Category Archives: Student Guide

Kent to host European network meeting

Kent will host the annual meetings of the SGroup European Universities Network (SGroup) 6 to 8 November 2019.

This event will see representatives from the SGroup’s 32 member institutions from 17 European countries attend as well as the network’s associate partners from Armenia, China and Colombia.

The Network, which was established in 1989, is based on four core areas of co-operation – internationalisation strategy, academic collaboration, academic mobility, and transfer of knowledge.

Kent joined the SGroup in April 2011 and has used its membership of the network to strengthen both its European and international partnerships, giving rise to a range of mobility opportunities for students and staff.

The SGroup Think Tank, which focuses on global engagement, will meet prior to the main SGroup meetings, 4-5 November. These meetings will focus on the network’s collaboration with Africa, China and Latin America.

For further information about Kent’s membership of the SGroup, please email

Primrose Paskins (P.M.A.Paskins@kent.ac.uk), International Partnerships

Learn more about the SGroup European Universities Network.

DICE talk: Progress with global tree conservation, 31 Oct

The Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) monthly talk for October will be taken by Dr Sara Oldfield OBE, a botanist and world-renowned tree experience and member of the DICE Advisory Board.

Dr Oldfield’s talk will be about progress with global tree conservation. The talk takes place Thursday 31 October 2019, 18.00-19.00 in Grimond Lecture Theatre 2 and is open to all.

Learn more about DICE.

FREE family day at Gulbenkian this Saturday!

Join us for a FREE Family Day to celebrate the Platforma Festival exploring themes of home, identity and migration on Saturday 26 October.

A series of pop-up performances, workshops, activities, film screenings and arts & crafts throughout the day which celebrate diversity and different cultures, with a particular focus on arts by, about and with refugee and migrant communities.

Have fun and celebrate as a family, whilst also exploring themes of home, identity and migration.

Aimed at ages 4-11, but all the family are welcome.

Annual psychology lecture to focus on police witness interview technique

Professor Amina Memon will give the University of Kent’s School of Psychology Annual Lecture 2019.

itled ‘Interviewing witnesses of crime: State of the science and future directions’, her lecture will take place on 31 October in Sibson Lecture Theatre 1 at 6.15pm. It is free and open to all.

Professor Amina Memon is director of the interdisciplinary Research Centre for the Study of Emotion and Law at Royal Holloway. She conducts robust and ecologically valid research on the use of cognitive techniques in police investigations. Her work has important implications for how children, vulnerable adults and seniors are interviewed and how these interviews are undertaken and processed by police officers, judges and other professionals within the judiciary system.

She has served as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases where she has been consulted on her expert knowledge on child witnesses, memory, eyewitness identification and historic abuse in the UK and USA.

For her lecture she will review the impact of the cognitive interview (CI), an ethical and effective model of interviewing that draws on the science of memory and communication. The appeal of the CI lies in its flexibility to be adapted for use in different contexts. Within the policing and criminal justice context, it’s been invaluable in inspiring research with different populations to examine how cognitive deficits and other challenges may compromise witness testimony. When used appropriately the CI results in a questioning style that minimises bias that can come from interviewers or misleading information.

Professor Memon will also consider the future applications of the tool including its potential for gathering information about human rights abuses and the benefits for interviewers as well as interviewees.

Kent’s Dr Emma Alleyne, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Psychology, will provide the welcome and introductions.

Medway Student Support Bursary

The Universities at Medway have been awarded a further significant donation to The Medway Student Support Bursary.

This donation will provide bursaries to home (UK/EU) students from Canterbury Christ Church University, University of Greenwich and the University of Kent each year. This is an excellent opportunity to apply for additional funding and the selected recipients will receive a bursary of either £2,500 (Autumn applications) or £1,250 (Spring applications).

To be eligible you must meet the following criteria:

Be a home student (UK/EU)
Be currently registered full or part-time on an undergraduate degree programme based at the Medway Campus
Demonstrate a household income of £42,875 or less

Application form can be found below:

Medway Student Support Bursary application form 2019-2020 Academic Year

To be considered you must submit a 350-500 word statement explaining your financial circumstances, what you intend to do with the award, and your future aspirations. You may also want to include some extracurricular activities or work you might have done e.g. voluntary work.

This award is for those struggling financially and is intended only for the student’s use and not for family support.

If successful, you would be required to:

Write a thank you letter to the donors explaining how the Bursary will be used to support you before being awarded your first payment
Before the second payment, you will need to submit a report outlining how the Bursary has supported you and impacted your studies by 1^st March 2020 (Autumn applications) and 24 May 2020 (Spring applications)
Sign a Bursary Agreement which sets out the conditions of the bursary award

Successful recipients will be able to hold other awards whilst in receipt of the Medway Student Support Bursary such as the NSP and may reapply for a further bursary in subsequent years.

Students out on a placement year are not eligible for that year, but may apply once academic studies are resumed.

All applications confirmed as meeting the eligibility criteria will be taken forward. The bursary recipient(s) will be chosen by the Medway Student Support Bursary Board which will meet in early December (Autumn applications) and early March (Spring applications) and all applicants will be advised of the outcome shortly afterwards.

Your completed application along with all required evidence can be scanned and emailed to us at medwaymastersoffice@kent.ac.uk or a paper application can be submitted to M2-25 (Medway Building 2nd Floor).

Deadline: 12 noon on the 8 November 2019 (Autumn applications) and 7 February 2019 (Spring applications).

Join the Kent Language Exchange Community

Do you speak Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin or Russian?

There is a Language Exchange event from 15:00-17:00 on Wednesday 6th November 2019 (Week 7)

Venue: Chipperfield Building Atrium

This is an opportunity for students learning world languages with the Centre for English and World Languages to meet students who are native or fluent speakers of their target language at the University.

Come along to share your cultural knowledge and help other students with their language practice.

Further information can be found here.

Affiliation with GLO

The School of Economics at Kent is pleased to announce a new affiliation with the Global Labor Organization (GLO), which will connect the University of Kent with over 1,500 academics and researchers worldwide.

Dr Matloob Piracha, Senior Lecturer at the School of Economics and Director of GLO, is confident that this new partnership will contribute positively to the excellent research environment of the School.

The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is a global, independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that has no institutional position. The GLO functions as an international network and virtual platform for researchers, policy makers, practitioners and the general public interested in scientific research and its policy and societal implications on global labor markets, demographic challenges and human resources. These topics are defined broadly in line with its Mission to embrace the global diversity of labor markets, institutions, and policy challenges, covering advanced economies as well as transition and less developed countries.

The GLO Network currently consists of over 1,500 Fellows and Affiliates from across the world.

GLO also runs a Virtual Young Scholars Programme (VirtYS).

KPERN Communities of Practice Programme: Working in Partnership

The second session in the KPERN Communities of Practice Programme will be held on Wednesday 6^th November 1-2pm.

Kasia Senyszyn, a School of Arts PhD student specialising in accessibility in theatre and a member of the KPERN (Kent Public Engagement with Research Network), has been working with Sun Pier House (SPH) in Medway, on the ‘Open Arts My Self’ project. The ‘Open Arts Project’ is specifically aimed at blind and visually impaired, deaf and hard of hearing people, young people and their families. The project aims to investigate the value of socially engaged practice, looking at improving well-being and engagement with those people at risk of social isolation.

Project artists from SPH will join Kasia to talk about how the collaboration came about and what it has involved, how it worked in practice, experiences of working across very different organisations, and lessons learned from the whole process. Anyone who is interested in working with Sun Pier House should come along.

Please email Research Impact & Public Engagement Manager Maddy at peresearch@kent.ac.uk to book a space.

There are 3 further sessions in the Programme:

Session 3: External expert Jamie Gallagher: Evaluating Engagement

Half day workshop Wednesday 29^th January 2020 (time to be confirmed)

Jamie Gallagher is an award winning and nationally recognised engagement professional and trainer, specialising in evaluation of the impact of engagement activity. After an overview of the engagement with research landscape, Jamie will move on to evaluation: the what, why and how. Participants will be supported to work on their own engagement and evaluation plans during the workshop.

Session 4: Laura Thomas-Walters: Innovative methods of engaging the public with research

Monday 10^th February 2020 1-2pm

Laura Thomas-Walters, a PhD student in Conservation Biology, commissioned her PhD quilt as a visual and tactile representation of the breadth of research undertaken at Kent. Laura worked with the Canterbury Quilters Society to produce the quilt, subsequently winning the Graduate School’s Postgraduate Community Experience Award. Laura will talk through the development of this innovative method of engagement, and where it will take her next.

Session 5: Dr Helen Brooks and Professor Mark Connelly: Gateways to the First World War – a plethora of engagement activity

Wednesday 4^th March 2020 1-2pm

Between 2014 and 2019, Gateways to the First World War was funded by the AHRC to support public engagement with the centenary of the First World War. In this session Dr Helen Brooks, a Reader in Theatre and Cultural History, and Mark Connelly, Professor of Modern History, will reflect on their experiences of a diverse range of public engagement activities: from talks and workshops to performances and lecture-concerts. They will discuss the ways in which they worked with community groups both as advisors and in developing participatory researcher projects, and reflect on the challenges and possibilities of this kind of work.

Calling at Medway students: Fancy starting your own business while at University?

The Business Start-Up Journey is an inspirational programme which brings student business start-up ideas to life.

This 15-week co-curricular programme will provide you with a step-by-step guide to starting a business, teaching you the skills that are required to be a successful entrepreneur.

The programme welcomes all students at the University of Kent. The Journey will be based in the ASPIRE space (Accelerator Space for Innovation and Enterprise) in the Sibson building, Canterbury and at the Medway campus.

The programme’s focus on innovation will enhance your employability. You will learn how to assess risk, how to turn challenges into opportunity and develop leadership, communication, presentation

The majority of the Business Start-Up Journey will be delivered on Wednesday afternoons in Canterbury and Thursday afternoons in Medway, making it easy for you to fit in around your study.

After the Business Start-Up Journey Launch, the times and locations of all events will be supplied to all students wishing to continue on the Journey.

Find out more about the Business Start-Up Journey which is run through Study Plus

Topologies of Air

Shona Illingworth, artist and Reader in Fine Art, has co-organised two upcoming events which form part of a forthcoming art installation entitled ‘Topologies of Air’.

‘Topologies of Air’ examines the impact of accelerating geopolitical, technological and environmental change on the composition, nature and use of airspace. The work questions the terms by which airspace is currently understood, and invites us to look up and consider the air above their heads not as a void, free space, but as a multi-layered, complex cultural and legal space that is shared and personal, with a long history and rapidly-changing future. ‘Topologies of Air’ is commissioned and produced The Wapping Project and will be exhibited at Bahrain National Museum in 2020 before touring to The Power Plant, Toronto, in 2021.

The first event is Sky Forum, organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and The Wapping Project which will take place on Friday 11 October 2019 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The forum will bring together experts across history, culture, astronomy and space science in three panel discussions to explore the past, present and future relationship between people in the Arabian Gulf region and the sky as well as wider transformations of the composition, nature and use of airspace close to Earth and outer space beyond. The event will feature a conversation between Shona and Marta Michalowska, Artistic Director of The Wapping Project, which will also form an integral part of ‘Topologies of Air’.

The second event is The Airspace Tribunal, an international public forum established by Shona and Professor Nick Grief of Kent Law School, which will take place on Monday 14 October 2019 in Sydney, Australia. The tribunal is a hearing which invites representations from experts across a range of disciplines and lived experience to consider whether we need increased protection regarding the radical transformation of airspace. The hearing argues that the associated threats to human rights are not adequately addressed by the current legal framework, and also forms part of the installation.

The Airspace Tribunal’s inaugural hearing took place at Doughty Street Chambers, London in September 2018. Each hearing is being recorded and transcribed to form the drafting history of the proposed new human right.

Further information and tickets for Sky Forum can be found here,

Further information and tickets for The Airspace Tribunal can be found here.