Above and Beyond Nomination
I was really delighted to be nominated for the Above and Beyond teaching award this year. Thank you for the anonymise student(s) for this recognition. It’s been a challenging year. COVID restrictions aside, I’ve revamped both the Autumn term undergraduate contemporary social theory module to include postcolonial theories, social movements, and the social theories of … Continue reading
Kent Sociology – UG Students Make A Difference
I know it’s almost Halloween now, but the beginning of this academic year has been extremely hectic as we experienced a lot of timetabling issues. So finally, I’m able to share with you some of the projects I’ve been involved over the summer. One of them is a mini-series I made on five of our … Continue reading
From the South to Mars!
How does one depart from the Global South and reach Mars in 12 weeks? Well, we had an answer! By ‘we’ I mean me and my 61 inquisitive and amazing students! The second week of April marked the end of my module SO627 Sociology of the Global South. I designed this module as a reaction … Continue reading
New Academic Year
It’s will be the Welcome Week for Kent starting next week. It’s still gonna be an unusual year for first years. As the Director of Studies for Sociology, I’ve made a 30-min induction video for our new students. The full clip is on Kent’s Panopto. Here is the first 1 min. I thought of these … Continue reading
Sociology Ranked 1st & 4 July Open Day
According to the newly released Complete University Guide, Sociology at Kent was ranked 22nd over all, but this is mostly dragged down by our low entry standards (Well, what can you do? We are under pressure to recruit recruit recruit!) But we were actually ranked 1st for research quality! Yay!! There is of course more … Continue reading
Teaching evaluation
I think most colleagues in my School were surprised this week when we received Spring module evaluations from students, because we were told that all Spring modules this year will not be evaluated due to strike and the pandemic. As the Director of Studies, I had to review all the evaluations – as usual, my … Continue reading
July 2019- Shandong University Summer School
It was a real pleasure to teach at Shandong University’s 2019 summer school on ‘China in global governance’ along with Yves Tiberghien, Tim Niblock and of course Michael Barr. My lectures were, not surprisingly, focused on global science governance. It was a novel area to most of the students. But I was really impressed by their … Continue reading
Fellowship, Ministry Lecture, iGEM
Phew What an October! Three updates: Visiting Fellowship at Beijing University of Technology My October started in Beijing, where I was awarded a competitive ‘Foreign Expert Visiting Fellowship’ by Beijing University of Technology. This fellowship provided financial and administrative support for me to establish exchange with staff and students on the topic of ‘What’s the … Continue reading
Joy Zhang 