Monthly Archives:一个pril 2019

Call for contributions for ‘Inside Out’ symposium

Contributions are sought for a two day symposium as part of thePlaying A/Partresearch project, led byNicola Shaughnessy, Professor of Performance in theDepartment of Drama and Theatre, and funded by the一个rts and Humanities Research Council, to be held at Kent on Thursday 4 and Friday 5 July 2019.

The symposium is titled ‘Inside Out: Autistic Identities, Participatory Research and Gender’. The first day will explore perspectives on participatory research practices, ethics and themes, and the second day will explore perspectives on gender and creativity.

Contributions are invited in the form of posters or creative artefacts from projects that engage with the symposium themes, issues and questions. These might include:

Creative practices with autistic participants

Participatory research, neurodiversity and inclusive practices
Ethical issues in participatory autism research
Creative research methodologies and neurodiversity
Gender, sexuality and neurodiversity
Monotropism and related concepts
Interdisciplinary and inclusive research outcomes.

If you wish to contribute provide a 150 word abstract outlining the rationale, content and form of the work to be featured (whether a poster or creative artefact). Please send toplayingapartconference@kent.ac.ukwith the subject line ‘Inside Out Proposal’. Please note the preferred language for this event is identity first (i.e. autistic person/s).

The cost of the conference will be £25 per day or £40 for both days, with fee waivers available on request.

建议在周五的最后期限24 May 2019.

Paul Allain to deliver keynote address

Paul Allain, Professor of Theatre and Performance in theSchool of Artsand Dean of theGraduate School, will give a keynote address at an international theatre forum and conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, held between Friday 10 and Sunday 12 May 2019.

The conference is titled ‘Out of the Frame’ and will explore street/open space theatre, its funding and role in society. The conference is organised by theShoshin Theatre Associationand the Committee on Theatrical Sciences of the Regional Committee of theMagyar Tudományos Akadémia[Hungarian Academy of Sciences].

Paul will be delivering the keynote address on Saturday 11 May, with a paper titled ‘Space Invaders or Alien Friends? Close Encounters of a Theatrical Kind’.

Paul’s talk will briefly trace key aspects of a theatre history which depicts the movement of certain key experimental theatre directors and groups from cities into the countryside, across Europe and in Asia too. The list is long, but Polish company Gardzienice and Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki stand out. Paul will ask what made these pioneers move to the country, what they sought, and what lessons we might learn from them for theatre-making today. How did other spaces and ‘new natural environments’ change training and acting, group dynamics, understanding of and encounters with an audience? Are such Romantic models still desirable and do artists still have such a choice? Or has choice now become urgent need in this age of mass migration?

The conference is part of the Rural Inclusive Outdoor Theatre Education 2 (RIOTE2) project, co-founded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

More information about the conference can be foundhere.

Consciousness, growing up in India and Pink Floyd: Nostalgia podcast with Srivas Chennu

In thelatest episodeof the Nostalgia podcast series, Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, speaks to Srivas Chennu from the School of Computing.

在这个富有洞察力的采访中,Srivas谈到how we are today able to ask questions that the ancient Greeks could not, how his research intersects with Chris’s own work in near-death experiences (NDE) and he talks about how his collaborators are studying what happens in the brain when someone has an NDE. We also discuss how films are often better at conveying these techniques than academic papers.

Srivas reflects on how a decade ago to study consciousness would have been laughed at as it was deemed to be so amorphous, and how and why that has now changed. Srivas also discusses his background, growing up in India, having a Hindu priest for a grandfather, Pink Floyd and the Alan Parsons Project, cultural changes between India and the UK, BBC 6 Music, Monty Python, what would have happened if Srivas had stayed in India (the ‘Sliding Doors’ phenomenon) and how he feels his friends think about him!

Life in Keynes 50th Anniversary Photography Competition

Keynes College celebrates its 50th Anniversary this year. As part of these celebrations, the Master of Keynes College, Chloé Gallien, is pleased to launch the ‘Life in Keynes’ photography competition.

This competition is open to all University students and staff past and present and participants are encouraged to submit photos that capture the essence of life in Keynes.

You don’t have to be a member of the College to enter, as we know that many of you have enjoyed the facilities offered by the College and we are looking forward to seeing what the College means to as wide a range of people as possible.

一个panel of judges will choose the best entries and these will be exhibited in Keynes College during June. There will also be a prize for the top three entries: vouchers to the value of £80 (1^stprize), £50 (2^nd), £35 (3^rdprize).

Photos should be submitted by theend of the day on Sunday 19 Mayto the competitionFlickr page.

Please see the following links forcompetition terms and conditionsand instructions onhow to enter.

Research funding success for Philosophy and Comparative Literature

Research funding success for colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Comparative Literature has resulted in grants of approximately £361,000 for academic research.

Professor Jon Williamson, Professor of Reasoning, Inference and Scientific Method, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant for his project ‘Evidential pluralism in the social sciences’, which will receive £244,000 for work in the philosophy of the social sciences.

Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship forSelf-Improvement: A History. Her award of £48,000 will support the writing of a book charting the long history of the idea of the improvable self from antiquity to the present. The book is contracted for publication with Yale University Press.

Dr Katja Haustein, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship totalling £46,247 for her project,一个lone With Others: A Literary History of Tact in the Twentieth Century.

Dr Graeme A Forbes, Lecturer in Philosophy, has been awarded a Mind Association Research Fellowship, securing £23,000 for work on his monograph,The times they are a-changin’.

This announcement follows news that Professor Amalia Arvaniti in the Department of English Language and Linguisticshas been awarded a grant of almost €2.5mto investigate the role of the tone of voice in communication and ways it might influence conversations.

Comedy and Mental Health: Future Directions conference

The Theatre and Performance Research Cluster and the Identities, Politics and the Arts Research Cluster in theSchool of Artswarmly invite you to conference entitled‘Comedy and Mental Health: Future Directions’to be held at the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus on Wednesday 1 May 2019.

The conference has been organised byDr Dieter Declercq, Assistant Lecturer inFilmandMediain the School of Arts.

一个t this event, eight speakers from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds will deliver short presentations on what they consider the most pressing questions and challenges for future research on mental health and comedy, especially stand-up comedy. The event is designed to stimulate further research into comedy and mental health by identify new research topics, exchanging methodological strategies and explore interdisciplinary and collaborative research.

Sessions will include ‘Comedy, Humour and Mental Health. An Attempted Overview and Some New Directions’; ‘Taking of the Mask and Laughing: Autistic Humour, Passing and Mental Health’; ‘Women Stand-Ups, Self-Denigrating Comedy and Mental Wellbeing’ and ‘Has the Growth of Stand-Up Comedy Contributed to Greater Awareness of Mental Health Issues?’

For the full programme, pleasesee the page here.

The conference is free to attend and is open to all. Registration is open untilMonday 29 April 2019; to register please email Dieter atdd324@kent.ac.uk.

Margherita Laera wins funding for theatre translation education resource

Dr Margherita Laera, Senior Lecturer inDrama and Theatrein theSchool of Arts, has just wonFollow-On Funding for Public Engagement and Impactfrom the一个rts and Humanities Research Council(AHRC) for a budget of £77k to fund a project on foreign-language plays in translation, targeting secondary school students and teachers.

This project will address the issue of under-representation of cultural difference in the British secondary school drama curriculum by creating an open-access educational website of video resources to engage secondary school children with foreign-language plays. By targeting young drama students and their teachers, the project will provide training for future theatre-makers and audiences to appreciate stories from diverse contexts and empathise with culturally distant others.

Increasing representation of non-English languages and cultures on English-speaking stages is of paramount importance to foster understanding among communities in multicultural societies, such as the UK, but also in the US, where translations of foreign-language texts tend to be rare and immigration high.

The website will include newly commissioned filmed extracts of five plays in the original language and two English translations, in order to highlight how translation strategies can have an impact on the production. The videos will be entirely new and curated for the project, featuring a professional cast. The site will also include film interviews with key practitioners working in the field; extensive contextualisations of the plays by academics and theatre- makers; and teaching resources clarifying how to integrate the resource into the GCSE, A-Level, BTEC and IB curricula.

To learn more about AHRC Follow-On Funding for Public Engagement and Impact, pleasesee the page here.

E-Learning Newsletter

The E-Learning Team has launched its Spring 2019 newsletter.Click hereto read all the latest news on the team’s events and our core learning and teaching technologies.

Mooting experiences help Kent law student secure more than £20k in scholarships

法律专业的学生,and aspiring barrister, Mark Nagy-Miticzky says his mooting experiences at Kent were “critical” in helping him secure more than £20k in scholarships from Inner Temple and BPP.

Mark has been awarded a prestigious £16,600 Inner Temple Exhibition Award together with a £1,500 Yarborough-Anderson Scholarship (an Inner Temple Benefactors Scholarship) and a Duke of Edinburgh Entrance Award of £175 (to cover the Inn’s fees for admission and call).

Mark has also been awarded a BPP University BPTC (Bar Professional Training Course) Excellence Scholarship of £2,000.

The scholarships will help support Mark as he progresses to the BPTC, the next stage in his professional training to become a barrister. Mark chose the barrister route after completing a number of mini-pupillages and vacation schemes and after the experience of advocating on his feet through participation in the Law School’s mooting programme.

一个t his Inner Temple interview in London, Mark was interviewed by a panel of three barristers, including a QC and judge. Mark said: ‘I think my mooting experiences were critical in my interview. Really the three things scholarship providers and chambers look for the most (I think) are good grades, and involvement in mini-pupillages and mooting.

During his four-year International Legal Studies degree, Mark took part in a Landmark Property Moot and reached the quarter-final of an Inner Temple Moot. He was also awarded ‘Best Mooter’ for his performance in a Kent Law School Evidence Moot. Mark said: ‘Having these competitions on my CV makes it easy to check the box for mooting experiences, but the public speaking skills also meant I was somewhat more comfortable selling myself in my answers.’

For insights into his Inner Temple interview experiencesee the full storyon Kent Law School’s news blog.

University Research and Innovation Awards – Call for nominations

Staff are invited to nominate colleagues for the University Research and Innovation Awards.

The new joint awards also include an additional category – an award for Public Engagement with Research.

Other categories include:

一个dvanced Research Award
Consolidator Research Award
Starting Research Award
Innovation and Enterprise Collaboration Award
Early Career Knowledge Exchange Award
Technical Support Award

For the research, engagement and technician awards, both individuals and groups are eligible. For the innovation and knowledge exchange awards, only individuals can be nominated.

Nominations must be received byPhil Wardin Research Services by 09.00 on 20 May.

一个ll nominees will be informed of the outcome by Monday 3 June . Winners will be celebrated at a gala dinner and ceremony, hosted by our Vice-Chancellor and President, on Wednesday 10 July.

Find out more about the awards – and plans to unite with the Teaching Prizes in 2020 – on ourResearch webpages.