Techne Congress: Distanced But Not Alone - The Practice of Being a PhD Researcher  

8th Jul 2020 1:00pm - 10th Jul 2020 6:00pm 

Our next Techne Congress, hosted by University of Westminster and to be held online via Zoom, is coming up on 8^th, 9^th and 10^th July.

To view the programme and book into sessions please see the Congress website.

Not much about our lives as researchers and as people is at the moment what we would have predicted at the beginning of this year. Managing life at the moment takes imagination, flexibility and new resources of many kinds. This Techne Congress, in moving online, acknowledges both our current situation and our need to try new ways of thinking, working and being together. Through the variety of sessions on offer, we will put into practice new ways of being together at a distance and provide opportunities for innovative and imaginative ways of thinking about and practising research.

Over the three days of the Congress, sessions will be run that will help you to think differently about wider issues that impact on every researcher and their work. There will be sessions on various aspects of the ethics of research, for example, and on the relations between practice and research. The digital nature of our world and its impact on research will be explored in sessions on using social media and on the use of digital archives. The need to be aware of our own wellbeing, and the ways that doing research can affect this, will be addressed in a session on the relation between writing and wellbeing. The keynote lectures by Professor Kalwant Bhopal and Dr Aaron Bryant will both consider the need for and effects of considering the histories and experiences of BAME people, within the academy and beyond it, for our research.

We are aware that all of you will be in very different circumstances to usual, and that participating in online sessions can be more tiring than meeting in person. For these reasons, we are planning a more compact version of the usual Congress programme, and hope that by spreading sessions across three afternoons rather than two whole days it will be more accessible for you to join in with the sessions that interest you. We will be running a series of sessions each afternoon from 1pm to 5pm for you to choose from.