On Saturday, new and returning students to Kent are urged to visit the Woolf common room on the Canterbury campus to stock up on household essentials as part of a Freecycle campaign designed to cut down on waste.

The Freecycle, organised by the Kent Graduate Student Association (KGSA), features items donated by former postgraduate students. Available items include duvets, pillows, kitchen items, drying racks, toasters, fans, a multitude of household cleaning products, and some non-perishable food items. All students are welcome to visit and gather what they need upon arrival to campus.

KGSA volunteers

Items are available on a first come, first served basis, and to ensure that as many people as possible benefit from the event, the KGSA asks that students visit once, sticking to a five-item limit. From 3pm on Sunday, the Freecycle will be available for second visits.

Postgraduate student volunteers will run the Freecycle on Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th September. To guarantee that nothing goes to waste, remaining items will be donated to various charities, such as the Salvation Army and Necessary Furniture, as well as food banks in Kent.

Update at 9.30 on Tuesday 11 September

The technical issue with timetables has now been fixed. You can view stage 2 and 3 module timetables on the Student Guide. 

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Update at 15.19 on Monday 10 September

We are working on a technical issue which is preventing some students from viewing their timetable.

We hope to have this issue fixed by Tuesday 11 September so please check the Student Guide again then.

Beyond misinformation: Parallel Universes in a Post-Truth World is the title of the School of Psychology’s Annual Lecture on Tuesday 25 September.

The talk will be given by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, FAcSS, FAPS, Chair in Cognitive Science and Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow, Chair in Cognitive Science and Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow.

If you would like to join us, please register by emailing George Oatridge by 23 September. The event will begin with an optional drinks reception in Keynes College Atrium at 17.00, followed by the talk at 18.00 in Keynes Lecture Theatre 1 (KLT1).

Abstract

Imagine a dystopian world in which it is not medical knowledge but a free-for-all opinion market on Twitter that determines whether a newly emergent strain of avian flu is really contagious to humans. There are signs that public discourse is evolving in this direction: Terms such as “post-truth” and “fake news”, largely unknown until 2016, have exploded into the media and into public discourse. I explore the implications of the growing abundance of misinformation in the public sphere, how it influences people and how to counter it. I argue that misinformation in the post-truth era can no longer be considered a localized “error” that can be corrected with appropriate communication tools. Instead, I suggest that responses to the post-truth era must include technological solutions that incorporate psychological principles, an interdisciplinary approach that we describe as “technocognition.”

Brief biography

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. He was an Australian Professorial Fellow from 2007 to 2012, and was awarded a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council in 2011. He held a Revesz Visiting Professorship at the University of Amsterdam in 2012, and received a Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship from the Royal Society upon moving to the UK in 2013. He was appointed a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science and a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science in 2017. In 2016, he was appointed a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his commitment to science, rational inquiry and public education.

His research examines people’s memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update information in memory. His most recent research interests examine the potential conflict between human cognition and the physics of the global climate, which has led him into research in climate science and climate modeling. As a result of his work in climate science he was appointed Visiting Scientist at the CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere laboratory in Hobart, Tasmania, in August 2017.  He has published more than 200 scholarly articles, chapters, and books, including numerous papers on how people respond to corrections of misinformation and what variables determine people’s acceptance of scientific findings. (See www.cogsciwa.com for a complete list of scientific publications.)   Professor Lewandowsky is an award-winning teacher and was Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition from 2006-2008. He has also contributed around 50 opinion pieces to the global media on issues related to climate change “skepticism” and the coverage of science in the media. He is currently serving as Digital Content Editor for the Psychonomic Society and blogs routinely on cognitive research at www.psychonomic.org.

The talk is being hosted by Professor Karen Douglas, Professor of Social Psychology at Kent.

The University was very sorry to hear of the death of John Simmonds MBE, former Chair of the University Council.

John served as a member of the University Council for twelve years from 2002.  In 2006 he started his appointment as Deputy Chair of the Council/Chair of the Finance and Resources Committee and from 2011 until 2014, John was Chair of Council.  John’s strong and wise leadership helped steer the University during that time and he also acted as an effective bridge between the University and the wider community in Canterbury and Kent, due to his involvement with and commitment to local government and education.

John was awarded an MBE in the 2014 New Year’s Honours List, for services to local government, and was also made a Doctor of the University in November 2014.  He was a long-serving Kent County Councillor, elected to the Kent County Council in 2001, and at the time of his death he had only just stepped down as Cabinet Member for Finance.

John Simmonds was a calm, friendly, approachable and supportive person, who was very generous in his service to the University and to his Council and University colleagues.  He will be much missed.

A Service of Thanksgiving in memory of John Simmonds will be held on Thursday 6 September at 1pm in All Saints Church, Whitstable (7 Church Street, CT5 1PG).  This will be followed by drinks and canapes at John’s home (43 Downs Avenue, Whitstable, CT5 1RR) for all who would like to raise a toast and share their memories of John.  A private cremation will have taken place earlier in the day attended by family members.

Family flowers only.  Donations in memory to the RNLI (quote supporter number 45996835).

For further information please contact Council Secretariat on 01227 823903 or councilsec-staff@kent.ac.uk.

A new book by Kent Law School Professor Geoffrey Samuel re-examines legal reasoning through the context of legal knowledge (or epistemology).

Rethinking Legal Reasoning, published by Edward Elgar as part of their Rethinking Law series, offers new insights into the nature of legal reasoning.

In the book’s introduction, Professor Samuel defines legal reasoning as “the reasoning used by lawyers to solve a legal problem, to advise a client, to justify a legal decision and (or) to comment on a legal text or case.” It’s also the reasoning attached to the application of legal knowledge to specific problems. He goes on to distinguish legal reasoning from legal argumentation saying that “one has the aim of both arriving at and justifying a decision while the other aims to convince.”

Rather than offer a new theory, Professor Samuel’s book aims to examine historical perspectives on legal reasoning and suggest epistemological and ontological frameworks to help readers rethink it. The book, for example, compares legal reasoning to medical reasoning and to reasoning in film studies. It also suggests consideration of Vaihinger’s ‘as if’ fiction theory and the importance of the notion of an interest as a way of understanding and rethinking legal reasoning.

Whilst introducing new topics, this latest book shares certain topics and approaches with Professor Samuel’s earlier work in A Short Introduction to Judging and to Legal Reasoning (Edward Elgar, 2016).

Professor Samuel is Professor of Law at Kent and Professor affilié, École de droit, Sciences-Po in Paris. He holds doctoral degrees from the Universities of Cambridge, Maastricht and Nancy 2 (honoris causa). He has also held many visiting posts in France, Belgium and Switzerland and continues to visit at Aix-Marseille Université and at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.