Staff Newsletter 24 November 2023

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

Chloe Mitchell - PA to HoD

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. 

Seminars taking place next week 

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 :)

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

• Click here to join the LCAB talk on Zoom
• Meeting ID: 961 6675 0675 
• Passcode: 641881

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!

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:

• S1 Week 1 Message from DfS
• S1 Week 2 Message from DfS
• S1 Week 3 Message from DfS
• S1 Week 4 Message from DfS
• S1 Week 5 Message from DfS
• S1 Week 6 Message from DfS
• S1 Week 7 Message from DfS

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:

• been interviewed for a BBC Science in Focus article.
• launched a new policy for Indoor Air regulations to coincide with World Ventil8 Day and in conjunction with the WHO.
• been interviewed for a podcast with the RSC on indoor air quality.

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 👏

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.

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 🙂