The University’s School of Music and Fine Art presents Mouthing Off, the Fine Art Interim Show 2018 at Sun Pier House, Chatham, Kent, featuring the work of 20 3rd year BA Fine Art students.

The exhibition is open to all and is free to attend. It opens with a preview on Friday 7 December (17.00-19.00). It is open to the public from 8 -11 December from 10.00-16.00 (apart from 12.00-16.00 on Sunday 9 December and closed on Monday 10 December).

Continuing a tradition of showcasing bold, exploratory exhibitions, our visitors will encounter a broad range of artistic styles and media, an explosion of imagination and a celebration of art’s potential contribution to society.

“Mouthing Off” offers the public a fascinating insight into contemporary art’s most recent practices and processes including works where the projected traces of finger tips touch and move across the surface of a mobile phone screen; net curtains blur the boundaries between public and private domains in an intimate exchange of light and movement of bodies; fragments of monuments from past leaders and dictators are strewn across the gallery and a dynamic exploration female space takes place through dance, body extensions and performance.

The Law School is a dynamic and cosmopolitan centre of world-class critical legal research. Our vibrant research community is both supportive and intellectually stimulating. We host a broad range of interdisciplinary research centres and groups offering students many opportunities to engage critically with academic research and contemporary issues. Our academic staff engage in a rich variety of research projects and collaborations that aim to make meaningful contributions to all aspects of life – including the social, political, economic, environmental and cultural. We particularly welcome research proposals in socio-legal studies, law and the humanities, and critical legal studies.

Scholarships available for our PhD in Law and for our PhD in Socio-legal Studies include:

•       Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) via the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South East (CHASE) – closing date for applications: Friday 11 January 2019 https://www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/search/FNADAHRC0002

•       Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) via the South East Network for Social Sciences (SeNSS)- closing date for applications: Sunday 20 January 2019 https://www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/search/FNADESRC0002

•       Kent Law School Studentships – closing date for applications: Sunday 20 January 2019 https://www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/search/FN37LSSTUD02

•       Vice Chancellor’s Research Scholarships – closing date for applications: Sunday 20 January 2019 https://www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/search/FNADVICECH02

For those who intend to undertake an LLM by Research, Kent Law School invites applications for the:

Larry Grant Scholarship – closing date for applications: Friday 3 May 2019 https://www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/search/FN37LARGRA02

More details, including how to apply, is available on the Kent Law School website https://www.kent.ac.uk/law/news/index.html?view=3712 or via Professor Rosemary Hunter and/or Dr Thanos Zartaloudis: klspgstudentships@kent.ac.uk

An “informed, civilised and passionate” debate on citizens’ rights after Brexit was hosted by Kent Law Clinic on Friday.

The debate, held before an audience of staff and students in the Wigoder Law Building’s Moot Room, was led by Dr Anthony Valcke, founder and supervisor of the EU Rights Clinic at the University of Kent in Brussels, and Kent Law Clinic Director Graham Tegg, a specialist in EU rights and welfare benefits who is responsible for a number of leading cases in the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Each gave presentations on their understanding of the current legal rights of EU and British citizens and presented their analyses of what Brexit might mean for citizens of the UK and of the 27 EU Member States. They also presented sharply differing critiques of the European Union itself and of the potential benefits and costs of Brexit.

Law Clinic Solicitor Sheona York, who attended the debate, said: ‘Both speakers were informed, civilised and passionate, and received deserved applause. The questions from the floor were well thought out and imaginative, and the answers illuminating. Afterwards one member of the audience said they had so far “despaired” of the Brexit debate occurring in the media and was very pleased to attend a debate where the facts were discussed sensibly and reasonably.’

A full account of each speakers critique and comments is available to read on the Law Clinic’s blog.

Sheona added: ‘At Kent Law Clinic we endeavour to create and sustain a space where people feel able to debate legal, political, social, cultural issues, where all opinions can be analysed and challenged. We will be holding more ‘Brexit debates’ – watch out for them!’

The latest episode of the podcast series on ‘Nostalgia’, hosted by Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, has just been released.

In this week’s episode, Chris interviews Will Wollen, Faculty Director of Public Engagement (Faculty of Humanities), the Academic Lead for Employability (School of Arts), and Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre (Acting). Will is an actor and the Faculty’s Director of Public Engagement. Will talks about his career on the stage, how he wasn’t planning on becoming an academic, being into The Beatles as a child, and why he is nostalgic about Radio 4.

Admission to the University Carol Service is by free ticket only. The second and final distribution of tickets will be at 5.45pm in the Grimond Foyer on Tues 4 Dec. Please bring ID.

The event itself takes place in Canterbury Cathedral on the evening of Mon 10 Dec and will feature performances the University Chamber Choir and student Gospel Music singers. Much of it takes place in candle-light. There will be an appeal for Porchlight, a charity supporting homeless people in East Kent.

Wheelchair access and Sign Language (BSL) interpretation will be available at the event, reflecting the values of Disability History Month (but please notify us of any requirements).

Dr Tamara Rathcke, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics for the Department of English Language & Linguistics, is a member of a European team of researchers who have recently been awarded a research grant from the Belgian funding body FWO. In collaboration with Professor Anne Breitbarth (Ghent), Professor Claudia Crocco (Ghent) and Dr Jacopo Garzonio (Padova), Dr Rathcke will contribute to the a project entitled Prosodic cues to syntactic reanalysis: experimentally tracking Jespersen’s cycle in progress.

This four year project will employ a PhD student to study, under the team’s supervision, how prosody interacts with syntactic structure at different stages of an ongoing syntactic change. Innovatively, it will do so using experimental methods, studying the interaction of syntax and prosody.

Besides contributing a new dimension to the modelling of language change by looking at the interaction between syntax and prosody, this project will devise new methods for the experimental investigation of syntactic change, which may eventually be expanded to the study of other instances of ongoing change.

Congratulations to Dr Rathcke and her European team of collaborators on this achievement.

SSPSSR’s very own Dr Rob de Vries is giving a Q-Step ‘pubTALK’ on Monday 10 December at The Old Buttermarket, Canterbury, at 7pm for a 7.30pm start, followed by Christmas drinks.  Everyone is welcome!

Rob has recently published a new book, Critical Statistics: Seeing Beyond the Headlines and his talk, based on his findings, is called, ‘Lies, Fake News and Statistics’.

Browse your social media feed, turn on the TV, or open your news website of choice – chances are it won’t be long before you come across a story based on a statistic. Maybe it’s that ‘70% of married women have cheated on their partners’ (The Washington Post) or that ‘32,000 people in the US die from gun violence every year’ (tweet by US Senator Tammy Baldwin) or that ‘One in five British Muslims sympathise with Jihadis’ (The Sun).

The news is full of numbers for a good reason: numbers and statistics are vital to understanding what’s really going on in the world. But they can also be deceptive. In the wrong hands, they can easily end up giving us a distorted picture of reality. In this talk, Robert de Vries will show how understanding a few simple tricks and some basic statistical concepts can help us see the truth behind the numbers in the news.