Author Archives: Rowena Bicknell

Humanities and Social Sciences Staff interested in Knowledge Transfer!

Kent Innovation & Enterprise invite staff from Humanities & Social Science faculties to find out about the requirements and opportunities for collaborative working with businesses and organisations, including AHRC and ESRC Knowledge Transfer Partnership funding information. Tom Campbell, Creative Industries Specialist from the Knowledge Transfer Network, will be our guest speaker.

The event will take place on the 13th May, 12:00 – 14:00 in SR2, Sibson. A light lunch will be provided so please register in advance via Eventbrite and let us know of any dietary requirements.

If you’d like to know more about the event please contact Lauren Griffiths-Norbury at L.M.Griffiths-Norbury@kent.ac.uk

National Careers Service event – supporting older workers

As part of our ‘BAG’ week, come to a presentation on Friday the 17^th of May, 11:00 – 12:00, JS1, by Rose Carter of the National Careers Service about supporting older workers. There is a greater number of older people in employment than ever before, but many people over the age of 50 are at risk of leaving the workforce early and not necessarily because they want to.

As the UK workforce ages, employers will increasingly need to rely on the skills and experience of older workers of they are to remain competitive, increase productivity and growth and avoid skills shortages in the future.

With this in mind, the National Careers Service is presenting a session to support the University and all staff with information, advice and guidance on how to retain and recruit older workers.

Designed for all staff and managers. Book your tickets through Eventbrite.

Natalia Sobrevilla Perea made member of Bolivarian Society

Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Professor of Latin American History in the Department of Modern Languages, has been made an official member of the Bolivarian Society.

The Bolivarian Society was set up in Lima in 1927, after the Centennial of the Wars of Independence and brings together intellectuals and people interested in the legacy of liberator Simon Bolívar. Natalia was incorporated into the society in July 2018. At the official ceremony, she was presented with her membership diploma and gave a presentation on Simon Bolívar and the Peruvian Army, which forms a chapter of her forthcoming book on the Army and the creation of the State in Peru.

Get £5 off entry to Hythe Bay Triathlon

Fancy having a go at a Triathlon? Ashford Tri Club is offering Kent students and staff £5 off entry to the Hythe Bay Triathlon on Sunday 19 May.

This very friendly local event is suitable for beginners and experienced triathletes: it features a 250m pool swim, 15km bike leg from Hythe to Folkestone and back, and a scenic 5km run along Hythe promenade.

More information is on the Ashford Tri Club website.

Speciality coffee to launch at Gulbenkian

From 30 April, Gulbenkian will be working with Canterbury based Garage Coffee to bring their ethically-sourced, delicious coffee to their café.

The Cafe will be serving their delicious house blend Maypole and a selection of single origin filter coffees. Importantly for Gulbenkian and the team behind Garage Coffee, they ensure that any coffee they produce comes from farms where workers are paid a good rate for their beans. They only use importers who deal with these speciality farms, which means that they know that the farmers are getting paid, on average, around 25% more than the fair-trade rate.

The Cafe will also be serving a fabulous array of loose leaf teas, expertly blended by Debonair Tea, a family-run tea business in Kent.

James and Alice from Team Garage Coffee will be on site on 30 April, so please come up to the café and say hi, have a chat to them about coffee and take your first look at this fantastic new addition to the speciality coffee scene in Kent!

Call for contributions for ‘Inside Out’ symposium

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.

Paul Allain to deliver keynote address

Paul Allain, Professor of Theatre and Performance in the School of Arts and Dean of the Graduate School, will give a keynote address at an international theatre forum and conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, held between Friday 10 and Sunday 12 May 2019.

The conference is titled ‘Out of the Frame’ and will explore street/open space theatre, its funding and role in society. The conference is organised by the Shoshin Theatre Association and the Committee on Theatrical Sciences of the Regional Committee of the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia [Hungarian Academy of Sciences].

Paul will be delivering the keynote address on Saturday 11 May, with a paper titled ‘Space Invaders or Alien Friends? Close Encounters of a Theatrical Kind’.

Paul’s talk will briefly trace key aspects of a theatre history which depicts the movement of certain key experimental theatre directors and groups from cities into the countryside, across Europe and in Asia too. The list is long, but Polish company Gardzienice and Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki stand out. Paul will ask what made these pioneers move to the country, what they sought, and what lessons we might learn from them for theatre-making today. How did other spaces and ‘new natural environments’ change training and acting, group dynamics, understanding of and encounters with an audience? Are such Romantic models still desirable and do artists still have such a choice? Or has choice now become urgent need in this age of mass migration?

The conference is part of the Rural Inclusive Outdoor Theatre Education 2 (RIOTE2) project, co-founded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

More information about the conference can be found here.

Consciousness, growing up in India and Pink Floyd: Nostalgia podcast with Srivas Chennu

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 Srivas Chennu from the School of Computing.

In this insightful interview, Srivas talks about how we are today able to ask questions that the ancient Greeks could not, how his research intersects with Chris’s own work in near-death experiences (NDE) and he talks about how his collaborators are studying what happens in the brain when someone has an NDE. We also discuss how films are often better at conveying these techniques than academic papers.

Srivas reflects on how a decade ago to study consciousness would have been laughed at as it was deemed to be so amorphous, and how and why that has now changed. Srivas also discusses his background, growing up in India, having a Hindu priest for a grandfather, Pink Floyd and the Alan Parsons Project, cultural changes between India and the UK, BBC 6 Music, Monty Python, what would have happened if Srivas had stayed in India (the ‘Sliding Doors’ phenomenon) and how he feels his friends think about him!

Research funding success for Philosophy and Comparative Literature

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.

Comedy and Mental Health: Future Directions conference

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.