Category Archives: Student Guide

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Dice Talks – Palm Oil – friend or foe?

This month’s talk by DICE (Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology) focuses on their ground-breaking work on the impacts of palm oil on conservation and local people’s livelihoods in Indonesia and Malaysia. The talk will be given by Drs Matt Struebig and Jake Bicknell from DICE.

The event will take place on Thursday 26 September from 18.00 to 19.00 in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1. For more details please visit the Event’s Facebook page. Please also share this message with anyone you think might be interested and encourage them to sign up to our mailing list.

The DICE talks are a monthly set of free and public events that showcase the work of DICE members, students and alumni. They take place between 18:00 and 19:00 on a Thursday each month and everyone is welcome to attend.

To find out about future DICE talks then please sign up to our mailing list.

To watch previous DICE talks then subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Ian Cooper

Religion in the German-Speaking World

Dr Ian Cooper, Lecturer in German for the Department of Modern Languages, has recently co-edited a publication titled Literature and Religion in the German-Speaking World (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Ian says: “More than any other literature in Europe, and for deep-seated historical reasons, the German literary tradition has from its beginnings been in constant dialogue with religious ideas – whether expressing them or challenging them. This is the first book to address the meaning of that relationship across 800 years of literature in German, and shows how German-speaking culture from the medieval period to our own time has been profoundly concerned with the interconnections between the religious and the secular.”

Students standing on the business start-up journey programme

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.

 

Become a Sustainable Development Goals Ambassador

The University of Kent Sustainability Team are offering an opportunity for students to gain skills in sustainability culture change, communications, and leadership by volunteering as a Goals Ambassador, as part of an exciting project based around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Students will receive training and a minimum of 30 Employability Points as well as being able to influence the sustainability of their University. Closing date is the 18 October.

For more information please have a look at the full role description for Canterbury students and the full role description for Medway students.

Please email sustainability@kent.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Careers fair stands with lots of students talking to employers

Get ready for Kent’s Employability Festival #EmpFest19

Canterbury and Medway: 7 October – 18 October

The annual University of Kent Employability Festival starts soon across the Canterbury and Medway campuses. The festival is free to all University of Kent students and recent graduates!

Want to know how to succeed in an interview? Or how to prepare for an assessment centre? The Employability Festival is the perfect opportunity to develop your job-seeking skills and gain an insight into a range of career sectors from graduate employers, industry experts and Kent alumni. Receive expert advice on the key things that can make you stand out in the recruitment market!

Take advantage of the range of activities taking place, which will help you to take the steps towards your dream career. These include:

  • Succeeding in Interviews
  • How to find part-time work
  • A Mock Assessment Centre
  • Business Start-Up advice
  • Psychometric tests

Plus, gain employer insights into tech, finance, law, conservation, heritage, politics and more! See the full EmpFest programme.

The majority of events are open to students from all stages and schools. Some have limited spaces, so check out the website and book your place ASAP.

Highlights include:

Careers Fair

  • Tuesday 15 October, 11.00- 15.00, (11.00 -12.00 Access Hour*) at Sports Centre, Canterbury campus. If you are a Medway student book your place on the free Campus Shuttle
  • Download the free Careers Fair Plus App to view the full list of exhibitors and interactive floor plan! Available on the App Store and Google Play
  • *The Access Hour is an additional hour to give you extra time and space to meet with employers and organisations in a less crowded environment.

GradJobs Live! Trip to London

For information about what’s on during #EmpFest19, see the online programme.

Canterbury: Facebook: @UKCES   Twitter: @unikentemploy    Instagram: @unikentces

Medway: Facebook: @ukmemployability   Twitter: @ukmemploy   Instagram: @medwaycareers

Join the conversation at #EmpFest19

Find out more on the Careers and Employability website.

 

 

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Studio 3 Exhibition: ‘Leading Light: At the Outer Limits of Photography’

Dr Eleen Deprez, Gallery Curator and Outreach Coordinator, has put together a new exhibition entitled ‘Leading Light: At the Outer Limits of Photography’, which brings together recent works by international artists and photographers. The Exhibition will open at Studio 3 Gallery on Friday 26 September 2019.

‘Leading Light: At the Outer Limits of Photography’ presents experimental ways of image-making and examines the exploitation and manipulation of the photographic process, and will feature artists David Claerbout, Elias Heuninck, Junko Theresa Mikuriya, Chloe Sells, Eva Stenram, Maarten Vanvolsem and Corinne Vionnet. The exhibition will run until 12 November, from Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm.

The exhibition is supported by Creative Campus at the University of Kent. Creative Campus is a scheme which seeks to support, coordinate and integrate best practice to mark out Kent as a highly creative place to work, study, play and visit.

As part of the exhibition, Studio 3 Gallery will host an opening night and a talk by artist Elias Heuninck on 26 September, a talk by Dr Manila Castoro on 24 October, and a pinhole photography workshop with Dr Claire Anscomb, who completed a PhD in History and Philosophy of Art at Kent, on 6 November. These events are free to attend and open to all.

Further details about the exhibition can be found on the gallery’s Facebook page.

For more details abut the Studio 3 Gallery, please see the page here.

 

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Call for Papers: ‘Beyond Human: The Aesthetics of Nature and Technology’

Dr Michael Newall, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art, Alice Helliwell, PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Art and David Brown, PhD candidate in Film are organising the 6th Annual British Society of Aesthetics‘ Postgraduate Conference with the theme ‘Beyond Human: The Aesthetics of Nature and Technology’. The conference will be hosted by the Aesthetics Research Centre at the School of Arts on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 February 2020.

Postgraduate students and early-career researchers are invited to submit paper proposals for the conference. The aim of this conference is to bring together aesthetic discussions of two core drivers of change in our world: nature and technology. Our relationship with and aesthetic understanding of the world and its objects is changing. Now more than ever, how we think of our environment and our place within it is being shaped by both rapid developments in technology and our increasing awareness of the precarity of the natural world.

These developments in relation to nature and technology have the potential to fundamentally change our understanding of many concepts in aesthetics. Art is increasingly making use of new technologies; artists are relying on algorithms and computational processing whilst Artificial Intelligence is advancing into near-autonomous artistic creation. At the same time, we are seeing a return in the analytic tradition of aesthetics towards discussions of value in the natural world. The emergence of environmental aesthetics, for instance, has seen a renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature and human environments. Both these trends challenge us now to focus on aesthetic issues that go beyond human.

The organisers welcome papers that will broadly address aesthetic questions relating to nature and technology, such as (but not limited to):

  • Art and the non-human (non-human animals, cyborgism, AI)
  • Art consumption and new technologies
  • Art of the Anthropocene / climate change
  • Art production and new technologies
  • Artistic ecosystems: spaces of exhibition, materials
  • Environmental aesthetics
  • Landscape
  • Neo-humanism, transhumanism
  • Non-human cognition and the aesthetic experience
  • Validity of the nature / technology dichotomy

Submissions are invited for two types of papers: traditional and ‘reversed’.

Traditional papers are to present an argument or viewpoint for 25 minutes, followed by a 15-minute Q&A session.

For ‘reversed presentations’, rather than holding the questions for the end of the paper, they will come at the beginning of each paper. This format invites selected participants to give a five-minute talk on a research question which they are struggling with or a particularly challenging or controversial issue which they are addressing in their dissertation, after which there will be 15 minutes of discussion. The audience will be invited to propose possible solutions, alternative approaches, and suggestions for further reading. The inversion of the traditional Q&A format is designed for postgraduates to make use of the wealth of expertise and knowledge at the conference. If you are in the early stages of a PhD, or perhaps an MA student developing a PhD proposal this session will be highly beneficial, though all are welcome to send in submissions.

For traditional paper presentations, please submit an abstract of no longer than 600 words excluding bibliography. For reversed presentations, the abstract should be no longer than 150 words excluding bibliography. For both presentation formats, please also include a short bio in a separate document. All submissions must be prepared for blind review, so please do not include any identifying information in your abstract.

A £60 travel grant will be awarded to all postgraduate students (excluding students from the University of Kent) whose papers or proposals for either the traditional presentation or reversed presentations session have been accepted. Their conference registration fee will also be waived.

There will also be limited additional travel grants for overseas students whose papers have been accepted and, subject to budgetary constraints, also for UK-based postgraduate speakers whose travel costs are significantly high. The number of these additional travel bursaries will be allocated on a case-by-case basis

Please send your abstracts for consideration by 1 November 2019 to beyondhuman.bsa@gmail.com.

Should you have any questions about the conference, please do not hesitate to contact the organisers.

Canterbury engagement

Public Engagement with Research Communities of Practice Programme

All research/professional services staff and students interested in engagement with research are invited to join informal communities of practice sessions in the coming academic year. Members of the Kent Public Engagement with Research Network (KPERN) will be sharing their experiences and wisdom from across a spectrum of engagement activities in 4 themed lunchtime sessions. We are also lucky enough to be hosting an external expert on evaluation of engagement activity in a half-day workshop.

These sessions will also provide space and time to mix with others, support peers, and share ideas on engagement plans.

To register, please email Maddy Bell at peresearch@kent.ac.uk confirming which session/s you wish to join (subject to space). The sessions will be held on the Canterbury campus.

Bring your lunch, challenges, and ideas!

Session 1: Dr Amanda Bates: Patient & Public Involvement (PPI)

Tuesday 8th October 1-2pm 2019

Dr Amanda Bates, Patient Experience and Public Involvement Lead for the Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS) will talk us through what PPI is (and what it isn’t!), why it is crucial, and how its approach can be transferable outside of the healthcare research field. She will reflect on the challenges of managing PPI in research and how they can best be addressed.

 

Session 2: Kasia Senyszyn: Working in parternship with external partners

Wednesday 6th November 1-2pm 2019

Kasia Senyszyn, a School of Arts PhD student specialising in accessibility in theatre, has been working with Sun Pier House (SPH) in Medway, on the ‘Open Arts My Self’ project. 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.

 

Session 3: External expert Jamie Gallagher: Evaluating Engagement

Half day workshop Wednesday 29th 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 10th 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 4th 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.

 

 

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Brush up your language skills with a Language Express course

Learn Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian or Spanish with Language Express evening courses at Kent.

20-week courses at different levels start week beginning 7 October. The fees are reduced for Kent students.  There is no formal assessment and the focus is on speaking the language and having fun while learning.

Find out more and book your place here.