Author Archives: Angie Valinoti

E-Learning Forum: Podcasting

Colleagues are invited to the next E-Learning Forum which takes place on Friday 27th March 2020, 13:00-14:30 in the UELT Seminar Room.

In this session the E-Learning team will explore the use of podcasting in academia. Podcasting has had something of a renaissance in recent years, particularly for the sharing of practice and ideas in academic practice and research. In this session, the team will provide practical advice on how staff can create their own podcasts and begin to share them more widely. The session will then look at examples of how podcasting is currently being utilised in academia and will include input and thoughts from Dr Chris Deacy from SECL; creator of the popular ‘Nostalgia’ podcast series at Kent.

Please sign up to attend by completing this booking form.

CeCIL Annual Lecture: ‘Have you seen dignity?’

This year’s Annual Lecture for the Centre of Critical International Law (CeCIL) at Kent will be delivered by Professor Susan Marks from the London School of Economics on Thursday 19 March.

Professor Marks’s talk, entitled ‘Have you seen dignity?’, will begin at 6pm in Sibson Lecture Theatre 2. It will be preceded by a reception in Sibson Atrium from 5pm.

Professor Marks is the author of The Riddle of All Constitutions, International Human Rights Lexicon (co-authored with Andrew Chapman) and A False Tree of Liberty. She is the editor of International Law on the Left. Her research seeks to bring insights from critical social theory to the study of international law and human rights.

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.

CeCIL is an innovative research centre at Kent Law School 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 law students, including a speaker and films series and workshops for students keen to develop their employability and international law skills.

New Studio 3 exhibition: ‘Hair: Textures of Belonging’

The School of Art’s Studio 3 Gallery has just launched a new exhibition entitled ‘Hair: Textures of Belonging’.

The exhibition was awarded an Arts Council grant for £14,000 and has been co-curated by Dr Eleen Deprez, curator of the Studio 3 Gallery, and Dr Sweta Rajan-Rankin, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Kent.

‘Hair: Textures of Belonging’ reflects on the social, political and aesthetic significance of hair. With its different textures, grooming practices, interpretations, and symbolic values, hair provides a unique and timely entry point to understanding racialised and gendered belonging among different communities. Artists have long used hair as a material in art practice. Here, they explore hair as a material with affective potential and as a signifier of identity. The impact of the exhibition will be amplified by a day of performance and workshops at the Gulbenkian Theatre on campus.

The exhibition features Marina Abramović, Zhu Tian, Sonia Boyce, Yuni Kim Lang, Jayoung Yoon, and Sonya Clark.

Studio 3 Gallery is open 10am – 5pm, Monday to Friday, and the exhibition will run until Saturday 4 April 2020.

Visit Studio 3 Gallery, for more details of all upcoming exhibitions.

For more details on Arts Council funding, please see the page here.

There is a Facebook gallery from the opening night of the exhibition.

Lisa Lin produces report on Coronavirus for Channel 4

Dr Lisa Lin, Lecturer in Media Studies, has just co-produced an exclusive report for Channel 4 News exploring the outbreak of Coronavirus in Wuhan.

The report features footage from the epicentre of the outbreak, the metropolis of Wuhan, focusing on the doctors and nurses on the frontline.

The feature is a short sample for a forthcoming documentary titled Frontline Diaries with Wuhan Medics: The Battle against Covid-19 from Ground Zero, which will be released later in the year.

Lisa produced the documentary with her production team in the UK and China.

To view the feature, please visit Channel’s 4 website.

PhD student Alžběta Kovandová writes for Anima Loci

Alžběta Kovandová, PhD candidate in Film: Practice as Research in the School of Arts, has recently had her essay, titled ‘Of Foxes and Men’, published in e-journal Anima Loci.

Anima Loci provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the ever-changing and often obscure relationship between images and the places they dwell.

Sharing the fabric of our cities with wild animals is the norm. As long as they do not encroach upon the boundaries of the domestic wall, the space in which we live is also that of birds, mice, insects and other species. In London, urban foxes are the most iconic yet fragile manifestation of this inevitable coexistence. Alžběta shares her thoughts and personal experience of these fleeting encounters.

‘One might argue that seeing a fox is the same as seeing a cat or a pigeon. Well, not for me. It was unexpected and somewhat surreal for me to meet an animal that I associate so much with wild nature in the streets of London’ writes Alžběta. ‘They are not very common in Prague; and in Liverpool where nature bursts through the city only very hesitantly, it is rather rare to encounter any animal passing through the streets. I, therefore, strongly associate foxes with London and these wild non-human city dwellers, with their amazing ability to find a home in the concrete jungle, have influenced my perception of the city’.

The full essay can be read on Anima Loci’s website.

How to stay safe online on #saferinternetday

It’s #saferinternetday on 11 February, a day which aims to make sure that anyone using the internet feels safe online, whether they are browsing, banking, sharing information about themselves, giving an opinion or posting photos.

Dr Jason Nurse, Lecturer in Cyber Security and Director of Public Engagement at the Kent Interdisciplinary Research Centre, has some great tips on how you and your students can stay safe online which he has released in collaboration with Futurum.

Futurum resources are created with scientists and researchers, which means they are factually correct, current and, above all, safe for the public, teachers and students to use. Below are some of our very latest research articles and activity sheets, and you’ll find even more on our website.

Codebar Skills Development sessions available

What is codebar?

codebar is an opportunity to network, socialise and do some coding. The workshops are volunteer led and consist of 30 minutes of socialising with food and drink, followed by a lightning talk, then coding.

codebar encourage new participants to work on their HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, Python or Git tutorials. They also help them understand programming concepts.

About the workshops

codebar participants are paired with a coach and can either go through the online courses available via the codebar.io site, or get assistance with their own projects.

The workshops are free to attend and led by Yoyo Design, and form part of the County wide Kent codebar chapter.

Coaches

codebar are always on the lookout for more developers to join their community and help coach at their workshops. If you are interested in being a coach then please visit here.

Participants (Codebar Students)

codebar participants (codebar Students) come from a variety of backgrounds. Some want to become full-time developers, whereas some would like to learn the basics of coding in a supportive environment.

The details:

We have two sessions coming up, one on the 24^th February the other on the 30^th March.

They run from 6.30-9 in Sibson seminar room 6.

Please register before attending.

The February session is worth 15 Employability Points.

To find out more and to register visit the Hub for innovation website.

Arts Council funding for Studio 3 exhibition

Dr Eleen Deprez, curator of the Studio 3 Gallery, has won an Arts Council grant for £14,000 for the forthcoming exhibition Hair: Textures of Belonging.

Hair: Textures of Belonging will explore the gendered and racial aesthetics of hair as signifier of black and gendered identity. The exhibition will celebrate the work of these artists and the diversity of black culture, and to promote diverse representations of beauty beyond the white aesthetic. The impact of the exhibition will be amplified by a day of performance and workshops at the Gulbenkian Theatre on campus.

The exhibition will feature (amongst others) Marina Abramovic, Zhu Tian, Sonia BoDyce, Yuni Kim Lang, and Sonya Clark.

The exhibition will run from 4 March until 4 April 2020.

For more details of all upcoming exhibitions in the Studio 3 Gallery, please click here.

For more details on Arts Council funding, please visit this website.

Alumna Nimasu Namsaren at the BFI Future Film Festival

Congratulations to BA (Hons) in Film alumna Nimasu Namsaren, whose film Mavzhuda has been accepted for the 13th BFI Future Film Festival.

The BFI Future Film Festival, which takes place at BFI Southbank from Thursday 20 February to Sunday 23 February 2020, will feature 50 shorts from emerging UK and international filmmakers age 16-25. The festival also offers a variety of industry workshops, lectures and networking opportunities.

Mavzhuda, which will be shown at the festival on Sunday 23 February, tells the story of the eponymous 12-year-old girl who immigrates to Russia from Uzbekistan with her family. Her new life in St Petersburg is challenging and in order to fit in she starts to forget her own culture and language and loses the connection with her grandmother. One day after school, Mavzhuda ignores her while walking together with other kids, and the pain that she inadvertently brings to the family helps her to find her own place in the hectic world around.

Further information and tickets for the festival can be found here.

Amalia Arvaniti speaks at Oxford University

Amalia Arvaniti, Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics, will be giving a talk at Oxford University on Monday 10 February. The talk is titled ‘Intonational phonology in the light of crosslinguistic evidence of variability’.

The talk will report final results from Amalia’s British Academy grant on intonation meaning and its relation to the formal representation of intonation; this research, together with other related work, forms the basis for SPRINT (Speech Prosody in Interaction: The form and function of intonation in human communication) Amalia’s ERC Advanced Grant.