SeNSS Director's Bulletin August 2020
Dear SeNSS community,
I hope you’re all enjoying the summer as best you can. Let me offer a brief roundup of SeNSS news as the outgoing Director.
Our summer conference was a big success, with over 100 students, pathway chairs and speakers taking part. I’d like to offer huge thanks to all those who contributed.
As ever, our Student Forum played a key part in planning and running many of the conference sessions. We’re very pleased to welcome 3 new members to the Forum, Blair Welsh (Essex), Chloe Place (Sussex) and Debra Page (Reading); and to convey our thanks to those stepping down, Abigail Burgess (Goldsmiths), Gozde Hussain (Royal Holloway) and Jill Juergensen (Reading).
We’re also very pleased to welcome our new cohort of students and postdoctoral fellows who will be joining us in 2020-21. Our formal induction event will take place virtually in October and the core team will be sending out details in due course. A highlight will be the launch of the second edition of Sentio, our student-led journal, and a chance to join the editorial team for the third edition.
There are two active SeNSS studentships competitions running at present. Our supervisor-led collaborative competition closes 21 September 2020 and there’s still time to submit proposals and to seek advice about this opportunity. If you are a supervisor involved in environmentally-linked collaborations with external partners, please also consider submitting a proposal to our joint ESRC/NERC studentship competition by 11 September.
We continue to develop our collaborations with businesses through the Impact Accelerator Account (IAA) Business Boost scheme. The current programme of activities is available here.
Our training offer continues to expand. Our planned series on Sensory Methods will run as soon as social distancing protocols allow. This summer, as well as Business Boost 2020 activities, we bought online free access to SAGE Campus and you can still view the recorded sessions of the Webinar Series that we ran in GIS and Storymapping, Webscraping and Qualitative Digital research methods. Access to all virtual activity can be found on the SeNSS Virtual Training Pages on the VLE. Click here to access the SeNSS Virtual Training Pages.
We are also preparing to commission further training to take a deeper dive into some of the topics and sessions covered at the Summer Conference, including decolonising your research, imposter syndrome, and podcast and media training. Our fortnightly zoom Pathway catch-ups will take a break in August, but will pick up again in September. I very much hope that these catch-ups, together with our Plan B programme, have played a part in helping all of us as researchers to adapt our research plans in the face of this unparalleled pandemic.
Finally, I’d like to wish my successor, Ismene Gizelis, every success. Ismene is a Professor of Government at the University of Essex and has served as Deputy Dean for Postgraduate Research and Education for its Faculty of Social Sciences. You’ll see from her profile that she specializes in peacekeeping and conflict dynamics - useful skills indeed for any DTP Director!
On a personal note, I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to the SeNSS core team, Felicity, Paul, Abi and Elliott, and to Fragkiskos as Deputy Director, for their invaluable support and hard-working commitment to this consortium.
With my very best wishes,
Pam
Prof Pamela Cox
Outgoing Director, SeNSS DTP