These awards offer the opportunity to gain formal recognition for the development of excellent practice related to teaching, learning or assessment. Nominations for an award provide good preparation for a future application to the annual National Teaching Fellowship Scheme awards and they are excellent evidence for inclusion in an HEA fellowship. The achievement of the award is also a valuable addition to a CV when applying for promotion. Nominees will also be extending the impact and reach of their work by sharing outstanding practice from which other colleagues can learn and many more students should benefit in the future.
The VC’s Awards are open to all Birkbeck staff members, including Research Student Teachers, engaged in teaching and supporting the learning of our students.
Alongside extending the impact and reach of your work, benefits of the VC’s Awards also include the following:
£500 awarded to individual award recipients
£1000 collectively awarded to team award recipients.
Applications are now open and the deadline is Friday 6 January 2023, 5pm. For more information and criteria, please visit the Teaching and Learning Connect site. For any questions, please email Stephanie Bass.
Deadline for entries extended to midday 14 October
The Birkbeck Graduate Research School (BGRS) aims to highlight the activities and successes of our research student community. We are pleased to announce the 2022 Gwynne-Vaughan Medal which is awarded to Birkbeck Doctoral students able to demonstrate the most notable contribution to their field while undertaking their research degree. The winners will be awarded a £250 prize, a formal certificate and a distinctive medal.
Eligibility
There are two categories for entry:
Current doctoral students
This category is open to all current part time and full time doctoral students enrolled at Birkbeck in academic year 2021/22
Any achievements you include must have taken place while you were registered as a Birkbeck Doctoral student up to 31 July 2022
Doctoral awardees
This category is open to any student who was enrolled in academic year 2019/20, 2020/21 and who has already been awarded their doctorate.
Any achievements you include must have taken place before your doctorate was awarded.
How to enter
Applicants must complete the following Gwynne-Vaughan Prize form which includes a statement from the student and a supporting statement from the supervisor.
All entries will be considered by the Research Student Sub-Committee (RSSC). The winners will be announced at the end of the Autumn term at a BGRS event that will be open to all research students at Birkbeck.
Birkbeck Library is pleased to announce its first Birkbeck Open Research Symposium which this year is themed “Open for Climate Justice”, in line with International Open Access Week
The event features a keynote from Dr Caroline Edwards, and an afternoon of speakers and lightning talks, aimed at discussing the crossovers between open access and climate justice. This will be a hybrid event, with attendees both online and in person.
Themes could include but are not restricted to: open access, climate change, environmental and climate justice, environmental issues, climate activism, open climate data, international inequalities in climate action.
Talks will last 10 minutes each, with 5 minutes for questions to follow.
Talks should include at least one slide as there may not be a camera for online participants to view the speaker.
Talks can be delivered online (MS Teams) or in-person.
To participate, please submit a brief lightning talk outline with title and all author affiliation(s) and indicate your preference for an in-person or virtual format via the lightning talk submission form. The deadline is Friday 23 September.
On Thursday 16 June, Birkbeck doctoral students took part in the 2022 Three Minute Thesis Competition. Meiyun Meng was the overall winner and received a £500 prize.
From left to right: Hannah Reeves (people’s choice); Carlo Palombo; Meiyun Meng (overall winner); Tom Nealon; Marie Houghton; Doyin Olorunfemi (runner up); Fengzhi Zhao.
2022 3MT Competition
On Thursday 16 June around 60 people attended the Birkbeck Three Minute Thesis Competition in the Clore Lecture Theatre. This was the fourth time the competition has been run at Birkbeck and the first time since 2019. The seven contestants displayed excellent presentational skills to convey their research in a concise and engaging manner, all managing to conclude with just a few seconds to spare. As always at Birkbeck, there was a wide range of subjects from how cross-sectional data can help cure cancer to the experience of flat sharing among the over-30s.
Winner: Meiyun Meng
After the judges had watched the candidates make their presentations, Meiyun Meng (Department of Geography) was chosen as the overall winner for her lively and engaging talk ‘Individualising life courses: Home-making of highly educated women in Shenzhen, China’. Meiyun is in her third year as a doctoral researcher in Geography.
Runner up: Doyin Olorunfemi
In addition to the overall winner, the judges awarded a £250 runner up prize to Doyin Olorunfemi (Department of Management) for her talk on ‘From Selling to Venturing’.
People’s Prize Winner
The overall winner and runner up were chosen by a panel of 3 Birkbeck experts but the audience also played a key role and were asked to use their votes to select a People’s Choice winner. This prize was awarded to Hannah Reeves (Department of Psychosocial Studies) for her talk ‘Crossbones Graveyard: remembering the dead, or breathing with them?‘
2022 3MT Talks
A list of all the competitors and their talks is provided below.
Doyin Olorunfemi ‘From Selling to Venturing’Marie Houghton ‘Can home and happiness be found living in a house share after the age of 30?’Hannah Reeves ‘Crossbones Graveyard: remembering the dead, or breathing with them?’Meiyun Meng ‘Individualising life courses: Home-making of highly educated women in Shenzhen, China’Fengzhi Zhao ‘A Tale of Two Cosmopolitan Shanghai(s)’Tom Nealon ‘Inferring Time Varying Processes from Cross-Sectional Data’Carlo Palombo ‘On the prohibition of nudity’
ENTRIES ARE INVITED FOR THE 17th ANNUAL MAVIS BATEY ESSAY PRIZE Closing date for submissions 2nd Oct 2022
Our annual essay competition is intended to encourage vibrant, scholarly writing and new research, especially by those who have not yet had their work published. It is open to any student, worldwide, registered in a bona-fide university or institute of higher education, or who has recently graduated from such an institution. Submissions must be 5,000 to 6,000 words and the only restriction on subject matter is that it must be of relevance to some aspect of garden history which could include explorations of little known gardens, or an aspect of botany, ecology, horticulture, archaeology, social history, architecture, design, art history or sculpture.
The prize includes an award of £500, free membership of The Gardens Trust for a year and consideration for publication in our peer-reviewed, scholarly journal Garden History. All previous winners have been accepted for publication, and often the best of the non-winning entries are invited to submit to the journal as well.
Submissions or any further enquiries should be sent to essayprize@thegardenstrust.org by 6pm Sunday 2nd October 2022 For further details and entry forms see :http://thegardenstrust.org/research/prize/
12th New Research Symposium Saturday 26th November 2022– Call for papers
The New Research Symposium is an important feature of the Gardens Trust’s programme. It is open to all researchers and scholars, regardless of whether or not they are attached to an academic institution. Launched in 2011, the eleven previous symposia have hosted papers from fifty researchers. Many of these are members of County Gardens Trusts and a third are scholars from overseas, all of whom we warmly welcome.
Researchers in all fields of activity are encouraged to submit a 200-word proposal for a paper whose subject is as yet unpublished. Any topic relating to Garden History will be considered, for example: explorations of little known gardens, or aspects of botany, ecology, horticulture, archaeology, social history, architecture, design, art history and sculpture. The paper will be no longer than 20 minutes (approximately 2,000 to 2,500 words) and illustrated with a PowerPoint (or similar) slide presentation. The symposium will be held on-line via zoom. We’d be happy to answer any questions and even happier to receive proposals via newresearchsymposium@thegardenstrust.org closing date 6 pm, Sunday, 2nd October 2022
By Kim Caris-Roberts Flow n Flux “BIG BROTHER HOUSE, THIS IS DAVINA, YOU ARE LIVE ON CHANNEL 4, PLEASE DO NOT SWEAR!” This month there really was only one place to begin. Each and every one of us at Flow n Flux wanted to acknowledge how scary the world seems right now, in the wake of the war in the Ukraine; watching war unfold can make us feel powerless and the range of emotions can be complex. We needed to acknowledge that. Were there any ‘right words’ for the current climate? We concluded not. We expressed and shared our concerns and we are thankful we have a safe space to do this.
We then began to explore March’s theme: Reality TV. Big Brother seemed to have been the most common first experience of the genre, mentioned a number of times in our individual offerings from the free-writing activity, which enabled interesting free association using 9 words to gently guide us in our flow. “It’s always been my guilty pleasure”, a statement many of us identified with. Why guilty? We discussed the topics of ‘contestant’ exploitation, whether the burgeoning genre which shows no signs of slowing offers opportunities once unheard of to generations, we questioned does Reality TV alleviate any need for talent?, what constitutes reality TV? Perhaps one unexpected answer: Football.
Referring to The White Pube Podcast: The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, we continued to explore our oft’ complicated relationship with this genre of TV. After much discussion one member proudly proclaimed “I am dropping my shame around Reality TV: I love it!”.
Our last task was to create a Dragon’s Den-esque pitch for a new Reality TV show which embedded Feminist thought…Cue one group who pitched a plethora of misogyny offenders fighting it out for the opportunity to repent for their harms to cries of “In the pit! In the Pit!” that will forever echo in my ears every time I watch The Hunger Games.
For April we consider the questions of difference which have been central to the way that the feminist movement articulates itself. Specifically, we will explore difference among women, in particular, along the lines of race, class and sexuality, as well as national and geopolitical location. We will consider feminism, using Black feminism as our centre, in order to look critically at the current cultural landscape.
Little Extras April 1st-31st- Autism Awareness Month April 1st-31st Stress Awareness Month April 7th – World Health Day April 25th-29th National Stalking Awareness Week April 25th-1st May Lesbian Visibility Week
If you want to join FnF mailing list, please email: flownflux@gmail.com
The BGRS is pleased to announce the 2022 Birkbeck 3 Minute Thesis Competition, which will take place on Thursday 16 June from 6pm. Please mark this date in your diaries! This will be the first competition to have taken place in person since 2019.
Birkbeck 3MT: Thursday 16 June 2022
Join a selection of Birkbeck PhD students as they compete to communicate their compelling thesis topics in just three minutes. This event is a fantastic opportunity to share and celebrate the interests and successes of PhD researchers from across the College and we invite all current Birkbeck PhD students to take part. The winner of the Birkbeck competition will be chosen by an expert panel of judges who will award:
£500 to the overall winner
£250 to the runner up
The audience will also have their say by picking a people’s choice winner who’ll win a special prize.
Training Sessions
As part of our support for the competition, a free programme of training sessions has been arranged. All potential 3MT competitors should attend these sessions. However, any or all of them are open to any doctoral researcher at Birkbeck who would like to gain skills in these areas:
Following on from the success of the virtual Live Lectures in the previous IP for Research programmes, Vitae and the Intellectual property Office (IPO) will again be offering free online live lectures within the 2021/22 programme. See here for more
Applications for British Federation of Women Graduates Academic Awards are now being sought. The Awards are made to women doctoral students who will be in, or going into, their third year (or part time equivalent) of work for a research PhD/DPhil etc. in the autumn of 2022. Awards are, in effect, one off prizes varying in value from £1,000 to £6,000 and are given for outstanding academic excellence coupled with written and verbal communication skills. For further details please go to: www.bfwg.org.uk and look up under ‘Awards/Scholarships’ where more information, including criteria for eligibility, can be found.
Closing date for applications is: 5pm on Friday 4th March 2022
BRITISH FEDERATION OF WOMEN GRADUATES RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS DAY
Saturday 14th May 2022 10.30am – 4.00pm At BFWG HQ: 4 Mandeville Courtyard, 142 Battersea Park Road, London SW11 4NB
The RPD is when BFWG invites doctoral students to present their research to a general audience. Last year we were had to hold the Day as a ‘virtual’ event due to the pandemic. We hope that it will be possible to hold the Day in person this year and we invite postgraduate students to submit abstracts of their research for consideration. Abstract forms will be available on the BFWG website: www.bfwg.org.uk
Are you a postgraduate woman student? Do you have research you would like to present to a discerning audience – and have the chance of winning a small prize of £120 for the best presentation to a general audience? Or would you like to join with us, just to meet and listen to other postgraduate women students presenting their research? Our Research Presentations Day (RPD) offers these opportunities. Past attendees, both presenters and audience, have found the Day thoroughly enjoyable and helpful in developing presentation skills. If you think you would like to submit an abstract please look at BFWG webpages www.bfwg.org.uk or contact rpd@bfwg.org.uk for further details. Closing date for applications is: March 31st 2022 All -students, academics, anyone else interested (male or female) – are welcome to attend as audience. Lunch is included and there is a door charge of £10 but no charge for bona fide students whether attending as presenters or as audience.
We are so happy to announce our first annual Entangled
Exchanges workshop is open for registration!
Over the course of two weeks we are going to be exploring how we can decolonise
our teaching practices and spaces. We will look at questions such as:
How
can we as teachers create and hold spaces that celebrate difference?
How
can we respond to acts of violence in the classroom in a way that enables
students to return to that space, and keep coming back to the university in the
future?
How
can we make teaching spaces safer, and build in context and criticality for
Eurocentric canons and curricula?
We have an amazing line of speakers including Linda
Tuhiwai Smith, Nur Sobers Khan, Xine Yao, Consented Youth, Meleisa Ono-George,
June Rubis, Beatrice Okyere-Manu and Larissa Behrendt. Join us as we
collectively attempt to untangle the classroom and think through our place
within it.
