Monday 27 July 2020

Friday 24 July 2020

Hull nursing students launch a Nursing Society

Samantha Kitchen writes:

I am delighted to say we've started a Nursing Society which has been approved by the Students' Union.

By doing this, we are hoping to connect Nursing students from all academic cohorts including undergraduates, postgraduates, apprenticeships and satellite programmes of all fields to create an interdisciplinary community of support. We also hope to raise awareness of nursing students in the university and the general public.
The students involved in on the Nursing Society Committee so far are:
President: Sam Kitchen (Year 1 LD)
Secretary: Naomi Broadhead (Year 1 LD) and Rhianna (Tegan) Sykes (Year 1 Adult)
Treasurer: Phillipa Howell (Year 1 Adult)
Social Media Officer: Laura Greaves (Year 2 Adult)

Our objectives are:

To have members from the 4 nursing disciplines: Adult Nursing, Child Nursing, Mental Health Nursing and Learning Disability Nursing
To host events that are accessible and relevant to the demands of nursing students
To create talks/ drop ins between students in the different fields of nursing to learn more about other disciplines
To create talks/ drop ins between students and alumni, local healthcare practitioners and other relevant people
To create a link with course representatives
To create links with other societies for the opportunity of joint socials
To raise the profile and celebrate student nurses

We will be mindful of the differing commitments of students including caring commitments, financial commitments, part time work and differing needs of students throughout the year, for example, when cohorts of students are on placement (including day and night shifts). It will also be in our manifesto for all students to adhere to the NMC code at all times.

We are still in early stages of developing this and aim to be fully functional by 1 August, with a view to recruit members for the next academic year.

The students involved in the organisation of this so far were found through Lizzie Ette's Twitter championing #AllOurHealth WhatsApp group, however it would be great to get students involved from other fields. If you are aware of any students who may be interested in helping us to organise this, especially from branches currently not represented, please encourage them to get in touch. Additionally, if any staff or other relevant parties wish to get involved or have any ideas of what we could do with the society, please also encourage them to get in touch with us at our email.

Thursday 23 July 2020

International Conference of Autoethnography, Zoom (!) 20th-21st July 2020

Tim Buescher writes:

This year has been rather different for all of us in many ways. Lockdown, travel restrictions, increased workloads and caring duties have made meeting up difficult for all of us and an academic conference sounds like an impossibility. Or so it seemed in February when the steering committee for the International Conference of Autoethnography (formerly the British International Conference of Autoethnography) had to admit that we wouldn’t be gathering in Bristol for the 7th annual conference this year. 

However, we agreed to look at moving the thing online and relaunching/announcing this through the twitter account @_ICAE_. It has been an eye-opening experience to see people from as far afield as Kazakhstan, Aruba, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Norway, Chile, Turkey and various US states come together online for two days and share autoethnographic work in a wide variety of styles on a wide range of topics from an array of disciplines.

The theme for this year was Reclamation:

The process or act of claiming something back; of reasserting a right Restoration, regeneration, recapture, recovery, repossession or retrieval Reclamation as an act of telling a continuing narrative with what is salvaged from the wreckage of crisis. Something new.

Paraphrased from Barker and Buchannan-Barker, 2003

Panels included surviving lockdown, stories of survival/loss/reclaiming self, Reclaiming voices through poetic and lyrical understandings, Black motherhood /girlhood/womanhood, Methodological challenges and insights, Disrupted and problematic bodies, and many others.

The full programme is available here:

A YouTube channel has been established to curate some of the presentations including keynotes from Sophie Tamas and David Carless and the lifetime contribution award, which went to Alec Grant. You can access the channel here.

Many attendees spoke of how the online format allowed them to contribute in a way which would be financially impossible in a traditional setting, a serious consideration in thinking about decolonising academic institutions. The whole thing has been exhausting, but so very rewarding.