Contributions are sought for a two day symposium as part of the Playing A/Part research project, led by Nicola Shaughnessy, Professor of Performance in the Department of Drama and Theatre, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to be held at Kent on Thursday 4 and Friday 5 July 2019.

The symposium is titled ‘Inside Out: Autistic Identities, Participatory Research and Gender’. The first day will explore perspectives on participatory research practices, ethics and themes, and the second day will explore perspectives on gender and creativity.

Contributions are invited in the form of posters or creative artefacts from projects that engage with the symposium themes, issues and questions. These might include:

Creative practices with autistic participants

• Participatory research, neurodiversity and inclusive practices
• Ethical issues in participatory autism research
• Creative research methodologies and neurodiversity
• Gender, sexuality and neurodiversity
• Monotropism and related concepts
• Interdisciplinary and inclusive research outcomes.

If you wish to contribute provide a 150 word abstract outlining the rationale, content and form of the work to be featured (whether a poster or creative artefact). Please send to playingapartconference@kent.ac.uk with the subject line ‘Inside Out Proposal’. Please note the preferred language for this event is identity first (i.e. autistic person/s).

The cost of the conference will be £25 per day or £40 for both days, with fee waivers available on request.

The deadline for proposals in Friday 24 May 2019.

Keynes College celebrates its 50th Anniversary this year.  As part of these celebrations, the Master of Keynes College, Chloé Gallien, is pleased to launch the ‘Life in Keynes’ photography competition.

This competition is open to all University students and staff past and present and participants are encouraged to submit photos that capture the essence of life in Keynes.

You don’t have to be a member of the College to enter, as we know that many of you have enjoyed the facilities offered by the College and we are looking forward to seeing what the College means to as wide a range of people as possible.

A panel of judges will choose the best entries and these will be exhibited in Keynes College during June. There will also be a prize for the top three entries: vouchers to the value of £80 (1^st prize), £50 (2^nd), £35 (3^rd prize).

Photos should be submitted by the end of the day on Sunday 19 May to the competition Flickr page.

Please see the following links for competition terms and conditions and instructions on how to enter.

Research funding success for colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Comparative Literature has resulted in grants of approximately £361,000 for academic research.

Professor Jon Williamson, Professor of Reasoning, Inference and Scientific Method, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant for his project ‘Evidential pluralism in the social sciences’, which will receive £244,000 for work in the philosophy of the social sciences.

Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for Self-Improvement: A History. Her award of £48,000 will support the writing of a book charting the long history of the idea of the improvable self from antiquity to the present. The book is contracted for publication with Yale University Press.

Dr Katja Haustein, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship totalling £46,247 for her project, Alone With Others: A Literary History of Tact in the Twentieth Century.

Dr Graeme A Forbes, Lecturer in Philosophy, has been awarded a Mind Association Research Fellowship, securing £23,000 for work on his monograph, The times they are a-changin’.

This announcement follows news that Professor Amalia Arvaniti in the Department of English Language and Linguistics has been awarded a grant of almost €2.5m to investigate the role of the tone of voice in communication and ways it might influence conversations.

The Theatre and Performance Research Cluster and the Identities, Politics and the Arts Research Cluster in the School of Arts warmly invite you to conference entitled ‘Comedy and Mental Health: Future Directions’ to be held at the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus on Wednesday 1 May 2019.

The conference has been organised by Dr Dieter Declercq, Assistant Lecturer in Film and Media in the School of Arts.

At this event, eight speakers from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds will deliver short presentations on what they consider the most pressing questions and challenges for future research on mental health and comedy, especially stand-up comedy. The event is designed to stimulate further research into comedy and mental health by identify new research topics, exchanging methodological strategies and explore interdisciplinary and collaborative research.

Sessions will include ‘Comedy, Humour and Mental Health. An Attempted Overview and Some New Directions’; ‘Taking of the Mask and Laughing: Autistic Humour, Passing and Mental Health’; ‘Women Stand-Ups, Self-Denigrating Comedy and Mental Wellbeing’ and ‘Has the Growth of Stand-Up Comedy Contributed to Greater Awareness of Mental Health Issues?’

For the full programme, please see the page here.

The conference is free to attend and is open to all. Registration is open until Monday 29 April 2019; to register please email Dieter at dd324@kent.ac.uk.

Dr Margherita Laera, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre in the School of Arts, has just won Follow-On Funding for Public Engagement and Impact from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a budget of £77k to fund a project on foreign-language plays in translation, targeting secondary school students and teachers.

This project will address the issue of under-representation of cultural difference in the British secondary school drama curriculum by creating an open-access educational website of video resources to engage secondary school children with foreign-language plays. By targeting young drama students and their teachers, the project will provide training for future theatre-makers and audiences to appreciate stories from diverse contexts and empathise with culturally distant others.

Increasing representation of non-English languages and cultures on English-speaking stages is of paramount importance to foster understanding among communities in multicultural societies, such as the UK, but also in the US, where translations of foreign-language texts tend to be rare and immigration high.

The website will include newly commissioned filmed extracts of five plays in the original language and two English translations, in order to highlight how translation strategies can have an impact on the production. The videos will be entirely new and curated for the project, featuring a professional cast. The site will also include film interviews with key practitioners working in the field; extensive contextualisations of the plays by academics and theatre- makers; and teaching resources clarifying how to integrate the resource into the GCSE, A-Level, BTEC and IB curricula.

To learn more about AHRC Follow-On Funding for Public Engagement and Impact, please see the page here.