Admission to the University Carol Service is by free ticket only. The second and final distribution of tickets will be at 5.45pm in the Grimond Foyer on Tues 4 Dec. Please bring ID.

The event itself takes place in Canterbury Cathedral on the evening of Mon 10 Dec and will feature performances the University Chamber Choir and student Gospel Music singers. Much of it takes place in candle-light. There will be an appeal for Porchlight, a charity supporting homeless people in East Kent.

Wheelchair access and Sign Language (BSL) interpretation will be available at the event, reflecting the values of Disability History Month (but please notify us of any requirements).

Dr Tamara Rathcke, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics for the Department of English Language & Linguistics, is a member of a European team of researchers who have recently been awarded a research grant from the Belgian funding body FWO. In collaboration with Professor Anne Breitbarth (Ghent), Professor Claudia Crocco (Ghent) and Dr Jacopo Garzonio (Padova), Dr Rathcke will contribute to the a project entitled Prosodic cues to syntactic reanalysis: experimentally tracking Jespersen’s cycle in progress.

This four year project will employ a PhD student to study, under the team’s supervision, how prosody interacts with syntactic structure at different stages of an ongoing syntactic change. Innovatively, it will do so using experimental methods, studying the interaction of syntax and prosody.

Besides contributing a new dimension to the modelling of language change by looking at the interaction between syntax and prosody, this project will devise new methods for the experimental investigation of syntactic change, which may eventually be expanded to the study of other instances of ongoing change.

Congratulations to Dr Rathcke and her European team of collaborators on this achievement.

SSPSSR’s very own Dr Rob de Vries is giving a Q-Step ‘pubTALK’ on Monday 10 December at The Old Buttermarket, Canterbury, at 7pm for a 7.30pm start, followed by Christmas drinks.  Everyone is welcome!

Rob has recently published a new book, Critical Statistics: Seeing Beyond the Headlines and his talk, based on his findings, is called, ‘Lies, Fake News and Statistics’.

Browse your social media feed, turn on the TV, or open your news website of choice – chances are it won’t be long before you come across a story based on a statistic. Maybe it’s that ‘70% of married women have cheated on their partners’ (The Washington Post) or that ‘32,000 people in the US die from gun violence every year’ (tweet by US Senator Tammy Baldwin) or that ‘One in five British Muslims sympathise with Jihadis’ (The Sun).

The news is full of numbers for a good reason: numbers and statistics are vital to understanding what’s really going on in the world. But they can also be deceptive. In the wrong hands, they can easily end up giving us a distorted picture of reality. In this talk, Robert de Vries will show how understanding a few simple tricks and some basic statistical concepts can help us see the truth behind the numbers in the news.

From 1 December 2018, we are introducing a new organisational structure for the Projects and Maintenance & Technical Services teams within the Estates Department.   These changes will facilitate the delivery of improvements around governance, strategy, asset management, statutory compliance, financial and project management as well as the long term maintenance of the estate.

The Maintenance & Technical Services function will be responsible for the delivery of a coherent maintenance plan for the estate including: long term maintenance of the infrastructure, investment planning, business continuity, compliance assurance, minor works projects, planned and reactive maintenance.

The Projects team will focus on the delivery of major capital projects and high value minor works.  Systems and processes will be refined with new arrangements introduced for the approval, planning, monitoring, management and reporting of all projects.

The new structures of these teams and of the overall Estates Department can be viewed on our web page. You can also view and download the Estates booklet ‘Who we are, what we do and where we are going’ from our web pages. This booklet includes an overview of our strategic vision, core values, key objectives and team structure.

These changes demonstrate our commitment to continuously improve our services and meet the needs of our customers.  The feedback from our inaugural Customer Feedback Survey, conducted earlier this year, highlighted that 83% of our customers feel Estates Department staff act professionally, however there were some areas for improvement, notably around transparency in our operations and how we communicate to our customers.

We are addressing these issues and launched the Estates Customer Services Centre in June this year.  The Centre acts as the key contact point for all enquiries regarding services provided by the Estates Department.  The Customer Services Advisers take complete ownership of all enquiries, ensuring customers are kept fully informed on the progress of their enquiry.  We have introduced a Customer Services Policy and a robust complaints procedure for customers to use when they are not totally happy with the service they have received.

Our Customer Services Policy explains our guiding principles and can be found on our web pages here: Customer Services Policy.

The Customer Services team can be contacted by email: estatescustomerservices@kent.ac.uk or by telephone: extension 16666 (or if dialling externally: 01227 816 666).

Peter Czarnomski

Director of Estates

The next monthly DICE talk will be held on 13th December and given by Dr Bela Barata, DICE, discussing ‘Conserving Brazil’s mountain-top frogs’. Bela will talk about her fieldwork experiences and her recently completed PhD research, which looked at the impacts of climate change on some of Brazil’s most endangered amphibian species.

December’s DICE event begins with mince pies and drinks from 17.00-18.00 in SAC Marlowe Foyer. The talk will follow in Grimond Lecture Theatre 2,  from 18.00-19.00 and is open to everyone in the community.

The series is also available on YouTube.

In conjunction with Planned Future, we are running two Pre-Retirement seminars this academic year. The whole day seminar aims to give participants knowledgeable advice in regards to all aspects of planning for retirement, looking at areas such as finance, health and lifestyle.

The dates are:

• Tuesday 15th of January 2019: 9.00 to 4.30 pm
• Thursday 4th of April 2019: 9.00 to 4.30 pm

All staff, all ages welcome – it’s about planning ahead. Please book through Staff Connect.

The latest episode of the podcast series on ‘Nostalgia’, hosted by Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, has just been released.

In this week’s interview, Chris interviews Kyla Greenhorn, who is studying for a PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Kent. Kyla was born in Kansas and she discusses the reasons why so many American students choose to study in the UK. She decided from a young age that she wanted to move to Europe, and now sees the US as a foreign country. She talks about how her family is predominantly Republican and pro-Trump, and how this doesn’t sit well with her being a member of the LGBT community.

Kyla comes from an evangelical background and her sexuality affected her entire family dynamics, especially after she came out as bisexual to her mother. She discusses with Chris how the experience changed her, and how she can now make a stand for causes she believes in. Musically, Kyla reminisces about the boy bands she grew up listening to and how her musical tastes these days range from heavy metal to church music and how music is the most consistent thing in her life. She also explains why Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is her favourite movie and we learn what happened when she once performed a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire.

We learn why at school Kyla tended to avoid Religious Studies, and how and why she subsequently found an unexpected way into the subject. The conversation then moves to her experience of dealing with bigotry when it comes to gender and sexuality and to societal prejudices towards homosexuality.

To find out more about opportunities for further study in Religious Studies and other subjects, visit www.kent.ac.uk/postgraduate/.

The Raymond and Blanche Lawson Charitable Trust generously agreed to grant the Medway Student Support Fund a sum of £5,000 at their board meeting on 8 November 2018.

The Trust was created in 1980 by Tonbridge-based property businessman, Raymond Lawson, and his wife Blanche, and supports a wide range of charitable causes from hospices to children’s charities in Kent and Sussex. The grant money will provide bursaries to support those students most in need of financial assistance at the three universities based at the Medway Campus.

The latest issue of the Leadership Bulletin, designed to give an overview of key developments at Kent, is now available.

The latest issue (28 November 2018) includes a congratulations from our Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Karen Cox, to our most recent graduates and a thank you to the University Council.

There is also an update on Executive Group meetings, including a discussion of the planning round with Faculty Deans on 20 November and an EG Awayday focusing on organisational design on 26 November.

There are also updates on the government’s Settled Status scheme, which EU citizens working at Kent are eligible to take part in, and the launch of a new BSc in Human Geography.

The Bulletin is distributed fortnightly to all members of the Senior Leadership Forum to cascade to staff in schools and professional service departments. If you haven’t received your copy yet, you can read the bulletin online.

Find out more about the Leadership Bulletin and see previous issues on the OVC webpages.