School of Humanities and Social Sciences Good News November

Training provider appointment

Following a successful grant application as part of a team to the Department of Education, Dr Ellie Willard is now the Monitoring and Evaluation Lead for a large project working alongside Create Development, a National training provider who delivers personal development courses to educational practitioners.

The focus of the work will be with 29 Further Education Colleges in the North East and Yorkshire, working with tutors who teach students who have previously failed their GCSE Maths and/or English. 

The training input is designed to improve the self -efficacy of the students which, in turn, aims to help more of them can pass their resit examinations. Ultimately though the aim is to improve the students’ numeracy and/or literacy, enhancing their employability and economic prospects.

The project runs until Spring 2025.

Published work

Dr Mirko Demasi has had a manuscript accepted over the weekend, titled “Accountability in the Russo-Ukrainian War: Vladimir Putin vs NATO”. It’s for the journal of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology.

Dr Steve Taylor also recently published a new article through The Conversation, on the transformational effects of near-death experiences. He has been regularly writing for the Conversation for the past three years - you can see a full list of his articles here.

Events

In October Dr. Steve Taylor was a guest speaker at the 'How the Light Gets in' Festival at Kenwood House, London, organised by the Institute of Arts and Ideas. He gave a talk about his book Extraordinary Awakenings and also took part in a debate. A video of his debate from the previous How the Light Gets in festival (in Hay-on-Wye last May) has just been published on the IA! website. The debate was on 'The Status of Things' with Prof. Paul Dolan and Mary-Ann Ochota.

Also in October, Dr. Steve Taylor was a keynote speaker at a conference organised by the University of Notre-Dame in Indiana. The theme of the conference was 'Converging Wisdom? Questioning the Continued Relevance of the Perennial Philosophy.' 
A video of the session is here. (Steve's presentation begins at 1.02)