey on ‘Attitudes to Gender’.

It may be 20 years since the University of Kent ran a Geography undergraduate programme but there is a wealth of Geography expertise on the Canterbury campus.  The BSc (Hons) in Human Geography draws together this expertise, enabling us to run a new programme which draws on the traditional foundations of Geography and energises it to tackle contemporary issues.

Having been discussed around the University for many years we are very excited to now have the programme ready to bring in students from September 2019!

Our aim is to train the next generation of geographers to creatively address the challenges facing the modern world.  Our programme is a fusion of major geographic themes such as social and cultural geography, economics and development studies, and environmental and landscape planning, with modules from Law, Sociology, Anthropology and Biodiversity Conservation.

The programme has been supported by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG).  We are in the process of applying for full accreditation of the programme with the RGS-IBG.  In excited anticipation of the launch of our programme we have been engaging with local schools and in July 2018 we welcomed 26 pupils to our ‘Thinking Geographically’ conference.

The Kent Interdisciplinary Centre for Spatial Studies (KISS) will provide an innovative and interdisciplinary research community to which our students can contribute and through which they can expand their interaction with world-leading experts.

£2000 scholarships

To celebrate the launch of this new programme, we are offering up to ten £2,000 scholarships for applicants starting in September 2019.  The scholarship recognises academic excellence and the contribution students can make to our geography research community. Full terms and conditions are available via the Scholarships Finder.

Find out more

Full details of the programme can be found via the online prospectus.  You are also welcome to contact us via sacadmissions@kent.ac.uk

The University of Kent’s LGBT+ Staff Network is pleased to open the call for papers for the third annual Researching the Rainbow Conference on Friday 15 and Saturday 16 February 2019 on the Canterbury campus.

The conference, which takes part during LGBT History Month, is to showcase the vast array of excellent research being done on or related to LGBT+ people and issues, and to encourage multi-disciplinary collaboration and networking.

Previous topics have included gay and lesbian representation in the media, transgender issues within mental health care and parenting law, British colonial laws on sodomy, homosexual WWII clandestine operatives, and queer exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Papers are welcome from academics at any stage of their career, students or professionals.

Research posters from any discipline are also welcomed for display. If you would like to do a talk (15 or 30 minutes) or display a poster, please email lgbtstaffnetwork@kent.ac.uk by Friday 4 January 2019.

The conference is free and open to all.

Dear Staff and Students!

We are attempting to break a Guinness World Record for the largest display of origami hearts. We would love for you to be part of this achievement.

The heart is an anatomical and physiological symbol of health and vitality, and also of compassion. This shared project has spanned the Medway and Kent community and as each heart is simple to fold, people of all ages and backgrounds from around 35 different groups have been involved.

We are on track for our exhibition and record attempt in the spring term at The Deep End on the Medway Universities’ Campus. We are raising money for Molly McLaren Foundation and Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) too.

The record attempt will be open to the public, although it will be ticketed. Follow the record attempt here.

We have some drop in sessions starting this week, we would love you to be part of this record attempt:

Location: GKU Social Space
Dates and time: 15 November, 29 November, 6 December at 11.00-14.00