Dr Alister Smith: Fellowship Inaugural Lecture

27 April, 12.30 – 1.30pm, Online

Dr Alister Smith who holds a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Engineering, will present the next lecture of this year’s Fellowship Inaugural Lecture series.

Organised by the Institute of Advanced Studies and the Loughborough University Research Staff Association, this series showcases Loughborough University’s Research Fellows, who present their cutting-edge research and outline their career to date.

In this talk entitled Listening to Infrastructure: Acoustic Emission Monitoring in Geotechnical Engineering, Dr Smith will discuss the urgent need for improved and affordable health monitoring capability to facilitate geotechnical infrastructure stewardship (e.g. slopes, foundations, dams and pipes) as a result of existing infrastructure assets deteriorating, and new assets being designed and constructed to withstand uncertain future conditions.

Find out more information on the events page.

Risk, A.I & Belonging: Libby Heaney in Conversation with Simone Natale

27 April, 6 – 7.30pm, Online

Radar has teamed up with the Disasters Deconstructed podcast to put together this special episode featuring physicist Libby Heaney in conversation with the media theorist Simone Natale. They’ll discuss the risks AI is supposed to mitigate; the risks of AI itself; and whether AI might be used in the formation of new forms of belonging, rather than in the service of division.

Find out more information on the events page.

Mathematics Education Centre seminar

28 April, 10am – 12:15pm, Online

Featuring Professor Kerry Lee, ‘Helping children with low math and work memory performances: a glimmer of hope for computerised interventions’ and Tom Francome ‘How mixed-attainment grouping affects the way students experience mathematics’.

Find out more information on the events page.

Anarchism Research Group Seminar: Erica Lagalisse – Occult Features of Anarchism

28 April, 2 – 3pm, Online

In this seminar, Erica Lagalisse presents Occult Features of Anarchism – With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples (2019, PM Press) and discusses the book and the challenges of public scholarship.

Occult Features of Anarchism is a historical study that explores the gendered cosmology of the modern Left to build an anti-colonial critique of anarchism, commenting on the cultural production of ‘conspiracy theory’ in the process.

Find out more on the events page.

BERG seminar: Reducing extreme heat in sub-Saharan African dwellings

28 April, 4 – 5pm, Online

Climate change presents a rapidly growing threat to the health of people living in the Global South, especially those in low-income urban settlements. The buildings people occupy can worsen the effects of extreme heat, but effective modifications to buildings could improve the indoor environment for occupants.

This seminar, hosted by the Building Energy Research Group, will explore ways to reduce extreme heat exposure in dwellings in Ghana, Tanzania, and Malawi. There will be five speakers, with a question and answer session afterwards.

Find out more on the events page.

Four Faces of Omarska: Open Video Sequence, Public Montage #1

28 April, 6 – 8pm, Online

This ‘public montage’ event consists of a screening of the latest iteration of Milica Tomić’s video work Four Faces of Omarska: Open Video Sequence, followed by a public discussion with invited guests, which will inform future iterations of the work. It will address the mutual discontinuities and continuities of a single site in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina as a means of surveying the demise of socialist Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav society. With a specific focus on the privatisation process and transition from societal property socialism to capitalism, the session will also explore the theoretical, methodological and practical challenges of presenting visual documentation of collective investigative processes. Those present will be invited to participate in this process, with various contributions subsequently being added to the existing ‘open video sequence’ through future iterations of the work.

The event has been curated by Lívia Páldi, and commissioned by Radar and the AHRC Research Network ‘Interdisciplinary perspectives in transitional justice’. Dr Cristian Tileagă of Loughborough University’s School of Social Sciences and Humanities, who leads this network, will provide an introduction to the event and situate it in relation to the network’s work.

Find out more information on the events page.

IAS Time Theme: Friends and Fellows Coffee Morning

29 April, 11am – 12pm, Online

We will be hosting an IAS Friends and Fellows Coffee Morning, where we will be joined by our visiting fellows for the third Time Theme workshop.

The visiting Fellows are:

• Professor John Bowen (University of York) – Just in Time
• Professor John Bateman (University of Bremen, Germany) – Semiosis and Time: A View from Multimodality Theory
• Professor Valeriy O. Yampol’s’kyy and Professor Oleg V. Usatenko (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kharkov) – Stationary Ergodic Markov Chains with Long-Range Memory and their Applications to Literary Texts and DNA Sequences
• Professor Claire Warwick (Durham University) – ‘The intersection of the Timeless with Time’: Digital Text and the Disruption of Temporality
• Dr Gabriele Balbi (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland) and Dr Maria Rikitianskaia (LSE, UK) – Media as timekeepers: History and Categorization of Time Signals

All are welcome to attend. Find out more on the events page.

Time, Text and Media – IAS Time Theme Workshop

30 April, 12.30 – 5pm, Online

Join the third IAS Time Theme Workshop which will be looking at Time, Text and Media.

Time is one of the fundamental dimensions of human existence and human experience. Texts, which incorporate and relate human experience, unfold in space and time and traditional texts (literary and non-literary) reproduce the passing of time through the lenses of human experience.

Find out more on the events page.

Self-Care Sundays: Creative Writing

2 May, 4pm, Online

ow many of us love the idea of writing a piece of fiction but don’t know where to start? Join two Loughborough University students as they help you unlock your potential and develop your descriptive writing using images.

In this session you will explore literary techniques and their significance as well as learning how to employ them in your writing. You’ll go over the basics of how to construct a successful paragraph which will help you engage your reader in a more creative and unique way.

The session will involve the use of images to spur your imagination and help you produce a captivating piece of work. Image-based writing can be therapeutic and allows you to channel your energy in a creative format – the perfect way to finish a weekend and set you up for the week ahead! Find out more on the events page.