Calling all students! The Digital Arts Lab (DAL) Student Showcase competition has just been launched for 2022. This is the third year of the DAL student competition, which enables our students to submit their best academic work or personal artefacts created through or about digital tools. This may be an academic assessment which utlises a digital tool (for example a video, podcast or website), a personal endeavour that uses or showcases a digital tool, or a short piece of writing that comments on the digital world (fiction and non-fiction are both welcome). Further guidelines here.

The winning submissions from last year can be found here. The judges were amazed at the winning entrants' creative use of technology and are looking forward to seeing this year's submissions. Winners from last year were part of a session at the University of Warwick TEAL (Teaching Enhanced Learning) Fest, where they explained how they had gone about creating their digital entry at a session which included educators from across the UK and further afield.

Dr James Hodkinson (German Studies, School of Modern Languages and Cultures) delivers a conversation with one of his key collaborators, the artist Mohammed Ali MBE (https://www.soulcityarts.com), explores the relationship between his research into Islam in Germany in the 19th Century and his public engagement projects including the Art of Empathy (2019) and Congregate (2020-), a collaborative livestream of visual art, film, music and conversation. James explores the concepts of kinship and empathy, and the power of art to allow us to view the world from alternate cultural perspectives.

Dr Fabienne Viala (Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies) explains the concept of ‘artivism’ to us, in its Caribbean context, as a fusion of art forms and practices through which artists confront and engage with a range of publics. Fabienne argues that artivism activates the empathetic imagination, and looks at how environmental and racial justice are brought into dialogue through her work with Caribbean artivists.

Dr Chantal Wright (Warwick Writing Programme) delivers the first of our ‘Literature, Language and Translation’ Faculty of Arts at Home films: ‘The Literary Translation: A Guide for the Perplexed, Curious and Uninitiated’. Chantal is an important advocate for translation as a profession and a practice, and she draws our attention here to the creative processes of literary translation. She highlights, for example, the significance of the #namethetranslator​ hashtag, and the campaign to properly credit translators for their work. Her film urges us, more broadly, to appreciate the fact that translated works are the result of the creative endeavours of two people.

The Spring Festival (called Chinese New Year outside China) is an important festival in China. In the Warwick Language Centre and SMLC, students of Chinese at Warwick use their creativity to celebrate it in a special way, facilitated by their teachers. Songs, Raps, Poems, Stories, Games - come and enjoy yourselves!

9^th February, 5-7pm - Online Party

18^th February, 6-8pm - Online Calligraphy workshop

For more details please see here.

Global Sustainable Development launches new postgraduate programmes. From September 2021 onwards the new MASc will be available, offering a combination of an Arts (MA) and Sciences (MSc) award. Based in the School for Cross-faculty Studies, their academic home is a natural place to offer a combination of these awards, and they are one of the first Master’s courses in the UK to be doing so.

Explore with Professor Silvija Jestrovic (Theatre and Performance Studies) some ideas from her recent work about the presence and absence of the author, in ‘The Author Dies Hard’. Siilvija challenges us to think about the questions ‘Who is the author?’ and ‘Where is the author?’. Her wider work looks at how the author is constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality, and what the politics and ethics of these constructions are.

Hear from Dr Eris Williams Reed (Classics and Ancient History) about her work on the history of the Roman Near East and ancient communities’ interaction with the environment. Eris looks for expressions of environmental loss and ecological grief in the Safaitic inscriptions of Northern Arabia and uncovers the precarious, volatile and fragile relationship that some people in the ancient world had with their environment.