This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
The SWIPE (Student Work-in-Progress Exposition) undergraduate conference module is designed particularly for undergraduate students working on their final-year dissertations or other extended coursework, but is open to all third year students. The conference will provide students with an opportunity to conduct independent research. In addition, it will give them a chance to discuss their and their fellow students’ work and to test some of their ideas in a larger context. The conference aims to foster the ongoing academic dialogue within Comparative Literature, the disciplines joined in LLB and the School of European Culture and Languages as a whole as well as with the larger scholarly community of the University of Kent at Canterbury and its other campuses. By giving students an opportunity of being introduced to, and partaking in, one of the prevalent forms of professional academic dialogue, the SWIPE conference is designed as a preparation for students’ further participation in exciting academic debates and to invite them to consider the challenges and opportunities of postgraduate studies. At the same time, it will serve to hone transferable skills useful in students’ professional careers in other sectors of public life (organisation, presentation, communication and the demonstration of self-confidence). To ensure a certain thematic coherence and provide students with some orientation while still leaving them a wide-ranging spectrum of thematic concerns from which to choose their subjects, a specific, but not limiting, conference title will be chosen every year (to be advertised in the current stage 2 and 3 handbooks). Titles like “Violence”, “Love”, “Death”, “Silence” or “Resistance” are envisaged. Students’ participation will not be limited to the six workshops and the presentation of their paper but will also include the complete organisation of the conference; with respect to the latter, the module convenor’s role is restricted to giving guidance, advice and, whenever necessary, help.
Six 2-hour workshops, individual supervision meetings and a two-day conference.
100% coursework
Indicative Reading List -
• Bradbury, Andrew (2000/2005). Successful Presentation Skills. 2nd ed. London: Kogan Page.
• McCarthy, Patsy and Caroline Hatcher (2002). Presentation Skills: The Essential Guide for Students. London: SAGE.
• Further texts corresponding to individual subjects.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
• Since the conference papers will not be tied to the particular thematic concerns of any given period- or problem-focused module, these cannot easily be specified but need to be worked out according to the thematic focus of individual conference papers.
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