The PRIDE (‘Personal Responsibility In Delivering Excellence’) Award recognises members of Kent Hospitality staff who go out of their way to deliver excellent customer service.

Any Kent Hospitality staff member (permanent or casual) may be nominated from Canterbury and Medway campuses. The award is given out four times a year with each winner receiving £100 of shopping vouchers, a certificate and badge.

Nominations can be made by any member of University staff, students or visitors. Make your nomination online or alternatively you can pick up a paper form next to the red nomination boxes located in all Kent Hospitality’s catering outlets in Canterbury and Medway, as well College reception areas.

Please make your nominations detailed, providing as much information as possible why the nominee is being put forward for a Pride Award. The panel are looking for staff who achieve more than just what is expected in their role (i.e. hardworking, professional, positive and friendly attitude).

Congratulations to September’s Pride Award winner – Becky Wyatt, Keynes College Receptionist.

For further information or for guidance on submitting nominations please contact: pride@kent.ac.uk

The University are making some changes to the Campus Shuttle service. We need your feedback to help us make these decisions.

If you are a user of the free shuttle service between Canterbury and Medway campuses, please select the link below to complete our survey. The results of the survey will be presented to the University’s senior managers so make sure you have your say.

Complete the Campus Shuttle survey

The survey should take around 5 minutes to complete. The deadline for the survey is 9 December 2018 (23.59).

Professor Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London, will deliver the 2018/19 Centre for Critical International Law (CeCIL) Annual Lecture on Thursday.

His talk on ‘The right to property vs the property of rights: The British Empire and Private International Law’ begins at 18.00 in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1 (GLT1) and will be preceded by a reception in Aphra Foyer from 17.00.

Originally from Guyana and Barbados, Professor Drayton’s research explores how persistent forms of global inequality were constituted through the European imperial expansion. In 2001 he was awarded the Forkosch Prizeby the American Historical Association and in 2002, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. His 2016 book Whose Constitution? Law, Justice and History in the Caribbean has been cited by the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago in the 2018 judgement that struck down the criminalisation of same sex sexuality in the country.

Each year, the CeCIL Annual Lecture brings leading figures in the field of international law to Kent to share their cutting edge contributions to international legal thinking. Previous speakers have included Professor Anne Orford (Melbourne Law School), Professor Peer Zumbansen (King’s College London), Professor Gerry Simpson (London School of Economics) and Professor Vasuki Nesiah (New York University).

In anticipation of this year’s event, CeCIL is posting a special series of Professor Drayton’s quotes on its Facebook page.

CeCIL is an innovative research centre which aims to foster critical approaches to the field of international law, and other areas of law that touch upon global legal problems. In addition to an annual lecture, CeCIL offers a busy programme of activities for Kent Law School students, including a speaker and films series and workshops for students keen to develop their employability and international law skills.

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.

Would you like to attend a 2 hour Personal Presence & Impact, or Resilience & Wellbeing course?

Sessions at Medway and Canterbury.

Book your place through Staff Connect.

Are you interested in applying for a CHASE or SeNSS-funded studentship but are unsure where to begin? Are you a supervisor or administrator supporting CHASE or SeNSS-funded students?

The Graduate School is hosting several information sessions for staff and students in the Autumn of 2018 on how to apply for CHASE-funded and SeNSS-funded studentships. Please click on the links below for more information:

• CHASE Briefing (students and staff) – 8 November
• SeNSS Student Briefing Session (Medway) – 9 November
• SeNSS Briefing for Pathway Leads, Postgraduate Administrators and Potential Supervisors (Medway) – 9 November
• SeNSS Briefing for Potential Supervisors – 14 November
• SeNSS Briefing for Pathway Leads & Postgraduate Administrators – 15 November
• SeNSS Student Briefing 1 (Canterbury) – 20 November
• SeNSS Student Briefing 2 (Canterbury) – 5 December (repeat of session on 9 & 20 November)

Please get in touch with the Graduate School at graduateschool@kent.ac.uk with any queries and to reserve a place on one of these sessions.

From today (Thursday 1 November 2018), all University staff can benefit from accessing a new Wellbeing Zone website and app, specially created for colleagues at Kent.

Go to the new Wellbeing Zone website now to register, take a look and download the app! Register using the code KENT 1, or log-in (top right-hand button) using your Kent sign-in details.

The Wellbeing Zone is a free tool to help you learn more about all aspects of wellbeing and you can use it to better manage your own health and wellbeing.

The Zone features a 12 sector wellbeing assessment and offers advice on how to improve in all these 12 areas. You can make changes and goals and re-assess to follow your progress.

The Zone includes exercise programmes, weight loss advice, recipes and a calorie counter. There are also articles, videos and TED talks on all aspects of wellbeing including mental health, mindfulness and stress reduction.

The Zone has been set up and will be maintained by external specialists, Revitalised, whose other clients include Royal Mail, the MoD and Virgincare.

All the information you enter into the Wellbeing Zone is totally confidential and not accessible to any University department or individual.  Revitalised provide quarterly anonymised usage statistics to Occupational Health and Student Support & Wellbeing (SSW); SSW have provided the Wellbeing Zone for students for many years and it is now available as a sister site for staff.

The BIPU team have developed a Benefits Management Toolkit for staff managing projects/change.

Benefits are the reason for undertaking work – you are doing it in order to get something out at the end!  To ensure that the investment into projects and change at Kent are worthwhile, we must endeavour to keep on top of Benefits Management.

It is critically important that the benefits to be achieved by the work are articulated as clearly as possible and that these are actively monitored and managed for successful delivery.

The new Benefits Management Toolkit is embedded within the Kent Project Management Framework (KPMF) which you can access via SharePoint here.

The detail of Benefits Management activity and documents can be scaled in accordance to the project or change activity taking place, such as larger more significant work requiring greater detail.   However, benefits management is enormously valuable to smaller projects and more local change activity – undertaking some level of work to identify, understand and plan work around achieving measurable benefits will provide a framework to help you manage challenges and change along the way.

The Benefits Management Toolkit consists of:

• A Benefits Tutorial introducing Benefits Management and the documents and tools available to help you identify, document, plan for, manage and deliver benefits at Kent.
• The Benefits Management Cycle setting out a high level summary of how Benefits Management aligns with the KPMF at Kent.
• The Benefits Management Strategy
• A Benefits Map example from a project at Kent.
• A Benefits and Measures Guide providing examples of types of benefits and how you might measure these.

The KPMF is available to all staff and you will find a suite of useful documentation to help you manage project delivery and change.

For further information contact the BIPU team: bipu@kent.ac.uk

This academic year the Music Department has become a workplace member of Rock Choir, the pioneering national organisation with over 20,000 participants which encourages everyone to sing. Under the expert and inspiring direction of alumnus Jonathan Grosberg, staff and students meet every Monday lunchtime and, without needing to read a note of music, have so far learnt ‘Shut up and dance with me’ and ‘A Little Respect’ – including moves!

Members of staff are coming along from a whole range of departments across the campus – it is still not too late to join this term. Director of Music Susan Wanless is thrilled with the way the idea has taken off and from all the feedback she has received, making music is clearly very good for you.

Karen Cherpin, Administrator to the Head of School, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science:

‘I absolutely love it! I find it really uplifting and it definitely improves my mood and energy levels. I always go back to my office feeling revitalised and ready to face whatever the afternoon may throw at me.’

Katie Van Sanden, Industrial Placement Co-ordinator, School of Computing:

‘Love it, love it, love it! Perfect antidote to the Monday blues – it feeds the soul! With singing, harmonies, new friends and lots and lots of (unexpected but very welcome) laughter, what’s not to like? And Jonathan is just brilliant!’

Danika Jarrett, Project Co-ordinator, Information Services:

‘It gets me away from my desk, gives me something else to focus on for that time, and is great for wellbeing because I’m totally immersed in what Jonathan is saying and concentrating on what to sing, which is great for mindfulness and controlling breathing. It’s also been nice to meet people from other departments in the University as well.’