This Summer School will give PhD students exposure to high quality research being conducted on sustainability from across the sciences, the opportunity to learn from these research experiences and practices and to share common experiences in both researching and writing work which can lead to high quality outputs and dissemination outlets. It aims to serve a wide range of student interests and career plans not just those that consider themselves to be working in the field of sustainability.

We hope that the week will also provide an interdisciplinary forum for researchers to exchange their ideas, plans and needs in their fields. Allowing for the opportunity to discuss the opportunities and challenges for achieving a more joined-up approach to improving the social, economic and environmental wellbeing of society, and how to develop a more integrated approach to stakeholder engagement.

To find out more or to book a place, please click here.

This is a week long Summer School and you are expected to attend all sessions. However, if you are interested in attending one of the sessions on a stand alone basis please email ugc@cardiff.ac.uk as it may be possible to accommodate your request.

Promoting Collaborative Skills Development by Engaging Local Communities.
An Interdisciplinary Symposium in Collaboration with the Fulbright Commission and Butetown History & Arts Centre.

Thursday 6 June 2013
9.00 a.m. – 4.45 p.m.
Butetown History & Arts Centre

www.bhac.org

The Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory is currently running a student-led, AHRC-funded Collaborative Skills Development Project. This project seeks to build new skills related to the impact and engagement agendas among members of the up and coming generation of PhD students and Early Career Researchers.

This upcoming symposium will enable participants to reflect on issues related to public engagement.

The theme of the symposium is “Engaged Research”,  and it will address the following questions:

• What is community engagement?
• What is the responsibility of researchers to local communities?
• By what means is authentic community engagement actualised?

Please Register by 30 May 2013. A registration form and more information is available here.

The cost of attendance including lunch and refreshments is £15.  Cardiff students should ask their home departments about institutional funding.

Thursday 25 April 2013, 13.00 -16:00
Main Building

Postgraduate Researchers play an important part in the University’s public engagement. Whether as part of big events that draw in hundreds of schoolchildren, small group sessions, or individual ventures, students are often at the heart of these activities.

This exciting University Graduate College event will showcase this activity with talks, posters and hands-on demonstrations, and is open to anyone from Cardiff University. Lunch and a wine reception will be provided.

Postgraduate Researchers can book online here.

All other bookings to be made by email to ugc@cardiff.ac.uk

Programmes can be found below:

Following the success of the pilot scheme, we are pleased to announce that a regular Support Scheme is now in place.

For further information, please click here

‘Once Nature becomes environmentalized, its workings are submitted to the competing environmentality designs of various ecocritics’ – Timothy W. Luke

This conference seeks to shed new light on how researchers across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences conceive the interface between human behaviour and the natural environment not simply as a matter of scientific fact but as a problem for critical thought and cultural analysis. As the ecological crisis escalates, traditional conceptions of nature as the materially secure bedrock on which our social and cultural experiences are built appear increasingly obsolete.

We invite participants to respond to this critical ecological situation in ways which explore different senses of the word ‘critical’ and offer new perspectives on the environment as a field of contested meanings and practices. As new conditions force us to rethink the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the cultural and the natural, the organic and the inorganic, we must also rethink disciplinary boundaries and how we can communicate across them. In bringing a range of researchers from different backgrounds together around the term ‘critical ecologies’, we hope to exploit these shifting territories in order to suggest an expansive and inclusive conception of ecological research as a mode of critical and cultural inquiry.

This event will generate dialogue and exchange on how we, in Timothy W. Luke’s words, ‘environmentalize’ nature according to the competing designs of our different research strategies and theoretical concerns and how these differences may suggest the contours of a common ground. Topics might include, but are by no means confined to, the following:

• Environmental ethics and ecophilosophy – are there specifically ecological ways of thinking, being, and acting?
• Climate change and the media
• Environmental literary and film studies
• Connections between critical and cultural theory and green politics
• The relations between site-specific practices (walking, observing, gardening etc.) and ecological thought
• Environmental crisis and apocalyptic narratives in popular culture
• Science studies and theories of the nature/culture divide
• Environmental aspects of space and spatiality
• Green strategies in art and design
• Eco-psychology and ecological theories of affect and emotion
• Animal studies and species extinction
• Ecological cultural criticism and the challenges of interdisciplinarity
• Political ecology and gender and queer studies

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to criticalecologies@cardiff.ac.uk no later than Tuesday 30 April 2013.

Thursday 25 April 2013, 13.00 -16:00
Main Building

Postgraduate Researchers play an important part in the University’s public engagement. Whether as part of big events that draw in hundreds of schoolchildren, small group sessions, or individual ventures, students are often at the heart of these activities.

This exciting University Graduate College event will showcase this activity with talks, posters and hands-on demonstrations, and is open to anyone from Cardiff University. Refreshments will be provided.

Postgraduate Researchers can book online here.

All other bookings to be made by email to ugc@cardiff.ac.uk.

We are also looking for students who have been involved in public engagement work in its broadest terms to present their activity at this event with 5 minute talks, posters or stalls with hands on demonstrations. If you would like to take part, please email ugc@cardiff.ac.uk.

Programmes below:

The School would like to present an evening of music and poetry on Wednesday 15 May (time and venue yet to be finalised), providing a great opportunity for some of Cardiff’s post-graduate artistic talent to go on display.

If you are a musician, member of a small group or ensemble, singer or poet in any language, and would be interested in taking part, please get in touch with some details describing your style and experience. We would love to capture the international spirit of the university with performances from a range of cultural backgrounds and languages.

(Note: it is unlikely that we will be using a sophisticated sound-system so you will need to be able to perform acoustically or with a basic mic/amp/speaker set-up. Also – so that we do not raise expectations of international fame too high – not all delegates will arrive in time for the opening on Wednesday, so we should not expect a full turn-out as audience!)

If interested, please email waltonRW@cf.ac.uk by Friday 29 March.

Awards of up to £500 are available to either develop or run a new engagement project or to bring a public engagement element to an existing project. The scheme is open to academic staff and PhD researchers in all academic schools.

The deadline for applications is 5 April and application forms can be downloaded from the Community Engagement Team Small Grants webpage.

If you have questions or would like to discuss your application with the team, please contact community@cardiff.ac.uk.

Keynote address: Dr Andrew Edgar School of English, Communication and Philosophy) ‘Postemotional Society and the Philosophy of Sport’

Registration is now open for delegates for the 8th and largest ever Voice of Humanities Conference.  The Voice of Humanities is a popular interdisciplinary conference organised by postgraduate researchers within Cardiff University.

With over 20 speakers, this year’s conference brings together a range of papers around a number of themes: communication in the modern world, frontiers, borders and individuals in conflict, disempowerment, religious and migration studies, and Welsh identity.

Speakers are all postgraduates or independent researchers at the cutting edge of their fields. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference brings together an impressive range of perspectives and approaches.  From post modernism, linguistics and discourse analysis to ancient history, musicology and psychoanalysis, the conference is an ideal opportunity for intellectually stimulating networking.

Alongside our speakers, we also have a range of posters displaying new and exciting research from a variety of humanities disciplines.

The conference is free, but anyone wishing to attend is asked to book in advance.  For further information and to download a booking form, please click here or email VoiceOfHumanities@cf.ac.uk

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Dr Eileen Brennan (St Patrick’s College Drumcondra)
Dr Elizabeth Wren-Owens (Cardiff University)

Considering translation as both a linguistic and ontological phenomenon, this conference centres on the exchange of ideas across the humanities and social sciences. We are looking for doctoral students from a variety of disciplines to consider how the theme of translation relates to their own research and how their work relates to other researchers both within their subject area and in different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. Some of the most important intellectual ideas have emerged in the crossing of disciplinary boundaries and this conference would like to consider how this interdisciplinary exchange and translation of ideas functions today.

The full Call for Papers can be found below:

Translations Conference 2013 – Call for Papers

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted to TranslationsConference@cf.ac.uk by March 24. Please include a brief biographical note. If accepted, papers should be no more than 20 minutes long.

An abstract submission form and further information can be found here.