UACES Annual Conference 2020 brought our research group a mixture of excitement and poignancy. We are enormously grateful to the UACES team for their phenomenal work in organising and hosting a superb event, which was not only highly intellectually stimulating but which was also a tour de force of smooth and highly effective e-learning.

Spending some time in Brussels is always an invaluable opportunity for any EU researcher. I first arrived at KU Leuven on January 6th, 2020, a little over a month since the new von der Leyen Commission took office. At the time, COVID19 was only news in China and Western mainstream media was preoccupied with issues such as the coming into effect of Brexit on January 31st and the potential implications of the Soleimani incident between the US and Iran. Those were the days.

Dear UACES Colleagues, I hope you are well and that you have had the opportunity to spend some time away from your computer screens and to recharge the batteries over the summer months.

Six months ago back in early January, my fellow UACES Officers and I posted the message below on our website addressing our concerns about the prospects of the UK not remaining part of the Erasmus+ programme post Brexit:

A few months ago, I was having a WhatsApp chat with my 3 best friends. They are all incredibly talented women – one is a partner in a law firm, another an award-winning science journalist and author, another a charity policy director. Intimidating or what? The conversation was about the organisations they’ve worked for and the value of moving between different companies. One of my friends said ‘[it’s] amazing how easily you can think your organisation’s way of doing something is the best or most productive until you experience different workplaces’.

My academic career may have been entirely based in UK higher education institutions but I have had many different teaching jobs. Once in France in a class of sixty students, eighty percent of whom had no intention of learning the English I was teaching, a student set fire to her hat.

Dear UACES colleague, I hope you and your friends and family are well during these troubling and uncertain times. It has been great to see that the UACES community has remained as vibrant and supportive as ever online and on Social Media as colleagues have adapted to the realities of teaching, researching and staying in […]