Category: Highlighted events

BGRS events

2022 Birkbeck 3 Minute Thesis Competition: Join the Audience on 16 June

Registration now open for this event

You can be part of the audience for this year’s Three Minute Thesis Competition. On Thursday 16 June, an expert panel of judges will decide which Birkbeck student has presented the most compelling, convincing, and concise summary of their thesis. There’s a lot at stake: not only the prestige of winning and the confidence that goes with it, but also –

  • £500 to the overall winner
  • £250 to the runner-up

As part of the audience you will have a vote to decide who is the People’s Choice. You can also join the Birkbeck postgraduate community in celebrating the diversity of research interests undertaken here, and raise a glass to that with a drinks reception after the winners have been announced.

Register now to be part of the audience.

Three Minute Thesis Training sessions

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:

What is it like to take part in 3MT?

You can read more about what it was like to take part in the 2018 and 2019 3MT competitions in the following BGRS blog posts: 

This is an international event and the Birkbeck winner will have the opportunity to continue on to the UK semi-finals later in the year.

Urban Intersections Reading Group


The Birkbeck Institute of Social Research’s Urban Intersections Working Group aims to stimulate conversations at the intersection of different disciplines, practices, spaces, media, and ways of seeing and understanding an urbanised (and urbanising) world.

Last year we inaugurated a reading group for post-graduate students (masters and doctoral) in any department of the College. Through a specific text, participants have the opportunity to reflect and discuss a particular urban topic, speaking from, but also challenging, their own research and disciplinary perspectives.

Sessions are held over Microsoft Teams and there is no limit to the number of participants. We will aim to hold at least one physical meet-up a term. We have a preliminary reading list that will be open to discussion and editing by the whole group. At the start of each session, a group member will frame the text to get the conversations going.


Our proposed reading list:
Week 1:
Alatas S. F., Sinha V: Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon, Palgrave
Macmillan, London, 2017. Introduction: Eurocentrism, Androcentrism and
Sociological Theory (1-16)
Weber, M: The City, Free Press, London, 1958
Occidental City (80-89)
Week 2:
Simmel, G: The Adventurer, “Das Abenteuer,” Phiosophische Kultur.
Gesammelte Essays, Leipzig, 1919
Jackson, S: Paranoia, The New Yoker, NY, 2013
Week 3:
Wilson, E: The Rhetoric of Urban Space, NLR, Jan-Feb, 1995
Sudjic, D: Dangerously Insane, LRB, Oct 2010
Week 4:
Nora, P: Between Memory and History, Representations, Spring 1989
Sicard, M: Eutopia, NLR, May-June 2020
Week 5:
Myambo, M, T: Africa’s Global City?, NLR, Nov-Dec 2017
Ruiz Tagle, J: Territorial stigmatization in Socially-Mixed Neighbourhoods
in Chicago and Santiago: A Comparison of Global-North and Global South Urban Renewal Problem, Social Housing and Urban Renewal (Watt and
Smets, Eds.), London: Emerald, 2017
Week 6:
Thompson, M et al: Re-grounding the City with Polanyi: From Urban
Entrepreneurialism to Entrepreneurial Municipalism, Economy and Space,
Vol. 52(6), 2020
Baibarac, C and Petrescu, D: Co-design and Urban Resilience: Visioning
Tools for Commoning Resilience Practices, CoDesign, Volume 15, 2019
Week 7:
Hatherley, M: Look at England Urban Spaces, Open Democracy, August 2011
Hatherley, M: The Occupation of Space, Open Democracy, January 2011
Self, W: It Hits in the Gut, LRB, March 2012
Other:
Adams RE: Circulation and Urbanization, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications, 2018
Halegoua GR: The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place,
New York: New York University Press, 2019
Hou, J: Guerilla Urbanism: Urban Design and the Practices of Resistance,
Urban Design, Vol. 25, 2020
Massey, D: The Spatial Construction of Youth Cultures, Cool Places,
(Skelton and Valentine, Eds.), London: Routledge, 1998
Zukin S: The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy,
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020
We aim to hold one meeting per month, but this will be negotiated by the group
once it is formed. The first meeting will take place in the middle of December 2022.
If you would like to be involved, please contact Henry Mulhall
(Henrymulhall@gmail.com) and Sara Rodriguez (paralingual@gmail.com) with
your name, department, and course of study by 30 November 2021.

London Open Research Week 25th – 29th October 2021

A group of London-based peers working in the areas of scholarly communication, research data management, librarianship, publishing, and institutional repositories decided to collaborate across institutional boundaries for London Open Research Week 2021: having experienced frustrations with the fractures and divides across the topologies of openness, we have worked together to try and forge a broad event for practitioners and research communities.

Predicated by our experiences at and beyond the four institutions collaborating in London Open Research Week, and working with the theme of  this year’s International Open Access Week, It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity, we have curated a diverse and engaging programme of live, online sessions that are free to attend.

Feminist perspectives from Early Career Researchers, critical perspectives on openness, and the increasing tensions arising in the realm of research evaluation and (biblio)metrics and the various intersections with open research will be included, amongst a wealth of international insights from scholars and professionals across the sector.

We welcome you to join us to share in the ideas and benefits that come from commons approaches; as a rich field, working collaboratively and exchanging experiences and ideas beyond our usual operational, departmental, and institutional limitations, we hope to explore the tensions that exist between our current conception and operation of openness in direct relation to structural equity in order to build upon and challenge the equitable premise that ‘open’ is often understood to imply.

For more information and to book please visit: London Open Research Week 2021 If you have questions about any of the events, please contact Emma Illingworth e.illingworth@bbk.ac.uk

Latest AHRC CHASE Training Opportunities for all Arts and Humanities doctoral researchers

Material Benefits of the Immaterial: Academic Publishing in the Digisphere

Friday 10th September | 0900 – 1700 | Goldsmith’s – in person and remote

A study day will train doctoral students in the ways that the Digital Humanities have, and have not, altered academic publishing. Because art and music have led computational innovations in the Digital Humanities, their digital publications will serve as case studies; the intended audience is all arts and humanities researchers whose objects of study pose transmission challenges apposite to those in art and music. Four themes will be addressed:

  1. Output and its Transmission. How have digital and computational tools altered the creation, and the transmission, of the object of study?
  2. Remodelling Distribution. How have new formats changed distribution models?
  3. Sustainability: Are solutions to sustainability traded between digital publications?
  4. Open Access: How do emerging online publications, often staffed only by volunteers, compete with a university press publication in status, or financial resourcing?

After each speaker’s presentation, CHASE students will put questions to the speaker and their panel. For a final roundtable, CHASE students will be asked to chair and lead discussions.

During registration you will be asked whether you plan to attend remotely or in person.

Register here

CHASE Medical Humanities Network | ‘What the Book Told’: Artists’ Books and Lived Experience with Stella Bolaki

Thursday 16th September | 1700 – 1900 | Online

What is distinctive about the artist’s book as a form of creative self-exploration and communication? Since the 1960s, the artist’s book has been an innovative and versatile medium of expression, as well as a radical way of bringing art to a wider public. This talk and workshop will explore artists’ books from the ‘Prescriptions’ collection (University of Kent) that is dedicated to the topics of illness and wellbeing. We will reflect on how contemporary artists reimagine the book format to give voice to intimate experiences, craft multisensory stories about health and illness, and challenge medical hierarchies. Participants will also be guided to create a handmade book to capture aspects of their own lived experience.

About the session:

In advance of the session, you will need an A3 card paper (of any colour) and a pair of scissors. Please also gather materials that will help with crafting a handmade book (see below) or anything else that relates to the themes of health, illness and wellbeing.

If you wish, you can watch the short documentary film I Make Books by Martha A. Hall (18 min). This is a moving documentary on how American artist Martha Hall used the artist’s book format to document her illness experience and communicate with the medical community.

Indicative materials (for the making part of the workshop):

  • If you enjoy drawing or painting etc, you can have with you colouring pencils, sketches you can incorporate, illustrations and any other relevant art supplies. If you have any basic tools for bookbinding (such as a bone folder, needles/thread, pricker etc) you can bring those, but they are not essential.
  • A range of printed papers/materials with image and/or text which could be collaged or made into whole pages. E.g:
  • Packaging, wrapping paper, fabric
  • Photographs
  • Digital prints/internet printouts
  • Old books, newspapers, magazines
  • Paper with a range of textures, transparencies, uses, and contexts
  • Other materials, that could be collaged, used to produce marks/texts, or bound within, or act as pages in themselves. E.g:
  • Ribbon, strings, embroidered material, fabric, threads, cords, buttons or other small objects to glue or sew into a book or to store your book in (such as a box).
  • Stationary: staplers, rubberstamps, stickers etc.

The session will last two hours and will include a short break. Please feel free to drop in and out throughout this time – there will be no pressure to share your work or participate in discussion if you do not wish to.

Register here

Flow n Flux presents: Online Community Building – Create, Facilitate, Sustain

Thursday 23 September | 1000-1600 | Online

Have you got an idea for an online community, but you are not sure where to start?

We would like to help you bring that idea, and community, to life!

Flow n Flux presents: Online Community Building – Create, Facilitate, Sustain

Flow n Flux is an online feminist community that engages in monthly participatory workshops facilitated by Natasha Richards and Eleanor Kilroy.  

In this student led training you will learn valuable techniques necessary for building an online community. No matter the area of interest you can apply these skills to create, facilitate and sustain a sense of community online.

Here is a little taster of what to expect on the day.


10.00-11.00: Introduction

To begin with we will welcome you all to the training and share the origins of Flow n Flux. We will also start to discuss your ideas for an online community. Do not worry if you do not have an idea before the workshop, as the session may spark some ideas.


11.00-12.00: How to build

Next we will discuss marketing and advertising, as well as the organisational development tasks necessary for getting your online community off the ground.


12.00-13.00: How to facilitate

Then we will explore the skills and knowledge necessary for planning and running the online community. We will also discuss how to respond to potential challenges


13.00-13.30: Lunch


13.30-14.30: How to sustain

After lunch we will focus on how to increase and sustain your membership. We will develop strategies for addressing common pitfalls in sustaining an online community.


14.30-16.00: Your online community

In the final section of the day participants will have the chance to share their ideas for an online community and to receive feedback from other participants.

Register here

Useful Knowledge: Conference

PhD researchers at Birkbeck working on the history of the college are organising a major conference to mark the institution’s 200th anniversary.

Useful Knowledge, to be held at Birkbeck in February 2022 (ahead of the College’s bicentenary in 2023), will feature talks by leading historians and critics including Sir Richard Evans, Sally Alexander, Jerry White and Marai Larasi.

The conference, being organised by Professor Joanna Bourke’s ‘Birkbeck Knowledge‘ research group, is set to focus on the long history of the college, but also on the past, present and future of part-time and mature higher education more broadly.

Further information will be made available shortly and information about the Call for Papers is available below.

Call for papers

Birkbeck Knowledge’s PhD researchers Jonny Matfin and Ciarán O’Donohue have also launched a Call for Papers (CfP), aimed at all academics with an interest in the history of part-time and mature higher education.

“We’re aiming to include as wide a range of academics as possible, to discuss what we believe is a vitally important area of university history.”

Jonny and Ciarán

Deadline for the Call for Papers: 5pm, Thursday 30 September

Call for Papers Download

BIRKBECK INSTITUTE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE: PROPOSALS FOR EVENTS 2021-22

Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) is currently planning its programme of events for 2021-22. We welcome proposals from researchers and students working in any discipline or field across the College. We are very happy to work in collaboration with research centres and institutes at Birkbeck or at other institutions, both in terms of exchanging ideas and materials and in terms of sharing costs and logistics.

We encourage our Birkbeck colleagues to utilise the facilities of Birkbeck Cinema to foreground new or rarely screened films and other moving image works, and/or to contribute to contemporary debates around academic research and its relationship to social, political and cultural questions of the day.

In normal times, all of our events take place in Birkbeck Cinema, typically on Friday evenings 6-9pm and Saturdays 10-5pm. Birkbeck Cinema is an exceptional resource, now equipped to project the most up to date DCP and other digital formats, as well as traditional formats such as 35mm and 16mm.

In the current circumstances, however, we cannot say for sure when we will have full access to Birkbeck Cinema. For the autumn term, we are therefore especially interested in proposals for events that could be adapted, if necessary, to online presentation, with the possibility of streaming films via our Screening Room. From January 2022, while we hope to be able to operate from the Cinema in our usual fashion, we are aware that nothing is certain, and so we will remain open to the possibility of adapting BIMI events to online versions if this proves necessary.

If you would like to propose an idea for an event, please complete this form and send it tobimi@bbk.ac.ukwith the subject heading “BIMI proposals 2021-22”.The deadline for submission is Friday 25 June.

Michael Temple, Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, and Essay Film Festival; Matthew Barrington, BIMI Manager

Title of proposed event:

 
Names of proposers and department or School:


Description of event (no more than 250 words, please):








 
Screening material (including technical specifications if known):



 
Indicative budget (film materials, speakers, travel, etc. – BIMI can typically cover up to £200 per event):

 
Potential collaborators (from Birkbeck or other institutions):



   

The Essay Film Festival

25 March to 3 April 2021

The Essay Film Festival returns 25 March to 3 April for its 2021 edition, which this year will be held entirely online. The Essay Film Festival is supported by AHRC funded CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.

How will the festival work online?

All the films will be free and open to anyone in the UK. To watch the films, visit our online screening room, where you will be able to view all the films at a time that suits you. The screening room does not require any sign-ups or downloads. While most of this material will be made available for the entire festival window (25 March to 3 April), one or two items will be up for a more limited period, so you should check the window of availability for each film. 

What about live events?

Our programme of live events – open to audiences globally – includes artists’ and curators’ talks, conversations with filmmakers and discussions with critics and researchers. These will take place online, via a platform called Collaborate, which is very simple to use. Book your place on our website (http://www.essayfilmfestival.com), and we will send you a link to join us on the day: again, you do not need to create an account or download any software.

What is in the programme this year?

For us the essay film is a critical intervention in the world, combining a passion for investigating reality and for asking tough questions about society with an open, inventive and even playful approach to film language and forms of representation.

This year’s programme reflects that dynamic ambition for the essay film, with a wide range of contemporary and archival works from different parts of the world, accompanied by live talks and conversations featuring artists and researchers.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich will give a talk about her forthcoming project on Suzanne Césaire, alongside a selection of her short films exploring alternative voices and narratives from African-American history.

Cauleen Smith will be joining us to discuss a programme of her experimental works reflecting her longstanding interest in Afro-futurism and jazz, especially Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra.

Two programmes of short films by Kevin Jerome Everson focus on themes of labour and place, which the artist will further develop in an illustrated talk and conversation.

From the Asian Film Archive we share Monographs, a series of video essays responding to the uncertainties of the pandemic from ten contemporary Asian artists, some of whom will be speaking at the festival with critic and essayist Kevin B. Lee.

John Gianvito will be in conversation about his latest film, Her Socialist Smile, an historical essay about Helen Keller that foregrounds her radical politics and commitment to social justice.

Nuria Giménez’s My Mexican Bretzel uses found footage and literary invention to play with the conventions of film portraiture and highlight the invisibility of women’s histories – themes that the artist will discuss in a live conversation.

An extended programme around the work of Jenny Brady features three of her own films and three films curated by the artist, alongside a talk about her current research into musical performance and the sonic practice of Alvin Lucier.

Our archival section showcases films by Med Hondo and Sidney Sokhona, both representing critically the lives of African workers in France in the 1970s; writer Assia Djebar’s filmic reinterpretation of colonial travelogues and newsreels shot in Algeria; and the collaborative films of Yugantar, India’s first feminist film collective.

This year’s programme closes with a study day devoted to Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, specifically his films Man Marked for Death, Last Conversations and the unfinished A Day in Life.

Come and join us!

On behalf of the Essay Film Festival: Matthew Barrington, Lauren Collee, Kieron Corless, Catherine Grant, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Janet McCabe, Raquel Morais, Laura Mulvey, Michael Temple

Full programme and practical information: http://www.essayfilmfestival.com

The Essay Film Festival is supported by CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership

National Archives: Introduction to archival research days

You may be interested in the following announcement from the National Archives which includes information about online ‘Introduction to Archival Research’ sessions.

The National Archives holds one of the largest collections in the world, containing over 11 million historical government and public records. From Domesday Book to the Leveson Enquiry, our records offer students a myriad of untapped research opportunities across a wide range of time periods and disciplines.

With so many options, however, getting started in the archives can be a daunting prospect. Many students have questions which they are too afraid to ask. How will I know where to go? What do I need to bring with me? How do I find records for my research? How do I order documents? Do I need to use gloves? How can I be sure I’m not wasting my time?

This introduction day will explain how to get started with archival research, the importance of knowing the history and structure of a collection to navigate the records, and how to make the most of your time on site.

Our upcoming events

Our next ‘Introduction to Archival Research’ sessions will be held entirely online on the following dates:

Monday 1 February 2021: Find out more and book your place

Monday 8 February 2021: Find out more and book your place

Monday 15 February 2021: Find out more and book your place

Monday 22 February 2021: Find out more and book your place

These sessions are are aimed at third year undergraduate and postgraduate students. Registration this year will be at a reduced rate of £5. While this workshop will be entirely presented online, we hope that students will be able to join us back at Kew for our Skills and Methodology workshops, which will be held in June 2021.

If you have any questions, please email past@nationalarchives.gov.uk. 

LGBT History Month and International Women’s Day

For LGBT+ History Month in February and International Women’s Day in March, the Access and Engagement Department is looking for two Birkbeck PhD candidates or early career researchers to deliver an accessible public lecture or workshop for an audience with little to no experience of Higher Education. If you are interested in doing this please get in contact by 12 February.

Our public lecture series, Get Started: Big Ideas, was previously delivered in Stratford Library, in collaboration with Newham Council. Through the pandemic we have been delivering the talks on Zoom and broadcasting using YouTube live.

The themes this year are ‘Body, Mind, Spirit’ (for LGBT History Month) and ‘Gender Equality in Eudcation’ (for International Women’s Day), so we will be looking for pitches that take these themes into account.

WHO? 
We’re looking for Birkbeck academics, particularly PhD students and early career researchers, whose research touches on topics relevant to LGBT+ History Month or International Women’s Day.

WHAT? 
Our audience consists of people with no experience of Higher Education, or those who have had a long break since their last HE experience. With that in mind, we will work closely with the academic to ensure the lecture is accessible to these audiences. More information on our department’s work.

We are open to pitches of lectures (roughly 20 minutes in length), workshops, virtual walks, or other formats that you feel would be engaging. This would usually be followed by a Q&A.

PAYMENT 
We are able to pay PhD candidates or academics who are not on full-time contracts. The pay is at spine point 31 (£21.15 per hour) and we would usually allow for 2 hours’ prep time and 1 hour delivery. In this case we will also be adding 1 hour to allow for familiarising yourself with any software needed. Please do get in touch if you have a proposal which would exceed the allotted time.

If you have any questions, please drop us a line at getstarted@bbk.ac.uk.