Dr Jason Nurse will be taking his knowledge of online privacy to the pub as part of the national Pint of Science series of events.

He will be one of three speakers in the tech-themed event in The Good Intent in John Street, Rochester on Monday 20 May. The theme for the evening is the pros and cons of modern technology.

Jason’s talk specifically addresses concerns about online advertising.  Firms can launch targeted ad campaigns suited to what they believe we want, or to influence our beliefs in particular ways. To allow such targeting, organisations constantly explore new ways to gather information about us, often at the expense of our privacy. This spans traditional web tracking, smartphone apps and new technologies (e.g. smart-tech). In this talk, Jason will demystify how online advertising works, the tricks advertisers use to track users, and what the risks to us are. He will also provide some tools and tips you can use to protect yourself online.

For more information and tickets (which usually sell out quickly) go to the Pint of Science website.

The University ’s School of Music and Fine Art presents Sweet FA… the Fine Art Degree Show 2019; an exhibition of work by 20 exciting, emerging international artists, set in the extraordinary environment of The Historic Dockyard, Chatham.

The exhibition opens with a Private View on Saturday May 18,  from 13.00-18.00 with, at 15.00, speeches from special guests; the acclaimed artist Bob & Roberta Smith, Victoria Pomery, director of the Turner Contemporary Gallery, Margate, and Karen Cox, Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Kent.

The exhibition is open to all and is free to attend. It is open to the public from Sunday 19 – Friday 24 May, from 10.00-17.00.  Please note the show is closed on Tuesday 21 May.

Continuing a tradition of showcasing bold, exploratory exhibitions by the University ’s Fine Art students, visitors will encounter a broad range of artistic styles and media, an explosion of imagination and a celebration of art’s potential for society, framed by the backdrop of The Historic Dockyard. The exhibition will offer the public a fascinating insight into contemporary art’s most recent practices and processes.

The catalogue for this year’s show is designed in collaboration with MA Curation students from the University of Kent’s School of Arts

The Degree Show Address:
The Historic Dockyard, Chatham, Kent, ME4 4TY

Entry for the private view is via The Galvanising Shop (next to the Dockyard’s visitors’ car park on the East Road, and for the rest of the exhibition, via The Historic Dockyard Chatham Visitor Entrance.

More information on opening times and directions is available on The Historic Dockyard webpages.

Find out more about the event on SMFA Facebook: @unikentmfa, SMFA website or Fine art student Instagram.

Dr Maurizio Cinquegrani, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film, will be presenting a paper at the International Congress on Visual Culture: Latin America from the Image, the Historical Narrative and Visual Culture, to be held in San Juan at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico on Monday 15 April 2019.

Maurizio’s paper is entitled ‘Ratline Escapees and the Cinematic Landscapes of Post-War Latin America’. From Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Odessa File (1972) to George Steiner’s philosophical novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981), where Adolf Hitler is found alive in the Amazon jungle over thirty years after the end of the war, and to the Führer’s brief appearance in ‘Bart vs Australia’ in The Simpsons (S06E16), where he is seen struggling with his car phone in the Buenos Aires of the 1990s, the afterlife of the Third Reich has continuously been narrated or reinvented on film, literature and other media.

Based on a chapter from a monograph that Maurizio is currently writing, his paper focuses on the ways in which the presence of Nazi war criminals in Latin America, following their escape across the so-called ratlines after the war, has been portrayed on film since 1946. It explores a diverse range of case studies including classical Hollywood cinema and Latin American films, spanning across different genres including dramas, espionage, and science fiction. Two main tensions are going to be identified throughout his study: on the one hand there is vague Latin-American topography used in films exploiting post-war events to fabricate a generic cinematic space with no ties to historical accuracy; on the other, a group of films focusing on the escape and capture of Adolf Eichmann see the unfolding of a more coherent cinematic landscape.

These films will be made to dialogue with documentaries and archival footage on Jewish migration to Latin America before and after the war. Case studies include Notorious (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor, 1946), Operation Eichmann (dir. R.G. Springsteen, 1961), They Saved Hitler’s Brain (dir. David Bradley, 1969), Boys from Brazil (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978), Algunos Que Vivieron [Some Who Lived] (dir. Luis Puenzo, 2002) and Wakolda (Lucia Puenzo, 2013). Additionally, the paper is based on Maurizio’s study of archival footage held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

To find out more about the congress, please see the page here

This Event & Experience Design Showcase takes place from Saturday 18 May to Friday 24 May, in Studio 1, Engineering Workshop on Chatham Historic Dockyard.

Opening times are:

• Saturday 18 May, 13.00 – 18.00
• Sunday to Friday 19 May –  Friday 24 May , 10.00 – 17.00
  (NB closed on Tuesday 21 May)

The Showcase, WICKED, celebrates the work of current Event and Experience Design graduating students. As this is a special celebration of the undergraduate course, we will be celebrating the achievements of our alumni from the very start of the course. Thirteen years of ambition, aspiration, achievement and excellence within education and the events industry

Like their predecessors, these early career designers have continued to make work at the forefront of contemporary practice in the ever-expanding field of events.  They have embraced changes in technology, taken delight in manipulating and crafting materials and always prioritised the creation of a memorable experience for their audiences.

In the latest episode of the Nostalgia podcast series, Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, speaks to Clive Marsh, Head of the Vaughan Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Leicester.

In this podcast, we learn about what it was like for Clive to follow Liverpool FC, how he discovered The Times newspaper film reviews as a teenager, listening to Radio Luxembourg under the bed covers, his upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren, how he ended up studying German and Biblical Studies at Bangor, why he joined the SDP and later the Labour Party, his awareness of how painful British society can be, and why he thinks we will only do well in the future if we do some serious reflection on our past.

Dr Lauren Ware, Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, appeared on BBC Radio Kent (Lauren appears at 2:70) to discuss viewers’ emotional connection with the Game of Thrones television show in light of the upcoming premiere of its final season, and cast member Gwendoline Christie’s recent statement that fans “will need therapy” after the finale.

In the programme, Lauren discussed questions about emotional connections with art and with fictional entities; a classic problem in philosophical aesthetics.

Lauren, who is a fan of Game of Thrones, commented on how ‘extreme genre’ stories (in the realms of science-fiction and fantasy) contain human elements which can be difficult to explore in other mediums, and went on to discuss how shows like Game of Thrones provide “a playful space for us to think about revenge, or anger, or other things that are a little bit uncomfortable”, which is why the audience gets so attached to the characters within these stories.

Are such outlets good for us? Lauren thinks so. “Sometimes we have emotions within us that we don’t get to satisfy. These mediums can be a way of getting this emotion out in a controlled, safe, and non-consequential environment.”