L-R: Seiwaa Osei Afriyie, H.E Samira Bawumia (Republic of Ghana)

On 25-26 January 2020, the Warwick Africa Summit 2020 took place in the Oculus Building at the University of Warwick. The Warwick Africa Summit is an interdisciplinary conference focused on African development and is solely organised by students. Students from the GSD Department were part of the team behind the Warwick Africa Summit 2020, including final year Sociology and GSD student Seiwaa Osei Afriyie (President of the Warwick Africa Summit), second year Single Honours GSD student Taigh Adebajo (Co-Director of Finance) and second year Single Honours GSD student Trinity Awelo (Logistics). As President of the Warwick Africa Summit, Seiwaa has put together her highlights of the event.

In November 2020, Head of School for Cross-faculty Studies Dr Stephanie Panichelli-Batalla will run a four-hour-long session on her research on Life Stories of Cuban Internationalist Healthcare Professionals. The session will be for a course titled "Fuentes orales para la investigación en artes y humanidades" (Oral sources for research in arts and humanities).

The course will be offered to PhD students of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid working in the Arts and Humanities field and who are interested in working with oral sources but have not yet received any training to do so.

The short course on oral history is a result of a successful funding application by colleagues at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Dr Particia Mayayo and Dr Neomi Deharo.

^{Photo credit: Marco J Haenssgen}

An inspiring session in the School for Cross-faculty Studies Research and Pedagogy Seminar was delivered last week by Assoc Prof Giacomo Zanello from the University of Reading. Highlighting research using novel FitBit-like accelerometer devices in Ghana, India, and Nepal, Dr Zanello demonstrated how new forms of digital and sensor-based data collection can improve our understanding of people’s energy expenditure profiles during a day and across the seasons.

Maddie Booth, a third year PAIS and GSD student was on Hillz FM radio station this morning on 'Kate's show' to discuss and promote her upcoming art exhibition titled: "Stand Up, Stand Back, Stand With". The art exhibition is going to be on from 3 March 2020 until 22 March 2020 at The Arts Trail Studio, Leamington Spa. The exhibition is surrounding the issue of domestic violence and seeks to raise awareness for the issue as well as raising money for three charities who support survivors: Coventry Haven, RSVP and The Survivors Trust.

 Find out more about the event here and you can also donate to Maddie's JustGiving page to help support her work.

 You will be able to find a recorded version of the live radio broadcast on Hillz FM soon!

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.

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.

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.

Last month, CHANGE Festival took place on campus at the Warwick Arts Centre. This new, not-for-profit arts festival featuring over 20 events brought together shows, talks, comedy and workshops, with the aim to inspire visitors to imagine a better, more positive future for all.

GSD students were involved in both the organisation of the thought-provoking festival and the events themselves. Maddie Booth, a final year Politics, International Studies and GSD student, worked with CHANGE Festival's producer Becky Burchell to bridge the gap between the University and the festival. Maddie was also the Events Co-ordinator in the weeks leading up to the festival. Ellie Church, a final year Economic Studies and GSD student was also involved, sitting on the Council of the Future over the course of the festival.

The inaugural Warwick Climate Negotiating Forum (WCNF) took place at the University across two days last month. Run by students and led by GLOBUS Warwick, the student-run online journal at the School for Cross-faculty Studies, this project was the first of its kind at the University. The event gave students the opportunity to experience global climate negotiations first-hand, in a setting that encouraged a rounded learning experience by inviting guest speakers and offering a number of workshops.

The Political Ecologies of the Far Right conference, taking place from 15-17 November 2019, is an interdisciplinary academic-activist event organised by the Human Ecology Division at Lund University. The conference is in collaboration with The Zetkin Collective, a group of scholars, activists and students working on the political ecology of the far right, and the Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism at Chalmers University.

The conference will explore:

Two trends (which) intersect in the present: rapidly rising temperatures and rapid advances of the far right. What happens when they meet?

During the next three days, we will explore this formidable conundrum, and consider together what is to be done, both in terms of research but also in terms of practice. We aim to make this conference a platform to bring together both academics and activists to meet, share learnings, network, build alliances, and start unlikely conversations. They need to happen. This is the first systematic inquiry into the political ecology of the far right in the twenty-first century.

Dr Leon Sealey-Huggins, an Assistant Professor in Global Sustainable Development, will be the keynote speaker at the conference delivering a talk entitled “Between apocalypse and survival: the violence of climate breakdown in, and for, the Caribbean” from 5:30pm-6:30pm on Saturday 16 November 2019. Dr Leon Sealey-Huggins will also be part of the roundtable session and final discussion from 2:45pm-4:30pm on Sunday 17 November 2019.