Month: February 2018

Ableism in Academia: The Break-Out Session

Ableism in Academia: The Break-Out Session

Friday 23rd March 10am – 5pm

On Friday 23rd March, UCL Institution of Education is hosting the event Ableism in Academia. Due to popular demand, this event is now full. Since interest was so great, an alternative, break-out session is now being offered at Birkbeck where the live presentations will be viewed on the big screen, enabling discussion and interaction.

Venue: Birkbeck, University of London

Bookings: To confirm your place at the break-out session, please visit this link

Programme

10.00 – 10.40: Keynote:

  • Fiona KUMARI-CAMPBELL Policy and legal responses to social inclusion

10.40 – 11.00: Invited speaker:

  • Nicki MARTIN The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education research

11.00 – 11.10: Comfort break

11.10 – 12.20: Accepted submissions:

  • Wendy MERCHANT – Excellence, Rigor and Resilience
  • Rosalind JANSSEN – Living with microscopic colitis
  • Gillian LOOMES – The questioning aspie
  • Ian GENT – Depressed academics
  • Carla FINESILVER – Invisible disability, unacknowledged diversity

12.20 – 1.30: Lunch break

1.30 – 3.00: Accepted submissions:

  • Thomas KADOR – Academics who can’t read (remote)
  • Ben LUNN – Ableism in Music Academicism (remote)
  • Jeanne BARCZEWSKA – Teaching voice (remote?)
  • Oliver DADDOW – Colour blindness and accessibility in academia
  • Jennifer RODE – Greyhound racing and the academy
  • Elisabeth GRIFFITHS – Invisible disabilities, disclosure and being an ‘insider’ in disability research
  • Jason DAVIES – Disabling grief in academia

3.00 – 3.20: Comfort break

3.20 – 4.30: Workshop

  • Facilitated by Mike Higgins, Equality Diversity & Inclusion Manager at UCL.

4.30: Closing words

  • Prof Michael ARTHUR, President and Provost of UCL

Unfortunately, catering will not be provided but attendees are welcome to bring along their own refreshments or come and go throughout the day.

Background information

Academia prides itself on productivity, innovation and rigour. It also purports to promote inclusivity and diversity.

However, as disabled, chronically ill, and neurodiverse academics know, ableism – discrimination in favour of able-bodied people – is endemic in academia. Rather than embracing difference as a reflection of wider society, academic ecosystems seek to normalise and homogenise particular ways of working and of being a scholar.

Against this background, this interactive symposium provides a forum to discuss the pressures and challenges faced by disabled, chronically ill, and neurodiverse academics. By engaging in debate around academic ableism, including how it intersects with gender, race, class, age, and sexuality, we aim to create a policy-facing manifesto that will challenge academia’s existing notions of able-bodied perfection and provide impetus for change.

Event aims

  • To be pioneering regarding inclusivity and accessibility
  • To allow for debates and discussions
  • To use personal experiences and theorisation for the creation of a manifesto for universities to use.

Contact details

For further information about the break-out session, please contact Sarah Sherman s.sherman@bloomsbury.ac.uk

For further information about the main event, please contact Nicole Brown nicole.brown@ucl.ac.uk

New CHASE Training Opportunities

The following training opportunities are available to all Arts and Humanities research students at Birkbeck.

CHASE Creative Writing Residency

18 – 25 May | Near Kings Lynn, Norfolk

A creative writing residency to provide an opportunity for creative writers across the CHASE network to build creative writing skills, further CHASE creative writing projects, develop pedagogical skills and build relationships across the network.

The Residency is a one-week program for creative writers from 18th to 25th May at the Great Barn Farm near Kings Lynn. The week will consist of daily student led workshops and writing classes on theory and practice with a masterclass on the 19th from Sarah Hall, who has published six novels, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The week will also include scheduled time for participants to further their own creative projects. It will conclude with a group discussion on teaching best practices and draft guidelines.

Possibilities: Media as process and actant

Title: Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities!

Friday 9 March | 10.00-17.00 | University of Sussex

How do digital tools, environments and research co-construct each other? How can you trace the materiality of your research?  How might you diagram the interdependencies of your research sites? What are some of the possible re-mappings and re-imaginings that might occur?

 

 

Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2018

2018 Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) at Birkbeck

Your chance to provide feedback

All current Birkbeck research students have been sent a personal invitation to take part in PRES 2018. The survey will close on 30 April 2018. Birkbeck is now participating in the PRES on an annual basis and the latest survey opened on 8 February 2018. Further information about the PRES survey at Birkbeck is available on the Birkbeck surveys page.

We are grateful to all who take time to submit a response. The PRES is an important way for the BGRS and for Birkbeck to understand the views of postgraduate researchers in order to address issues of importance and so that we can continue to do what you value.

£100 Amazon Voucher Prizes

If you submit a response to PRES 2018 you will have a chance to win £100 in Amazon vouchers.

How your responses to the PRES are being used

In the 2017 PRES survey we received 331 responses which was a significant increase on the response rate for 2015 PRES where we received 227 responses. The Birkbeck Graduate Research School (BGRS) and each of the Schools were asked to consider the responses from the 2017 PRES and to create action plans to address key issues raised in the survey.

These action plans were considered by the College’s Postgraduate Research Student Reps and by the Research Student Sub-Committee and work is underway to address issues raised.

Highlighted examples of activities since PRES 2017

Birkbeck Graduate Research School (BGRS)

  • A revised BGRS website was launched in 2017 which provides clearer information to all research students, prospective research students and staff. The BGRS website will continue to be developed over the coming months and now includes a BGRS Blog.
  • The BGRS has launched a Moodle site specifically for research students and is actively developing the contents over 2017/18. The contents of the BGRS Moodle site include:
    • Highlighted information for new PhD students
    • A detailed overview of training and professional development available to Birkbeck PhD students
    • Lecture capture, slides and handouts from BGRS training sessions
    • Access to BGRS Research student forums
    • Details of Birkbeck Postgraduate Research Student (PGR) Reps
    • A summary of Careers and employability resources for PGR students
    • Information about internship, teaching and demonstrating opportunities
    • Video resources for postgraduate researchers and other useful information.
  • The BGRS is organising an average of 1 social event each term to allow PhD students to meet with each other and has also piloted a series of Shut Up and Write sessions. Future events in 2017/18 include a repeat of the successful three minute thesis competition that this year will take place alongside a poster competition.
  • The BGRS has launched Training Needs Analysis for Birkbeck research students.

School of Arts

  • Generic email addresses have been established for PGR Reps to ensure continuity and a dedicated programme/ departmental Moodle group is being implemented.
  • The Research Student Collective, run by students from different departments, is being used to enhance opportunities to share work informally, and all programmes are responding to Staff Student Forum feedback about how to support a strong sense of cohort within a year group and across the years.
  • A PGR Toolkit has been added to the School PGR Moodle site along with weekly reports on the week in arts and improved events calendar.
  • A programme of lunchtime training sessions and conversations for supervisors is being implemented in 2017-18, including a session on mental health, a forum for practice based research supervisors and sessions on how to support specific moments in the research student journey.

School of Business, Economics and Informatics

  • Library resources continue to be improved  and updated. Recent database subscriptions include PsychINFO and Mintel. In cases where an article/book is unavailable via existing databases this may be sourced via an inter‐library loan usually sponsored by departments.
  • MRes students have been given provided with access to the BEI PhD room
  • Training requirements for research students will include identification of training requirements for teaching activities.
  • Computing resources are being assessed to check for updates/ repairs where needed.

School of Law

  • School induction information has been updated to include more information about structure, useful contacts and management lines.
  • Future improvements to rooms and computing resources is being explored.
  • A new School Sub-Committee has been established to consider research student issues.
  • Processes for communicating teaching opportunities are being evaluated.
  • The School’s  graduate research seminars will be developed and further established.

School of Science

  • A new centralised Moodle resource is being created for Psychological Sciences students to include schedules of the many seminar series open to postgraduate research students.
  • A new training workshop for final year Psychological Sciences students will be provided on the examination and viva process.

School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy

  • The School’s PGR Committee ran an interdisciplinary research event on 4 November 2017 aimed at meeting student demand for interdisciplinary events and fostering intellectual exchange across the School and beyond.
  • SSHP appointed a new Research Student Representative who is in close contact with student reps from all SSHP departments. Together, the reps are working together on plans for future social events and scholarly exchanges.
  • The SSHP Support Fund will be advertised more widely to ensure that students make the most of the resources that are available.

Astrobiology and Planetary Exploration (APEX) Meeting Programme

Astrobiology and Planetary Exploration (APEX) Meeting Programme

All research students are welcome to attend the Interdisciplinary Astrobiology and Planetary Exploration (APEX) seminars, held on Thursdays during the Spring Term.

These events begin at 13:00 in the Garwood Lecture Theatre (1st floor, UCL South Wing).

25 Jan 2018

Magnetic measurements of Saturn by Cassini
Prof Nick Achilleos (UCL)

01 Feb 2018

Searching for organic signatures on the Martian south pole
Jacqueline Campbell (MSSL)
Why we should build a Moon Village
Prof Ian Crawford (BBK)

08 Feb 2018

Observing the Solar System with Twinkle
Billy Edwards (UCL)
X-ray explorations of planets and moons
Dr William Dunn (UCL/MSSL/CfA/ESA)

15 Feb 2018

SMILE: A novel and global way to explore solar-terrestrial relationships
Prof Graziella Branduardi Raymont (MSSL)

22 Feb 2018

The first cell membranes
Sean Jordan (UCL)
Black diamond (carbonardo) and the core of a Neptune?
Dr Adrian Jones (UCL)

01 Mar 2018  

Martian oceans: The evidence and issues
Zach Dickeson (NHM)
ExoMars PanCam
Roger Stabbins (MSSL)

08 Mar 2018

The ExoMars Mission
Prof Andrew Coates (MSSL)

15 Mar 2018

The Cosmic Zoo: Complex life on many worlds
Dr William Baines

New CHASE Training Opportunities

The following training opportunities are available to all Arts and Humanities research students at Birkbeck.

What Future for Theory?

26 March (Goldsmiths, University of London), 23 & 24 May (UEA)

‘Theory’ no longer holds the ascendancy it did in its 1980s heyday. Research has become more archive-oriented, more concerned with the production of knowledge, for which new possibilities have emerged with the advent of the ‘digital humanities’. ‘Theory’, with its specialised language, its immanent readings, became a symbol for the humanities’ inability to communicate their value; the model of the ‘output’ assures academic institutions and the culture in which they operate that humanistic research has something to show for itself. Theory also seems out of step with those contemporary political movements that aim to articulate new subjectivities and identities: theory itself had pronounced the death of the subject, and dismantled the metaphysical assumptions underpinning identity. Increasingly, theory appears a thing of the past.

But at a time when both the university and the humanities are undergoing major transformations, we wish to ask: how might theory, both its canonical past and its emerging forms, help us to make sense of our current moment, its technological/scientific developments, its forms of cultural production? And how does this current moment demand that we rethink the approaches and methods of theory? Particularly pressing are the ways digital technologies are transforming the way we conduct and disseminate research, but at the same time the limits and possibilities of the human: our present moment calls not just to be analysed, but to be theorised.

The programme will be made up of a symposium, to be held at Goldsmiths on 26 March 2018, and a roundtable, to take place at UEA on 23 May. On 24 May, participants will produce a video response to the questions that had arisen in the discussions thus far.

Find out more and apply here: Deadline to apply Wednesday 21 February

French for Academic Purposes 2

Further sessions in the series

  • Session 1: 14 February, 13.00-15.00, Courtauld Research forum
  • Session 2: 21 February, 13.00-15.00, Courtauld Seminar Room 1
  • Session 3: 27 February, 14.00-16.00, Institute of Historical Research Pollard Room
  • Session 4: 6 March, 14.00-16.00, Institute of Historical Research Pollard Room

Find out more and apply here

Data Week: 12-16 February 2018

Data Week is a collaboration between Birkbeck, SOAS, London School of Economics and UCL. Events include the following covering a wide range of data-related issues of importance to your research.

  • Speed Data-Ing
  • Get Ready for GDPR
  • What’s My Research Data?
  • UCL Research IT & Data Management Drop-in
  • Get Your Research Data In Shape
  • Working With Audio-Visual Data
  • Get Started With Data Management Planning
  • Research Ethics, Data Management, Data Protection Drop-in
  • All Day Drop In – Research Data and Software Surgery
  • Making the Most of Your Research Data
  • Working With Personal Data

Registration for the various events is available here.

 

2018 Three Minute Thesis and Poster Competition: 23 May

The 2017 winner was John Siblon from the Department of History who received the £500 prize. John’s research focuses on war memory and representations of black colonial servicemen in the aftermath of the First World War.

Birkbeck Three Minute Thesis + Poster Competition: 23 May 2018

All current Postgraduate Research Students at Birkbeck are invited to take part in the 2018 Three Minute Thesis Competition which will take place on Wednesday 23 May.

This year we are also holding a Poster Competition and a drinks reception on the same evening. We hope that running these two competitions will provide a fantastic opportunity to share the interests and successes of PhD researchers from across the College.

Further information about how to register to attend of to take part is available here where  you will also find details about training sessions available for those who are considering taking part.

Prizes

The following prizes will be awarded:

Three minute thesis competition
  • £500 to the overall winner and £250 to the runner up
Poster competition
  • £300 for the winner and 3 runners up prizes of £50 each

Further Information