Posted by da459
28 October 2022YEAR 1
Congratulations on successfully completing the three-week year 1 induction programme and to all of you for your fantastic Hack presentations. The winning presentation was Firm 3, with Firms 2 and 5 being voted as Highly Commended. Remember to check your individual timetables and the module ELE pages for more information and regular updates about room/timetable changes throughout the term.
Law Mentors
Below is a list of professionals who you can applied to be mentored by. Click the link on their name to be taken the the Handshake website, where you can learn a bit more about their background and responsibilities – you can also apply to be mentored by them using the same link.
IMPACT 2022 took place across Week 4 and was a fabulous event for our second year Law with Business and BSc Business students. Twenty teams of students worked with local BCorps to pitch solutions to some of the real-life business challenges faced by our BCorps. All teams successfully submitted videos outlining their proposals by the Thursday deadline and the week ended with a pitch off in the morning where the finalists were chosen. The grand final saw a fabulous panel of judges crown Team 1 the winners for their creative pitch for Ward Williams Associates that included the idea of ‘Nurturing a Plant’. Vanessa from Ward Williams was delighted with this simple but effective idea and is planning on implementing it across the organisation immediately. Team 16 won the ‘audience vote’ for their innovative solutions for Gydeline.
The judges were impressed by the quality of the work produced, the creativity of the teams and the way in which the teams worked so hard to meet the client briefs. Huge thanks to our judges Russell from Gydeline, Matt from Leap, Sarah from Origin Coffee, Vanessa from Ward Williams Associates, Nick from Innovation Impact and Business at the University and Ed from the Business School) and congratulations to our amazing student teams.
The Exeter Centre for Environmental Law (ExCEL) and HaSS Cornwall are happy to invite you to their monthly Environmental Justice Café: 45 minutes dedicated to themes around Environmental Justice.
Speakers will join us and give a short talk, followed by an informal discussion.
This month’s Café will be held next Tuesday, 1st November at 12:30, in Daphne du Maurier Seminar N.
Our invited speaker this time will be Dr Mary Menton, who was until recently a Research Fellow in Environmental Justice in the University of Sussex and now is based in New York. She will be sharing her on-the-ground work experiences with environmental injustice (e.g. violence against environmental and land defenders).
Just bring your lunch and have a seat. We provide some tea and coffee.
We very much look forward to seeing you.
Please note that the full autumn calendar of themed weeks for Law students can now be found on the Gateway page here.
What to Make of Parliamentary Politics in the UK?
It’s now become a cliché to say that we can’t do political satire anymore, because real life UK politics is just too far-fetched. From Brexit, the controversies over Corbyn, Johnson’s proroguing of Parliament and withdrawing the Whip from MP’s that didn’t agree with him, to lockdown parties, allegations of corruption, and now… Truss and her brief tenure in Downing Street where she crashed the economy. It’s hard to find a tone to talk about this which doesn’t sound flippant and can convey some of the deep gravity of a situation where we have to look to the 1970’s to find anything resembling this kind of turbulence.
More than this, politics in the UK has been lacking the gravitas required of one of the world’s wealthiest economies, and this has done much damage to our global reputation. Truss’s actions have made what was already going to be a terrifying winter for many people in the UK, into a desperate one, amidst a soaring cost of living and strikes across many industries and sectors. We can expect things like ‘warm banks’ to join food banks as an essential way to help the destitute, in one of the world’s richest nations.
As the Chancellor who successfully helped us to navigate those extraordinary few years of the Pandemic, perhaps Sunak is the best placed person to lead the Conservative Party (and thereby, the country) through the next few months. It’s also wonderful to see a person of colour as Prime Minister, nearly 75 years since the Empire Windrush docked and 35 years after people of colour once more became represented in Parliament as MP’s. However, he is also the wealthiest PM that Britain has ever had, 61% of his cabinet were privately educated (compared to a UK average of 7%), and 31% are Oxbridge, 4 of his cabinet of 30 are visible by colour, and only 7 are women. This is not a Cabinet that recognises the plurality of the people of the UK.
We have to hope that Sunak’s post-pandemic dropping of the £20 Universal Credit Uplift isn’t prescient, and that he can have empathy with and policy proposals for, the desperate poverty experienced by Europe’s most unequal nation. In these contexts, it is easy to see why opposition parties are still calling for a General Election, and an electoral mandate for the difficult choices about how our resources should be shared.
YEAR 1
This week in British Politics and Government we ask ‘Is the UK an island? We consider what the neoliberal global order means for a small island state like Britain, does Sovereignty still make sense in a world of global institutions and supra-national corporations, and can we as individuals help to shape the world?
In Political Communication: Difficult knowledge and political communication
This session tackles the central role of emotions and trauma in political communication. We will watch a documentary about the Magdelene Laundries in Ireland. This is one example of a number of high-profile exposures of human rights abuses by Church and State in Ireland. We look at the government’s public apology for the Magdalene Laundries as a piece of political communication.
YEAR 3
We hope that your dissertation is starting to shape. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your dissertation supervisor if you’ve not already done so … As circulated by email last week, the word count for the dissertation has been shortened to 8,000 this year, in order to keep it in line with other university departments. Correspondingly, the revised research proposal has also been shortened by 500 words to 1,000.
Politics Academic Tutor Groups
Academic tutor groups have been scheduled for first years in week 5, so you should look out for those. Students are encouraged to attend as the sessions will provide peer support as well as support from the lecturer and will be a chance to reflect on how things are going, as well as resolve any issues.
Years 2 and 3 will have meetings later in the term and we will update them nearer the time. But of course, for any individual queries/issues, students can always get in touch directly with their academic tutors.
New Peer Assisted Learning Scheme
In the Language Centre we are looking to advertise a Peer Assisted-Learning Scheme for our students next week. We want to pair up students who are at Beginner/Intermediate level in either French, Mandarin or Spanish with students who are more advanced so that they can benefit from each other´s learning experience. Mentors will be able to get recognition through the Exeter Student Awards and Mentees will get some extra support with the language they are learning.
Video link here: https://youtu.be/aVduLy9yUUE