Learning Community Newsletter Week 7

Posted on 9 November 2021

All the latest from the department

In the newsletter this week, I want to talk about the concept of challenging yourself. With formatives being written right now across a wide range of modules, I’m sure that this is something that is already somewhat on your mind.

Getting the opportunity to write formatives is one of the really special things about working in our Department. They are a chance to challenge yourself, to work through ideas, to test new ways of constructing arguments, and ultimately lay the groundwork for producing your best work in the summative assessments.

Another way to challenge yourself is to endeavour to get the most out of your time in the Department and at the University. These weekly Learning Community Newsletters are one of the ways you can learn more about the intellectually stimulating work and events that are going on in our Department (two are in person this week!). At the bottom of this week’s newsletter there’s the opportunity to get even more involved with the Department by becoming Course Rep.

So this week, challenge yourself to achieve your best work and to get the most you can out of the exciting opportunities that being in the Department offers you.

I hope you all have a fantastic week,

Jeremy Moulton (Learning Community Officer)

Events

Fascism, Anti-Semitism and Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Study of Right-Wing Ideology

Tuesday 9th November 6:30pm, Derwent Senior Common Room

Contemporary politics has become marked by far-right extremism and obsessions with conspiracy theories. The number of terrorist attacks by right wing extremists has risen to a shocking high during the 2015 migration crisis in Germany (and still remains so). The largest group of domestic terrorists in the USA comes from the extreme right. The number of seats in parliaments throughout Europe occupied by right wing authoritarians has more than doubled in the last 20 years. Professor Werner Bonefeld will be joining PolSoc this week to address this current of fascism, anti-semitism and conspiracy theories and what can be done to confront this turn in politics.

After Grenfell: Accumulation, Debris and Urban Change in London

Wednesday 10th November 4-5pm, LMB/ 036X (Campus East)

The Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 was both a terrible tragedy and a drastic exposure of longstanding urban inequalities and injustice. For local residents, the fire is inextricable from deeper histories of division that have been built into the urban fabric of Kensington and Chelsea and which have marked the local landscape in enduring ways. Since 2018, the tower has been wrapped in a white casing, hiding the remains of the fire from view. Nevertheless, it has become a locus for new kinds of memorialisation and calls for urban change. Exploring themes of accumulation and erasure, the visible and the hidden, this paper explores the ambiguous afterlives of the tower, and what kind of future might be contained within its wrapping. It highlights how the future of the site is charged with a politics of presence and absence in which the debris of the fire, and the accumulated histories in which it is embedded, are made to matter in new ways.

Course-Rep By-Elections

As some positions were not filled in the last round of elections, course rep nominations will be reopened this week between Monday 8th midday to Friday 12th midday.

The positions available are:

IR, Politics, Politics with IR - First Year
History/Politics - First, Second or Third Year
Global Development - First Year
Global Development - Second Year

This is a great opportunity to play a part in shaping our Department. Being a Course Rep means sitting on staff meetings, including Board of Studies, Student-Staff Forum and Teaching Committee. It involves collecting feedback and understanding the thoughts of students on your course and communicating these with our Department in meetings so that the committees can consider appropriate changes and improve the student experience.

It is a 2-3 hour a week commitment and it is a great chance to be involved in the policy-making process, data collection and communications if these are career paths that you are interested in. Writing a short manifesto may seem daunting, but really you only need to write a couple of sentences or paragraphs about yourself, what skills you can bring. Please do email our brilliant Department Rep, Gemma Longman, at politicsrep@yusu.org if you have any questions.