📰 Staff Newsletter 16 February 2024
- Annabel Jackson (Deactivated)
Important Information
International Women's Day celebrations!
Click here to sign up for a session of inspiring talks on Tues 5th March, “Beyond the Norm: Narratives of Academic Achievement Amidst Challenges." The session will be chaired by the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Enterprise, Partnerships & Engagement, Prof Kiran Trehan. Prof Sarah West will be sharing her unconventional journey to becoming a professor and Dr Karen Parkhill will be sharing her inspiring story of triumph. Reserve your spot and be part of this empowering event!
There will also be a Wall of inspirational women displayed in the Environment Foyer - submit a poster for the Wall by 23rd Feb! There is a condensed version if you are pressed for time. The Wall will be available to view all week between 4th and 8th March.
Click here to sign up for our International Potluck lunch on Fri 8th March between 12pm and 2pm. Please join us and bring something delicious, either sweet or savoury, that represents you/your culture!
Departmental Events
Speaker: Amy Thompson
Title: Evaluating inequality and human-environment interactions among the Maya: Geospatial perspectives on societies past and present
Blurb
Dr. Amy Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. In her presentation she will be exploring inequality among and within Mayan communities. Inequality is present in nearly all human societies. Today, we experience wealth inequality in our daily lives materialized through differences in incomes, technologies, and personal and professional networks. In the past, wealth differences were often displayed through prestige goods and the size of domestic spaces. Here, she evaluates wealth inequality based on size differences and distributions of residential units, addressing both spatial and temporal trends. Using GIS, she explores disparities at a macro-level scale of the entire Maya region, and at a micro-level scale, within Maya communities. She also evaluates the distribution of inequality and differential access to resources in the Classic period (250 – 800 CE) and modern times. Understanding the complex relationships of past and present communities on the same landscapes help elucidate how processes of inequality and human-environment interactions may affect current and future communities, potentially providing insights on how to mitigate the long-term effects of inequality in varying social and environmental conditions.
Speaker: Dr David Cross
Title: Climate Justice: students and staff for whole institution transformation
Blurb
This seminar will begin with a presentation narrating a series of actions and encounters by students and staff to advance Climate Justice in one UK university. Aligned with the principles of transformative learning (Freire, 1970), we have critically engaged with our conditions of education, to offer a model of learning that bridges the separation between the university’s curriculum and its operations, and aspires to Whole Institution Transformation (UNESCO, 2017).