lectures

Have you been thinking about whether you might like to study at university? It doesn’t matter if it’s still just an idea or if you’ve found a course you’d love to study, our Get Started: Undergraduate Study Online Drop-in is for you. Book here. Who is the Get Started: Undergraduate Study Drop-in for? The workshop is for people who are thinking about potentially coming to study at university at undergraduate level, regardless of whether you know what you want to study or not. It's particularly relevant for people who have been out of formal study for a significant period of time to help them prepare for everything they need to know and do to study a university course. It will be delivered from a perspective that assumes attendees have little to no previous experience of studying at university, but you'll still be welcome even if you do and are looking to update your knowledge. What type of advice and questions will you be answering in the drop-in?  The week before the drop-in we will send you through five video resources. In these videos we talk about: Why Study at University?Making a Decision About UniversityWriting a Personal StatementHow to Apply to BirkbeckPreparing for Study The drop-in will give you the opportunity to ask any questions you might have after watching these videos. For example, you may have questions about whether to study part-time or full time or about how you would apply for a student loan. We will not be able to answer questions about specific courses at Birkbeck, but we can signpost you to who would be able to help! At the drop-in we'll also be joined by a current Birkbeck undergraduate student who can give you a real insight into what it is actually like studying at Birkbeck!  The session will be friendly and welcoming, and aims to show anyone who has been away from education for a while that there are lots of other people out there who are starting the journey back to study themselves, many with similar concerns and motivations. And we hope all participants will leave reassured that it’s never, never too late to study at university! I'm not confident online, how does the drop-in work? On the day of the drop-in, we'll send you through a link. All you need to do is click on the link which will take you through to a page where you will be able to see and hear us. You can enable your microphone at the bottom of the screen to ask us questions. There's no need to enable your video. If you'd rather not use your microphone, there's also a live chat function available where you can type your questions in and get real-time answers from us.  We’ve made a video which talks you through the process of logging on to the online platform we use, Collaborate, which you can watch here: https://birkbeck.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=0c7902e3-d359-4c39-a45b-abc200f97b55 Please note will not be providing in-depth subject specific guidance at this event. If you would like to find out more about course content then you can visit our website on www.bbk.ac.uk/study or alternatively there is a Virtual Open Evening on Thursday 2nd July. To find out more and to book a place on this event, visit www.bbk.ac.uk/prospective/open-evenings/open-events If you are interested in learning more about student finance, including student loans, grants and discounts, please contact the Student Advice Service.Guidance for attendees • This event is open to anyone who is interested in going to university to study a first degree or an introductory course. If you would like to study a Postgraduate course, then we are also offering a drop-in for that here • We encourage you to bring along questions or concerns, so that we can go through these with you. You will also be able to speak to a current Birkbeck student. • Please log on 10-15 minutes before the session to make sure there are no technical issues with your connection. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Accessibility information: If you have any questions beforehand or you still feel uncertain about joining the session, and would like to have a call with a current student at Birkbeck who can talk you through the process of joining, step-by-step, then please get in touch with us by emailing getstarted@bbk.ac.uk If you are under 18, please make sure you have an adult in the room with you whilst you participate in this session. Please contact us in advance of the event at getstarted@bbk.ac.uk with your accessibility requirements so that we can ensure you will be able to get the most from this event. For some requirements, e.g. BSL interpreters, we may need a few days' notice to make arrangements, so please let us know as soon as possible. Book here. Contact name: Access and Engagement Further details: More information about this event …

Book your place now 'Join me at The Mendfulness Clinic. In this online one-to-one performance, you and I will repair our tattered clothes together, attempting to mend society’s fraying relationship with the fabric we wear in the process. Fast fashion tells us to buy new – but what if we celebrated the history of our clothes, and how it shows on the fabric? This performance can accommodate a small number of participants only - first-come, first served.' Louise Wilcox is a multidisciplinary artist/performer. Her practice and work focus around her relationship to ‘femaleness’, exploring under/inadequately represented elements of gender. She is currently investigating how the traditionally ‘feminine’ process of crafting might help us confront challenging topics.Wilcox is part of Dirty Rascals Theatre. This is event is part of Arts Weeks 2020: Online. A number of days before the event, you will be emailed a link to access the online event. This year, Birkbeck Arts Week looks a bit different - we’re moving to the virtual sphere for five weeks of specially curated events and experiences. Receive each week’s online programme in your inbox on Mondays during the festival by signing up to our mailing list Contact name: Arts Week Team

An archival, memory based work, Love In The Time Of Corona investigates ageing, death, decay, deterioration, dis-ease, and tries to find equanimity during troubled, uncertain times... The artist invites the participation of the viewer in a live one-to-one virtual encounter in her home during lockdown, to share an intimate, unrepeatable moment, after days of solitude and isolation… This is the story of women who love too much. A story of unrequited love… How do we learn to love from a distance? What if social distancing becomes the norm? Is this about social care or social control? What will the impact of these times be on our society? Will things ever be the same again? Shabnam Shabazi has an archival practice and her signature theme is ‘home,’ exploring notions of home in multiple ways in and around her body. She is a multi-disciplinary maker and enabler of creative projects, working with object, video/digital media, installation, text/word, and has a solo and collaborative performance making practice. Love In The Time Of Corona is a commission from Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality for Birkbeck Arts Week 2020: online.   This is event is part of Arts Weeks 2020: Online. A number of days before the event, you will be emailed a link to access the online event. This year, Birkbeck Arts Week looks a bit different - it's moving to the virtual sphere for five weeks of specially curated events and experiences. You can receive each week's online programme in your email inbox on Mondays during the festival by signing up to their mailing list, and book events online here. Contact name: Lou Miller Further details: More information about this event …

Book your place now This event is sold out. Please join the the mailing list by clicking book now, a limited number of tickets may become available. An archival, memory based work, Love In The Time Of Corona investigates ageing, death, decay, deterioration, dis-ease, and tries to find equanimity during troubled, uncertain times...The artist invites the participation of the viewer in a live one-to-one virtual encounter in her home during lockdown, to share an intimate, unrepeatable moment, after days of solitude and isolation… This is the story of women who love too much. A story of unrequited love… How do we learn to love from a distance? What if social distancing becomes the norm? Is this about social care or social control? What will the impact of these times be on our society? Will things ever be the same again?After booking, you will recieve an email nearer the date of the performance with details of how to log in and participate.Shabnam Shabazi has an archival practice and her signature theme is ‘home,’ exploring notions of home in multiple ways in and around her body. She is a multi-disciplinary maker and enabler of creative projects, working with object, video/digital media, installation, text/word, and has a solo and collaborative performance making practice.Love In The Time Of Corona is a commission from Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality for Birkbeck Arts Week 2020: online. Read more:Shabnam Shabazi This is event is part of Arts Weeks 2020: Online. A number of days before the event, you will be emailed a link to access the online event. This year, Birkbeck Arts Week looks a bit different - we’re moving to the virtual sphere for five weeks of specially curated events and experiences. Receive each week’s online programme in your inbox on Mondays during the festival by signing up to our mailing list Contact name: Arts Week Team

Speaker: Clark Muenzer (Pennsylvania State University) Attendance free. This lecture has been postponed to 6 May 2021.

Book your place now The 2020 Birkbeck Medieval Seminar examines the stories of nature, landscape, and environment as they were told in the middle ages. Drawing on interdisciplinary discussions across history, literature, and archaeology, we explore how ecologies were not only encountered and perceived, but also constructed, imagined, and evoked. Participants in this seminar are invited to interrogate a range of topics, including: how people in the middle ages (broadly conceived) used narratives to define and frame interactions between humans and non-humans within the multi-species systems we now describe as ‘ecologies’; how topographies of culture and nature, of human work and natural agency, were negotiated in practice; and how culturally-determined approaches to texts and materials were used to structure approaches to, and understandings of, medieval environments. Rather than viewing the middle ages as a source of primitivist, harmonious ways of living with a now-estranged nature, this seminar playfully posits that ecological constructs such as ‘wild nature’ are medieval dreams from which we ‘moderns’ have not yet awoken. By focusing on narrative, we will explore how the making of places in landscape and the telling of places in text can occupy and operationalize the ‘same’ ecologies. Ultimately, the seminar seeks to explore the ways that narratives of nature constructed in the middle ages continue to shape how we think and feel about ecologies.  This event is organised by the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology and the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck. It is part of Birkbeck's Discover the Past series. To see the full list of events, visit the Discover the Past web page.  Photographs may be taken at this event for future use in printed and online publicity, and social media.   Contact name: Department of History, Classics and Archaeology

Birkbeck's Big Ideas is a series of thought-provoking free public lectures, delivered in the local community by Birkbeck researchers from a wide range of subject areas. Everyone is welcome to attend, regardless of previous educational experience, and the lectures are a chance to learn something new. Join us at Big Ideas' new home in Stratford Library, with a lecture to mark Adult Learners Week 2020. More information to follow. Book your place now Contact name: Access and Engagement Department

The E’s in interviews  Join an online public lecture where Dr Beverley Costa will be discussing how to conduct research interviews in sensitive contexts. The lecture will be followed by a short Q&A. This talk focuses on how to attend to equality, emotional expression, expectations, empathy, and ethics in research interviews in sensitive contexts. We consider issues of asymmetrical power dynamics in interviewing relationships. We consider how the pull of compassion can put a strain on ethical decision-making and compromise the safety of all the participants in a sensitive interview. We examine the perils as well as the benefits of empathic engagement if interviewers want to avoid their own secondary traumatisation. During the 30 minute-talk we hope that consideration of these issues will offer some answers to the question: How do we connect with people’s emotional states enough without matching their intensity?   Join our webinar by clicking on the link below at 6pm on Friday 19th June: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/6aeca22264bb4e04b256a407a17cafb2    Dr Beverley Costa is a Senior Practitioner Fellow in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck. After training as a group and individual psychotherapist and psychodramatist, Beverley Costa set up Mothertongue, a culturally and linguistically sensitive therapeutic support service for people from black and minority ethnic communities. She founded the Pasalo Project in 2017, which aims to share knowledge, ideas and experience from applied linguistics, psychotherapy and social care across borders and boundaries. Contact name: Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication

Book your place now Birkbeck has launched a new programme, 'Birkbeck Inspires', a free online events, activities and resources programme designed to inspire learning, provoke thought, and entertain and excite curious minds. We are all aware of the value of exercise for our physical health, but evidence suggests that exercise also has a key role to play in our well-being and in supporting learning.  Ana da Cunha Lewin, Chartered Psychologist and Programme Director of the Foundation Degree in Psychology for Education Professionals and BA Psychology for Education, will be delivering a live talk focusing on some simple strategies on utilising exercise to support and wellbeing and learning. There will also be an opportunity for a question and answer session with Ana da Cunha Lewin. Follow Birkbeck, University of London, on Facebook for regular updates on the series and visit www.bbk.ac.uk/birkbeck-inspires for content as its released as well as timings of future bookable live events. Contact name: Olivia James

Book your place now Birkbeck has launched a new programme, 'Birkbeck Inspires', a free online events, activities and resources programme designed to inspire learning, provoke thought, and entertain and excite curious minds. Eric Hobsbawm, by the time of his death in 2012 at the age of 95, was the best-known and most widely respected historian in the world. This is a conversation about Eric’s life and legacy, between Professor Julian Swann, Birkbeck’s Pro-Vice Master for Research, and Professor Sir Richard J Evans, historian and Fellow of the College and previously Birkbeck’s Acting Master as well as Professor of History and Head of Department. The event will start with a pre-recorded conversation between Professor Swann and Professor Evans. The video looks in detail into the life of Eric Hobsbawm, historian and former President of Birkbeck, with references to Professor Evans’s book “Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History”, published in February 2019. The biography was the first to be published, and used the vast mass of personal papers he left behind, as well as his published works, to portray his life in the round: not just as a historian but also as a political activist. After the video has played, there will be an opportunity for a live question and answer session with Professor Evans. Follow Birkbeck, University of London, on Facebook for regular updates on the series and visit www.bbk.ac.uk/birkbeck-inspires for content as its released as well as timings of future bookable live events. Contact name: Olivia James

Speaker: Katherine E. Calvert (University of Sheffield) Women’s choices about whether, when, and how to mother have long been contested in fierce political, religious, and ideological debates. This lecture analyses socialist women’s responses to, and shaping of, ideas about motherhood in Weimar Germany (1919-1933). By examining Frauenwelt, the women’s magazine of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) during the Weimar era, it will be shown that, despite campaigns to increase women’s access to birth control and provide better protections to single mothers, the left-wing women’s movement did little to challenge widely held essentialist ideas about women’s natural capacity for mothering. It will be contested that Frauenwelt’s promotion of normative ideas about women’s mothering not only reflected women’s continued acceptance of gendered divisions of labour, but also contributed to the perpetuation of such notions, and argued that, while socialist women of the post-World War I generation attempted to take greater ownership of their own mothering choices, the ideal of women’s mothering remained intact during this period, leaving supporters of the political left ill equipped to challenge effectively the rise of profoundly misogynistic policies on the far right in the late Weimar period.   The Sylvia Naish Lectures were launched in memory of Sylvia Naish, an accomplished linguist, translator, Friend of Germanic Studies, and benefactor of the former Institute of Germanic Studies. The lecture is chosen by competition from among the proposals submitted by research students registered for higher degrees at Universities in the United Kingdom.  All welcome. Please register in advance.  This lecture has been postponed to 22 October 2020.

Book your place now As museum professionals face the unprecedented challenge of caring for their collections during the global crisis of Covid-19, they possess one advantage – they often have previous experience of battling with disasters on a much smaller scale as part of their ordinary working life. Water leaks or pest infestations that might be unfortunate in a domestic setting can reach disastrous heights when applied to precious heritage collections and the fragile buildings that house them. Careful disaster planning can go some way to mitigate risk, but the unexpected can and does happen, often at the most inconvenient times. Times of crisis require very different styles of management to everyday museum life, and especially in smaller museums, curators and directors are required to develop new leadership skills under intense pressure. In this talk, Keeper of Medicine at the Science Museum Natasha McEnroe will share a personal reflection of her own working life in different museums, and the variety of disasters she has flinchingly faced, from rats to raw sewage. Contact name: Centre for Museum Cultures Further details: More information about this event …

Book your place now Led by artists Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, Blast Theory draw on popular culture, performance, technology and games, the work often blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional. In 2018 they were the first ever artists-in-residence at the World Health Organisation (WHO). They spent time at WHO’s Strategic Health Operations Centre, which monitors epidemics and pandemics across the world and coordinates international collaborative responses. The work prompted by their residency reflects on contagion and cities, and focuses on moments of uncertainty in public health decision making and the 2003 SARS epidemic. A Cluster of 17 Cases, was inspired by the story of 17 unsuspecting people who stayed on the 9th floor of a Hong Kong hotel on the night of Feb 21, 2003. These 17 people were subsequently identified as spreading the SARS virus to at least 546 people around the globe. Blast Theory’s work on infectious disease continued last year with Spit Spreads Death, an interactive parade of light and sound designed to remember the individuals who lost their lives and the health workers who put their own lives on the line in Philadelphia in 1918–19, when more than 12,000 people died in the deadliest flu pandemic the world has ever seen. Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures and Centre for Medical Humanities are delighted to present a live, online event during which Blast Theory will discuss their recent work and its implications for the current Covid-19 crisis. An open Q&A will follow the artists’ talk and panel discussion. Contact name: Centre for Museum Cultures Further details: More information about this event …

Book your place now Birkbeck has launched a new programme, 'Birkbeck Inspires', a free online events, activities and resources programme designed to inspire learning, provoke thought, and entertain and excite curious minds. Despite our best efforts to reassure them, many children will be experiencing anxiety at this time.  Dr Vanna Cotzia, Educational Psychologist and Lecturer in Educational Psychology, will be delivering a live talk focusing on strategies to reassure and support children and young people who may be experiencing anxiety. There will also be an opportunity for a question and answer session with Dr Cotzia. Follow Birkbeck, University of London, on Facebook for regular updates on the series and visit www.bbk.ac.uk/birkbeck-inspires for content as its released as well as timings of future bookable live events. Contact name: Olivia James

Book your place now When: throughout May, June and July (sign up through the individual event pages), 1pm - 2pm Where: online During May, June and July CIMR invites you to participate in three lunchtime one hour online debates on topical issues. In each, leading scholars and practitioners will present their ideas on current economic, innovation and policy issues, and you will have the chance to respond to their ideas. This event, the third in the series, will be given by Dr Federica Rossi and Dr Muthu De Silva on 'Science-business co-creation in the digital economy'. Dr Laura Kreiling, OECD Science and Technology Policy Division, Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, will be chairing this event.  Programme  Please sign up by 5pm on Monday 29th June. You will be sent a link to join ahead of the session.   Abstracts Why do we need science-based co-creation? Muthu De Silva, Leonid Gokhberg,  Dirk Meissner, Margherita Russo  For many years the transfer, exchange and collaboration of knowledge and technology between academia and industry have been discussed as an important means of generating commercial value. The underlying rationale for such collaborations is that knowledge and technology from academia lead to firms’ competitive advantage. What has received less attention in the literature, so far, is a science-based collaborative approach for addressing societal challenges. We develop a conceptual framework to address this gap in our knowledge.    Public innovation intermediaries and digital technology co-creation processes Annalisa Caloffi, Ana Colovic, Federica Rossi, Margherita Russo Innovation intermediaries can play an important role in helping companies to address the challenges brought about by the digital transformation. They can help companies to adopt and integrate new technological and organisational systems and processes, foster collaborations among SMEs and between SMEs and large companies, and unveil market opportunities. We discuss the specificities of the role of public innovation intermediaries in supporting the digital transformation. We build on a base of evidence composed of extensive interviews with selected public intermediaries in France and in the UK, innovation experts and companies, carried out between 2018 and 2019, to argue that public intermediaries, which carry public policy mandates, have a specific role to play, particularly in the context of the emerging, complex and yet not fully commoditised set of technologies underpinning the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.   Contact name: Alice Dowden

Book your place now Picturing Crisis: Historic England’s crowdsourced photographic collectionsTamsin Silvey, Cultural Programme Curator at Historic England In response to the Covid-19 lockdown, for the first time since the Second World War Historic England asked the public to capture a moment in time for the Historic England Archive, the nation’s archive for records of England’s historic buildings, archaeology and social history. The Picturing Lockdown project created a visual record of this extraordinary moment. It was inspired by the National Buildings Record (NBR), a Second World War public call out for voluntary help in contributing records of the nation’s heritage under threat. NBR photographs created the nation’s archive for buildings that were lost during the Blitz and featured in IWM’s 2019 Culture under Attack season. As Historic England explores opportunities to share the Picturing Lockdown collection, its curator Tamsin Silvey will discuss why public engagement is at the frontline of protecting heritage during times of crisis.   Choosing what to Protect: The V&A during World War I and World War IIElla Ravilious, curator in the Word and Image Department at the V&A It is sometimes thought that when an object enters a museum, it enters stasis and its narrative ends. However, some of our objects have led surprisingly exciting lives within the Museum. During both World Wars the V&A selected a range of its most precious treasures and hid them for safety in a bewildering array of places. Curator Ella Ravilious will explain some of the decision-making behind which objects got protected, where and why, and what happened to them during that time and directly afterwards – in particular, how post-war museum practices led to a dramatic object theft. She will also explore the surviving contemporary narratives from staff about what the museum experience was like during wartime.   Keeping Culture Alive: the National Gallery during World War IISusanna Avery-Quash, Senior Research Curator (History of Collecting) at the National Gallery, London The National Gallery is currently unable to give visitors access to the pictures physically due to the Corona pandemic, however, through digital technology people are still getting the chance to treasure great art. History shows that the Gallery has weathered other national emergencies, the most dramatic of which was the Second World War. During that conflict the Gallery, despite many of its galleries being bomb-damaged, was one in fact of the few places in London where the public could enjoy a programme of cultural activity. Drawing on visual and written records from the Gallery’s archives, this talk will discuss the range of events put on at Trafalgar Square, the motivations behind these activities, the impact they had at the time, and lessons we may learn from them today. The first form of cultural entertainment were the lunchtime concerts organised by Myra Hess which made classical music accessible; exhibitions followed ranging from contemporary war art and one-off shows like ‘Design at Home’ to the much-loved ‘Picture of the Month’ that brought back a series of paintings from the Gallery’s permanent collection from storage in a Welsh mine.      Contact name: Centre for Museum Cultures Further details: More information about this event …

Book your place now When:  July 7th 2020, 14:00-16:30 Where: Online  Event abstract: Innovation intermediaries are organisations that support firm-level and systemic innovation by, among other activities, creating knowledge links between other organisations, sharing knowledge about a particular technology, providing knowledge-intensive services to firms, and carrying out consultancy activity for policymakers. Intermediaries can play a particularly important role in the implementation of new digital technologies such as the Internet of Things, where they might deliver a range of activities not only to support the alignment of different actors and opportunities, and to encourage learning processes, but also to facilitate the articulation of demand. Intermediaries operating in such rapidly changing context are required to govern a process of change that is uncertain in both nature and direction, and poorly understood by policymakers, firms and often even by experts. This workshop aims to foster a timely discussion about the new roles and activities that intermediaries perform as they support firms in the digital transition, and the knowledge and resources they mobilise in order to do so. Please register for this workshop by 5pm on Friday 3rd July. You will be sent a link to attend the session before the event.  For further information, please feel free to contact Dr Federica Rossi, CIMR: f.rossi@bbk.ac.uk.  Contact name: Alice Dowden