Staff Newsletter 24 November 2023

Owned by Chloe Mitchell (Deactivated)
Last updated: 23 Nov, 2023
10 min read

Morning all 🌳 The UoY Learning and Teaching fund scheme is now open for applications, and there's plenty of seminars and events to keep you busy (thumbs up)

Chloe Mitchell - PA to HoD

Important Information

(lightbulb) Top Tip

Did you know that all staff can book rooms across campus? Visit our Book a room Wiki page to find out which rooms in the building and beyond are available to book and how to do it. There are also links to further room details, such as capacity, equipment and accessibility information. 

If you are having trouble finding free rooms in Semester 2, note that many rooms across the campus will currently be reserved until the teaching timetable is released in early December. Most departments have one or two rooms specifically for department staff meeting use only (such as our Boardroom ENV031). As these will never be used for teaching, they can be booked further in advance. 

Departmental Seminars

Seminars taking place next week 


DEG Seminar - In person (hybrid)

Date / Time: Tuesday 28 November, 12:00-13:00

Location: ENV005 Lecture Theatre (and on Zoom if needed)

We encourage attendees to join us in person where possible to give our speaker a warm welcome, but if you can't make it to the building, you can click here to join on Zoom

Speaker name: Tom Chudley

Chair: David Rippin

Title: Crevasse-based controls on the hydrology and dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Blurb

The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is the largest contributor to global sea-level rise (SLR) from the cryosphere, with losses split approximately equally between surface melt and ice discharge into the ocean. A key uncertainty in quantifying 21st-century SLR is the extent to which meltwater modulates ice losses as it is transported to the base of the ice and, ultimately, the ocean. Half of Greenland’s seasonal melt is transferred to the bed of the sheet through crevasse fields, with implications for ice rheology, subglacial hydrology, iceberg calving, and subsequent feedbacks in ice dynamics. Despite increasing observations of the diversity and complexity of crevasse hydrology, crevasse drainage mechanics are poorly understood – particularly in comparison to other water pathways (lake drainage, moulins, finer-scale fractures) – and the vast majority of ice sheet models neglect to include crevasses at all. In this talk, I will outline the recent work I have been doing to help address the knowledge gap surrounding crevasse hydrology. I will discuss field-based observations of crevasses and their hydrology, recent advances in obtaining ice-sheet-wide observations from remote sensing, and potential links between crevasse drainage behaviour and ice dynamics. My ultimate aim is to use these derived relationships to properly parameterise spatially heterogenous crevasse hydrological behaviour into coupled models of Greenland Ice Sheet hydrology-dynamics.

Speaker Bio

Tom is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Sea Level, Ice and Climate Research Cluster in the Department of Geography at Durham University. He obtained his PhD from the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, where he was part of the ERC-funded RESPONDER project and developed UAV-based methods to detect ice sheet dynamics at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Following this, he undertook a postdoc at the Ohio State University, working with Prof Ian Howat on detecting ice-sheet-change from large-scale velocity and elevation datasets. His fellowship is combining Earth observation, fieldwork, and numerical modelling to understand how crevasses will control the future of sea level rise from the Greenland Ice Sheet.


Sustainability Education Conversations

Date / Time: Wednesday 29 November, 12:05-13:00

Location: Online only - click this link to join the SEC


Speaker: Sarah Clayton

Title: Climate Education Essentials

Blurb: Explore the evolving landscape of climate change education in this engaging seminar session. As movements like Teach the Teacher and Teach the Future advocate for the integration of climate change into the curriculum, the question emerges: What do all young people need to know about climate change?  In this session, I present the initial findings of my research. Focused on discerning the fundamental concepts that secondary science students should grasp before completing compulsory education, my study taps into the insights of secondary science teachers, climate scientists, and youth climate activists. Together, we'll explore the identified threshold concepts and engage in a thoughtful discussion about the challenges of defining something as 'threshold' and prioritizing these crucial concepts







Department Events

Save the date! DEG Festive Potluck/Moving Feast! Thursday 14th December, 13:00-16:00 🎄

  • Where: Environment & Geography building
  • Who: All staff/PGRs, including BioArch and SEI-Y
  • What: Everyone is invited to bring in drinks and dishes from their culture/home/that they like making, to share with the rest of the department!

Further details will be circulated next week but for now this festive celebration should appear in your calendar - if not please email Annabel Jackson at environment-pa@york.ac.uk :)

Other Events

Not-Just-Human Cultural Restoration: Opportunities for a Law Beyond the Human

Date / time: Monday 27 Nov 2023 / 13:00

In person venue: Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, Top floor, Berrick Saul Building, Campus West

Speakers: Joshua Sterlin - McGill University / Emille Boulot - University of Tasmania

Blurb: Contemporary legal governance is built upon an ontological bifurcation that assumes a divide between nature (the beings and earth systems on which we depend and with whom we relate) and humans (our internal political sphere). The ‘environment’ is abstracted and reified from the social context, becoming passive, and without agency, becoming an object for extraction. Environmental law, built upon these foundations largely specifies “allowable harm rather than adjudicating on mutually enhancing relations” (Boulot and Sterlin 2021:1). But what if we were to have a legal system that sought to foster and govern ‘mutually enhancing relations’ between the non-human and human? What would this look like?

In response to the substantial harms caused by extractivism, there have been calls for, and increasing practices of, restoration, rewilding, and rehabilitation. It is also clear that we need to not only restore the ecosystems in which we are enmeshed, but also our own social, political, and legal systems so as to adapt them to living in a wilder world. Restoration is a practice that necessarily involves active management and engagement with the social ecologies, where practitioners acknowledge and seek to remediate past damage rather than simply forestall future damage. When practiced in a way that recognizes the place of the human within social ecologies it has the potential to ‘decenter’ the subject of environmental law, eroding the ontological bifurcation described above. As such it holds out prospects for relations which are life sustaining, which is the motivating focus of our case study for identifying associated opportunities for environmental law and governance. This presentation will set out a detailed research proposal which aims to examine restoration examples across Western states to ask what are appropriate modes of living and governing in more-than-human worlds, and what are appropriate legalities in this process?

Bios: Joshua Sterlin is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Canada, and is a member of the Leadership for the Ecozoic project. His scholarly training is in anthropology, holding an Msc in People and Environment (Anthropology) from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. His research ethnographically focuses on the growing nature-connection movement in North America, examining the means and methods in which these modern groups are attempting to ‘rewild’ not only themselves, but their cultures. He has extended this research studying the rewilding of Western cultures, and thinking animacy otherwise, by applying this lens to the genre of horror, as well as to the development of a law beyond the human. Joshua is a recipient of the Graduate Excellent Award, the Transnational Environmental Law best article prize for 2022, and a board member of Hunter-Gatherer Research. When not doing all the above, you can find him canoeing Québec’s north. You can reach him at: joshua.sterlin@mail.mcgill.ca 

Emille Boulot is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She has completed her PhD at McGill University in Canada, and is a member of the Leadership for the Ecozoic project. Emille is also an Australian lawyer and holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Governance. Her research interests encompass a diverse range of topics, including environmental law and regulation, regulatory theory, interdisciplinary policy research and Indigenous legal rights. Emille is a Lionel Murphy Postgraduate scholar, a board member of the Australian Environment Review, and a research fellow with both the Earth System Governance Project and the Ecological Law and Governance Association. Along with Joshua, she is the recipient of the Transnational Environmental Law best article prize for 2022. Emille enjoys biking, hiking, and spending time at the beach with her dogs. You can reach her at: emille.boulot@utas.edu.au 

Research Coding Club - Intro to Version Control

Date / time: Wednesday 29 November / 14:00-16:00

In person venue: James College PC Room G/N/169

Online link: You can also join the Research Coding Club session online by clicking this link.

Next Wednesday, Research Coding Club will be running our perennial hands-on introduction to version control. Version control is a really useful skill for software development, whether you're writing small analysis scripts or huge HPC simulations. In this session we'll cover the basics of using git for your own projects, as well as the popular GitHub service for collaborating with others. Whether you're a complete beginner or just need a refresher, everyone is welcome!

Feel free to bring along your own laptop -- if you do, please install git beforehand. If you prefer to use a GUI, then I recommend installing Github Desktop. You might also find it useful to sign up for GitHub before the session starts.

Dr Peter Hill (he/him) - EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellow - York Plasma Institute

Ghost Signs: Preserving faded history and public memory

Date / time: Thursday 30 November / 12:00-13:00

In person venue: ENV005 (Environment & Geography lecture theatre)

Speaker: Tyson Mitman - York St John University

The Ghost Signs Project looks at the faded signage that exists around us in York, and attempts to use it to better understand York's commercial history, how it has developed, and how these developments can inform how the life, culture, commercial values, and aesthetics of the city has shifted over time. This project has just been funded through Historic England, and is in its very early stages. This talk will discuss the inspiration for the project, the research in its current stage, and what the goals of the project are. The purpose of this is to encourage the audience to engage with the city in a new way, both ideologically and visually. The encouraged shift in perspective will hopefully inspire the audience to reimagine the city as a kind of open-air museum to itself that helps connect public space to public and personal memory, which makes the everyday experience of the city more interactive and special.

The Ghost Signs seminar will also be on Zoom, but we do encourage you to attend in person if you possibly can - it's always nice to have a good turnout for our visitors!

Good News and Media Engagement

Our wonderful Director for Students, Samarthia Thankappan is back with her weekly audio messages for students. Click the links below to listen to Samarthia's messages:

Tao Li has had a new paper published in Nature Communications using deep sea corals to explore glacial melt in the past: 'Enhanced subglacial discharge from Antarctica during meltwater pulse 1A.

Felicia Liu, together with Winston Chow (Singapore Management University) and Karen Lai (Durham) successfully hosted an industry-facing workshop on 20th November titled "sustainable finance for green data centres" that interrogated the role of financial institutions in stewarding a low-carbon transition of data centres, and the growing digital economy that they support. The workshop was supported by the Singapore Green Finance Centre, SG Tech, and Jones Lang LaSalle. It was well attended by over 100+ delegates representing banks, asset managers, private equity, and family offices in Singapore.

Bryce Stewart was a panel member at an event at University College London titled 'Lessons learned from developing Highly Protected Marine Areas in the UK'. The event was attended by senior members of Defra along with fisheries managers, environmental groups, other academics and students

Nic Carslaw has recently:

Rebecca Newman has interviewed representatives from food strategy development from Lancaster, Hull, Leeds and Sheffield to understanding key factors supporting strategy implementation throughout October and November. 

The Careers Team has, so this month, met with North Yorkshire Council & Leeds City Region LEP and has plans to meet QSIpmact, Envance and Leaf Translations. If you would like to connect to any of these organisations please get in touch with the team via environment-careers@york.ac.uk

Well done everyone on your fantastic efforts and achievements 👏

Teaching Opportunities and Updates

See the latest UOY teaching opportunities below. I encourage all staff (T&S, ART) to apply for the funding scheme. The Department was successful last year in securing over £5,000 towards the revised fieldtrips so I can hope we can build on this success with one or more successful projects!

Adrian Gonzalez - DEG Director of Learning and Teaching

Launch of the University’s 2023-24 Learning & Teaching Fund 

The scheme will provide funding to support innovations and enhancements in learning, teaching and assessment at the UoY, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Staff can apply for grants of £1000-£10,000.

Click here to find out more about the UOY Learning and Teaching Fund criteria, thematic priorities and how to apply. The key dates are: 

  • Application deadline: 8th January, 2024
  • Communication of decisions: by 30th January, 2024
  • Project funds must be spent: 31st July, 2024

If you have any questions or would like to discuss an idea, get in touch with the Inclusive Education Team.

Assessment and Feedback Project: invitation to staff discussion events

The University's Assessment and Feedback Project is leading work to review assessment policies and approaches across the University of York. We want to hear from staff about the assessment and feedback principles that need to guide our assessments, and invite you to join an online discussion event to contribute your views and ideas. 

The events for staff will take place on: 

  • Wednesday 29th November, 1-2pm
  • Thursday 30th November, 1-2pm
  • Tuesday 5th December, 1-2pm

Please complete this form to indicate which of the Assessment and Feedback Project sessions you would like to attend.

Got an item for next week's newsletter?

Great! Please add it to the Research, Teaching, Outreach and Good News Spreadsheet. Please use the most relevant tab for the activity/news and ensure that the description details are written out in full as you would like it to be presented. If your item does not fit the spreadsheet, please email it to environment-pa@york.ac.uk by 10:00 next Friday.

Thank you for your help in making the newsletter a great way to catch up on all of the Department's latest news and activities 🙂