Global Sustainable Development News
National Student Survey now open to finalists
Your feedback helps to shape our GSD courses and the wider University at Warwick for future generations
- NSS is a national survey of final-year undergraduates at all UK universities, run independently by Ipsos Mori
- The survey asks for your views on your whole course and covers teaching, assessment, resources and support
- You'll be able to claim £5 credit on your Eating at Warwick card for completing the survey
- The survey is open from Monday 3 February 2020 and takes ten minutes to fill in
- Your personalised link will be emailed to you on Thursday 6 February 2020 or go direct to thestudentsurvey.com
NSS is a really important way for you to reflect on your experience as a GSD student. It’s a great opportunity to think about what you found productive or enjoyable, and it's a chance to make suggestions for our continuous development. We take your responses seriously: in the previous NSS survey, GSD students told us that they would benefit from improvements around employability. In response to this our dedicated Placement and Employability Manager is putting in place resources, meeting with students and running sessions designed to enhance employability skills.
For example, next week the first School for Cross-faculty Studies Work Placement Fair will take place on Tuesday 11 February, from 4-5:30pm in The Oculus, room OC0.01. Students from all years within the School for Cross-faculty Studies are invited to attend. This event is designed to improve your employability skills by giving you the opportunity to network and gain a better insight into work placements. You'll have the chance to learn first-hand from students about their work placement journey which will support you in shaping your future career.
To find out more about NSS and how your feedback can make a difference to the University, please see here
Global Entrepreneurship Week 2019
Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), the world's largest campaign to promote entrepreneurship, took place at the end of last year from 18-24 November. To celebrate this week, Warwick Enterprise hosted and co-hosted a number of student-focused and student-led events on campus.
As Innovation Fellows, students in Global Sustainable Development (GSD) and Liberal Arts were actively involved in running the events on campus, as well as writing content for the Warwick Enterprise website, promoting Warwick Enterprise around the University and attending events themselves.
Upcoming Event: SCFS Work Placement Fair
The School for Cross-faculty Studies (SCFS) Work Placement Fair will be taking place on Tuesday 11 February 2020, 4:00pm-5:30pm, The Oculus, room OC0.01.
Double funding success!
Image credit: Dr Marco J Haenssgen
Supporting idea generation and research design for a project on behavioural spill-overs in Thailand, the Institute of Advanced Study and the Warwick Interdisciplinary Centre for International Development have awarded £3,150 and £950 to a research team around Global Sustainable Development (GSD) Assistant Professor Marco J Haenssgen.
Funding success for Dr Jess Savage
Image credit: Dr Marco J Haenssgen
Dr Jess Savage, Senior Teaching Fellow in Global Sustainable Development has been awarded £44,676 from the University Global Challenges Research Fund: Accelerator Programme to undertake a research project titled "Protected Areas and People: Exploring perceived wisdoms surrounding natural resource management and sustainability". The aim of the research is to help find sustainable, long term solutions by developing strategic tools for the effective design and implementation of management systems. This will allow the expansion of current knowledge networks throughout Cambodia, and into nearby Myanmar.
Year 12* competition: Entry now open
Each year, the Global Sustainable Development (GSD) Department at the University of Warwick runs a competition for year 12* students. The competition was established to engage with talented school students and give insight into the type of thought-provoking issues involved in studying GSD at Warwick.
This is an exciting opportunity for students to think creatively and gain valuable research skills as they learn more about global sustainable development. Since it was established, we have expanded the types of entries that can be submitted to include videos, podcasts and poetry, as well as more traditional essay responses. This is in line with our overall aim to engage with students from a variety of different backgrounds and interests, giving them the chance to present their unique perspectives on issues of global sustainable development.
Entry for the 2020 year 12* competition is now open. Entries must be received by midnight (UK time) on Friday 10 April 2020.
Shortlisted entrants will be invited to a Campus Day at Warwick on Saturday 27 June 2020 with GSD students and teaching staff. Winners will be announced and awarded prizes.
To find out more about the competition, how to enter and look at past entries, please see here.
*Year 12 in the UK or sixteen to seventeen-year-old age group equivalent
Blog post: A Sustainable Serenissima
Senior Teaching Fellow in the Liberal Arts Department Dr Bryan Brazeau looks back on the largely successful Venice and Sustainability project, hosted in Liberal Arts. Find out what staff and students discovered in this innovative problem-based module during their time in Coventry and Venice, and watch a media project looking at cultural sustainability in the city produced by Global Sustainable Development students.
The Black Women's Project takes home two awards at the Bright Network’s Society of the Year Awards 2019
On Wednesday 4 December 2019 in London, The Black Women's Project won the Women's Society of the Year and the Society of the Year at the Bright Network's Society of the Year Awards 2019. The Bright Network's Society of the Year Awards is an annual day of celebration and recognition for university societies around the country that have made a real difference on campus.
The current executive team has had a flying start in their new roles, winning multiple awards at the event in December last year. Lois Disanka, one of our second-year Single Honours Global Sustainable Development students, is the Co-President of The Black Women's Project. We spoke to Lois about the organisation's recent achievements.
Funding success for GSD researcher Dr Marco J Haenssgen
GSD Assistant Professor Dr Marco J Haenssgen has won a £19,793 GCRF Catalyst award to support the research project “Dynamism of land use and livelihood strategies among highland ethnic minorities in Northern Thailand: Co-producing narratives of change.”
Together with the Thai anthropologists Dr Mukdawan Sakboon and Dr Prasit Leepreecha from Chiang Mai University, the research team will use the innovative qualitative research method of story completion to document and illustrate livelihood changes in the highlands of Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. Over the past 30 years, livelihoods among highland ethnic groups have changed dramatically, with government-orchestrated shifts away from opium production and self-sufficient agriculture towards cash and mono crop cultivation, capitalist systems of production, and tourism business. Not only has this created new definitions of “rich” and “poor” villagers, but it also changed people’s relationship to the natural environment. In the fluid political environment of Thailand, villagers’ livelihoods and their uses of the land they live on have again come under scrutiny, raising fears of expropriation and displacement. This project aims to use the story completion technique together with visual media to produce narratives that give villagers a new channel to engage policy and the broader public with their personal experiences and livelihood changes.
Paper accepted for publication: Laughter in oral histories of displacement
Recently, the Head of School for Cross-faculty Studies Dr Stéphanie Panichelli-Batalla’s paper on laughter in oral histories of displacement was accepted for publication by The Oral History Review. The Oral History Review aims to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public.
Title: Laughter in oral histories of displacement: 'one goes on a mission to solve their problems'
Abstract
Although the use of humor and laughter in oral history has started to appear in oral history literature, it is still very much under-researched. Most of the studies analyze humor and laughter together, while Kate Moore focuses on laughter on its own. Humor and laughter, although linked, are two different concepts. While humor is a mental ability to perceive and/or express something funny, laughter on the other hand is a sound or a sequence of expirations, produced as the expression of an emotion, which can be set off by a humorous trigger, but not necessarily. It is therefore important to distinguish both. This paper will build on Moore’s study by exploring the use of unilateral laughter in eleven oral histories of exiled Cuban internationalist healthcare professionals. However, unlike Moore’s study, this research will not be limited to difficult memories. Our analysis will deepen our knowledge on the history of the Cuban global universal healthcare system by giving a voice to its participants, analyzing therefore, not solely the facts and statistics of the program but, as Portelli states, the meaning that its participants give to it when reflecting on their experience from the present. By exploring the occurrence of laughter, this paper intends to shed light on the relevance of focusing on unconscious reactions in oral history narratives, in order to better understand emotions linked to the narrated memories. The analysis will show that unilateral laughter is recurrent in the interviews when participants reflect on a change in their identity, the implications of working for a state program, and their need for respect of human dignity. It will highlight the impact the mission had on their personal and professional lives during and after their humanitarian experience. These stories of displacement will also show what Norrick has called the dual humorous perspective of the participants, but rather than solely referring to the time of the interview and age of the participants, we will also assert that another key factor to be taken into consideration is the situation of displacement as well as the degree of acculturation of the participants.