RATE Award Nominations for French Staff

As the teaching semester reaches its final few days, it’s great to hear that French staff are once again among the nominees for the Stirling University RATE Awards. These awards offer students an opportunity to vote for tutors, lecturers, support staff and supervisors who have had a particularly positive impact on their learning experience across a range of categories including Excellence in Feedback, Best Personal Tutor and Most Innovative Use of E-Learning. Congratulations to Bernadette Corbett, David Murphy, Elizabeth Ezra and Cristina Johnston who are all nominated this year.

The awards will be given out at a ceremony on 22 April, at the end of the University’s annual Learning and Teaching Conference.

New Student Exhibition

Strictly speaking, this isn’t a ‘French’ exhibition but one of the students involved is in Stirling on our double degree in International Management and Intercultural Studies, run in partnership with the University of Passau, which happens to be ‘housed’ in French at Stirling so…

Visitors to the Pathfoot Building are welcome to stop off at the Student Exhibition space behind the Porter’s Lodge to see the new exhibition ‘Coca is not cocaine – The traditional use of the coca leaf in Peru and Bolivia.’ The exhibition has been created by Kathrin Opielka (our double degree student!) and Eva Molpeceres, working with Dr Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Saénz, and it seeks to challenge preconceptions and misconceptions of an ancient custom and to shed light on the incredible richness of a voiceless practice.

The chewing and other traditional uses of coca leaves have been an instrument of communication and reciprocity in the Andean people’s culture for centuries. However, Western influences have given a different meaning and value to coca-related products. Why can’t we think of the word ‘coca’ without images of cocaine or “Coca-Cola” (both Western creations) coming to our minds?

The exhibition is on until August 2015.

Seminars and Conferences

Very much looking forward to our colleague Fiona Barclay‘s Literature and Languages research seminar this afternoon on ‘Remembering Algeria: melancholy, depression and the colonizing of the pieds-noirs.’ Fiona is just back from the American Comparative Literature Association‘s annual conference in Seattle where she gave a paper entitled ‘Unsettled culture: the Algerian afterlives of the children of the pieds-noirs in The Last Life (Messud, 1999)’ as part of a seminar on ‘Cultures of Settlement and Unsettlement.’

And in a few weeks, Aedín ní Loingsigh will be giving a paper entitled ‘Mis/trusting Narratives of Undocumented Migrancy’ as part of the ninth annual Liverpool Travel Seminar (Mobilities and Place) at Liverpool John Moores University, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and Liverpool Hope University.