Dr Oliver Double, Reader in the Department of Drama and Theatre, was referenced by journalist Alan Beattie in the Financial Times last Saturday, 20 July 2019.

The article, entitled ‘Calling Boris Johnson a Clown is Unfair to Clowns’, argues that to compare the celebrity politician to a clown does a disservice to the clowning profession, which is an art form requiring skill and integrity.

The article reports Olly’s observation that ‘Johnson has carefully developed a persona as would a stand-up comic, complete with performative habit of constantly dishevelling his hair. But instead of using it simply to get laughs, he employs it to further his career.’

To read the full article (subscription required), please see the page here.

This summer the campus shops are being redeveloped as part of Kent Union’s partnership with Co-op.

As a result the Park Wood shop is closed until Thursday 25 July when it will reopen as Kent Union’s Park Wood Co-op, and the main Student Union Shop will close on Thursday 25 July reopening as Kent Union’s Co-op on Thursday 29 August.

While the main SU Shop is closed there will be a pop-up store on the Plaza selling meal deal sandwiches, drinks and crisps, confectionary, tea, coffee, sugar, biscuits, newspapers, fresh fruit, bread and some groceries. The pop-up will open daily from 24 July until 28 August, 10.00- 20.00.

Summer might be the ideal time to focus on our health and wellbeing needs.  The University is still busy but some of the pressures of the processes of the Academic Year have reduced giving staff an opportunity to take a breath, pause and consider their own needs.

Signing up to the University of Kent Staff Wellbeing Zone is exactly what you need to help you focus on your own wellbeing needs:

• It has a simple Wellbeing Assessment Tool
• Guidance in how to formulate wellbeing goals
• Exercise and Diet programmes to follow that have been put together to work
• Recipes to tempt you to eat more healthily
• Lots and lots of informative articles on all aspects of wellbeing:
  • Health Eating
  • Activity
  • Alcohol intake
  • Mental Health
  • Meditation

It’s all completely confidential and free.  And you can connect it to other fitness trackers or wearables that you already use.

You don’t need to register; simply hit the Log In button and use the university login.

Once again, congratulations to the Kent Hospitality Housekeeping department for winning two awards at the British Association of Cleaning in Higher Education (BACHE) Awards on the 8 and 9 July at Keele University.

Continuing their winning streak, the team were awarded the ‘Best Practice Award 2019’ at this year’s ceremony. The award recognised new housekeeping initiatives that helped maximise staff skills. This included producing their own best practice training videos, which have been utilised across the department.

Making the event a double win, Ratna Rai won the ‘Cleaning Operative of the Year Award 2019’. Ratna, who works as a Domestic Assistant in Park Wood, was recognised for her consistently high standards of cleaning and for improving the student experience by building positive relationships with Kent students.

Gary Sayles, Executive Housekeeping Manager, Kent Hospitality said: “we are absolutely thrilled at our success at the BACHE Awards. To be recognised again by a national association for our team’s consistent hard work is fantastic, and special congratulations are also due to Ratna on winning the Cleaning Operative award. As a team we are proud to deliver a consistently high standard of service here at the University of Kent.”

The awards recognise the importance of professional cleaning activities in higher education institutions. BACHE aims to standardise training for cleaning staff, improve cleaning standards, and professionalise the delivery of cleaning and associated services on campus.

Stephanie Obermeier, PhD student in German and Comparative Literature, currently in her writing up year and based at the German Literary Archive in Marbach, has published an article in the prestigious journal German Life and Letters.

The article emerged out of research on Felicitas Hoppe, whose 2012 novel Hoppe forms the basis for one of the case studies in Stephanie’s thesis. Her most recent publication, Prawda: Eine amerikanische Reise, deals with similar issues in terms of authorial posturing, playing with genre and canonical texts, and blurring boundaries between fact and fiction.

Dr Heide Kunzlemann, one of Stephanie’s supervisors, commented: ‘We would like to warmly congratulate Stephanie on the fantastic achievement of placing her first major article in such a prestigious journal as German Life and Letters. The academic community’s interest in the topic bodes very well for the success of her thesis which is about to be completed.’

Find out more about postgraduate programmes in Modern Languages and Comparative Literature.

Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia, Head of the Department of Modern Languages and lecturer in Italian, has published ‘The Years of Alienation in Italy’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

The Years of Alienation in Italy project first took shape in 2014, when the editors began to discuss the possibility of organising a conference on the cultural representations of the notion of alienation in Italy.

The goal was to tackle the notion of alienation in spatial terms, by examining the way in which literary and cinematic depictions of the factory and the asylum frequently blurred the dividing line between industrial alienation and clinical madness; and to investigate the specificities of an Italian approach to alienation by interpreting the ubiquitous presence of the term in social and cultural discourses, in the light of the country’s troubled history in the 1960s and 1970s.

The project took a more concrete form in 2015 when a two-day workshop was co-hosted by the University of Kent (15 May 2015) and the University of Cambridge (22 May 2015). The workshop was financed by the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH), the Italian department of the University of Cambridge and the journal Italianist.

The Years of Alienation in Italy is inspired by this exchange and discussion, the focus of which it maintains and expandsThe Years of Alienation in Italy offers an interdisciplinary overview of the socio-political, psychological, philosophical, and cultural meanings that the notion of alienation took on in Italy between the 1960s and the 1970s. It addresses alienation as a social condition of estrangement caused by the capitalist system, a pathological state of the mind and an ontological condition of subjectivity.

Between July and October this year the Estates Department will be conducting a mandatory five year condition survey of its building and engineering infrastructure, on its Canterbury and Medway campuses.  The purpose of these surveys is to collect invaluable data, that will enable us to plan and prioritise our investments for the next five years.

We will require access  to the majority of areas during this period, however the surveys are non-intrusive and we do not anticipate any disruption whilst we undertake these inspections, and operational impact should be minimal.  Once a specific programme  has been agreed with the surveyors we will be in  contact with you nearer the time,  to arrange and coordinate access to your specific areas.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation whilst we carry out these essential surveys.

If you have any queries regarding this work please do not hesitate to contact Estates Customer Services via email at estatescustomerservices@kent.ac.uk .

The 2019 People and Planet University League published on Tuesday, saw the University of Kent establish itself in the top 40 of sustainable HE institutions, up a whopping 61 places from 101^st last year.

The table compiled by student-led network People and Planet scores Universities out of 100 on criteria such as environmental audits and management systems, carbon management, sustainable food, student and staff engagement, and sustainability in teaching.

Building upon the Vice-Chancellor’s commitment to embedding sustainability across the organisation, staff and students have been working with the Sustainability Team on a huge range of projects and initiatives representing action against one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Much of the improvement in the league table over the last year can be attributed to initiatives across 3 key areas:

Sustainable Food – The Sustainable Food Steering group developed and published the University’s first Sustainable Food Strategy in 2018. The strategy is a road map for increasing the sustainability of our food offering from field to fork and beyond, and was co-written by Kent Hospitality, Kent Sport, The Gulbenkian and the Estates Department, along with student and staff representatives.

Education for Sustainable Development – Work to promote the importance of embedding sustainability across the curriculum has been ongoing throughout the year. In March 2019, the Teaching Sustainability: Sustainable Teaching event, bought students and staff together to find out how this is approached at other Universities and to discuss how this could best be achieved at Kent. Next year the University will be running the NUS Responsible Futures programme which is a whole-institution approach to embedding social responsibility and sustainable across the formal and informal curriculum.

Student and Staff Engagement – 2018/19 has seen the first full year of the innovative FutureProof programme, which helps staff and students to deliver a University of the future by challenging departments and individuals to review their impacts against the Sustainable Development Goals. Futureproof represents an innovative approach to engagement at Kent as students and staff, especially within academic schools, are encouraged to work together to identify areas to focus efforts and plan projects and initiatives.

For more information about Sustainability at Kent, download our annual report and for details of how to get involved please visit the Sustainability Webpages or contact Catherine or Emily at sustainability@kent.ac.uk.

The Student Union shop on the Plaza will close at 14.00 Sunday 21 July for stock take.

The Park Wood shop will still be closed for refurbishment at this time, so this means that there will be no stores open from 14.00 21 July – 7.00 22nd July when the SU shop on the Plaza will be open again.

We apologise for any inconvenience.