Written by Bronwen Butler, Geography (International programme) BA.

To kick off philanthropy month on February 1^st UCL held its annual Scholarships and Bursaries Reception. The event has gone from strength to strength each year; from a tiny affair which Provost Michael Arthur jokingly said “could have been held in a broom cupboard” to a vibrant event to which over 500 people are invited to celebrate UCL, the generosity of its donors and the importance of philanthropy.

Image: (left – right): Professor Geraint Rees, Provost Michael Arthur, Naimeh Masumy, Janie Gammans, Maureen Amar, Richard Jenkins

President and Provost Professor Michael Arthur opened the event with a warm welcome to all the donors, staff and recipients in attendance. He discussed the importance of the UCL philanthropic Campaign and the university’s achievement as one of the top universities at fundraising in the UK this year. He briefly looked to UCL’s future developments before introducing the first student speaker Naimeh Masumy.

Naimeh Masumy is a full time LLM Law Student at UCL, originally from Iran. She is an ambitious young woman who has clearly battled against the odds to be here. Naimeh is a student with a bright future in the energy law sector but she is one of many people who simply could not think about life at UCL without a scholarship:

 “I have to say I would not be here without the Ardalan Family Scholarship. In my whole life, I have come to realize that education is the most transcendent gift one can be given, and the Ardalan Scholarship gave me that gift, it allowed me to have a foot in the door of the future, a future I was once unable to envision”.

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Written by Sonia Abrams (UCL Communications and Marketing)

More than 800 staff were in attendance at the second UCL Professional Services Conference, which took place on Tuesday 2 February at Logan Hall. The event was an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of the professional services community at UCL in a relaxed environment that also provided time to network, receive up-to-date information and socialise at the post conference reception.

The afternoon consisted of a series of presentations followed by an awards ceremony for staff and teams nominated for Professional Services Awards by their colleagues across the university, as well as a Q&A with UCL President & Provost, Professor Michael Arthur.

Rex Knight, Vice-Provost (Operations) opened the conference with a short introduction reminding staff of the key highlights for UCL over the past couple of years. This included the merger with the Institute of Education, as well as the outstanding REF result “which has taken us right to the top of the UK league tables on many measures, ahead of Oxford and Cambridge”. Knight thanked professional services staff for their contributions to these results by acknowledging “the support that is given to research activity through the institution”. He also eluded to the forthcoming philanthropic campaign being the most ambitious to date for UCL, and even in Europe.

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Written by Tania Castro Rodea (UCL Translation Studies)

On Thursday 26 November, we welcomed Professor Jean Boase-Beier (University of East Anglia) to UCL as part of the Translation in History lecture series. Her talk, ‘Roman Jakobson and the Translation of Poetic Language’, focused on the key ideas of this influential linguist and some of their implications for translation.

Professor Boase-Beier emphasised that Jakobson did not propose any particular way of translating; he did not give a set of instructions. But what he did say is of use because it can help us “think around translation, think about practice, and what consequences that has.” Boase-Beier also pointed out that, among Jakobson’s articles that are important for translation, some do not even mention translation, and so it is advisable to be aware of the wider context of his thinking, to know how he developed his ideas, particularly if we want to understand what already well-known quotes really mean.

In this regard, Boase-Beier posits that many people do not understand the most famous statement of Jakobson, that “the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.” To explain this statement, she used an example where the words cat, kitten and feline were offered as options. When we select, she said, we choose from words that designate similar things. But once the word ‘cat’ is selected, this is transferred to the axis of combination, where the choice is not based on things, but on the word selected and its similarities with other words. We say “the cat sat on the mat,” not because the cat has similarities with the mat, but because of the similarities between the words: they rhyme.

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Written by Iwona Bisaga (PhD student at UCL Urban Sustainability and Resilience)

Image: SolarAid

The Social Research on Off-Grid Solar (SROGS) conference took place at UCL on 9 and 10 December. It was jointly organised by Declan Murray (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh) and I.

This two-day event saw speakers and attendees from a diverse range of disciplines get together to discuss a variety of themes around off-grid solar solutions for energy access in Sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia and Latin America. Presenters included academics, PhD students, private sector representatives, policy makers, practitioners, physicists and engineers, which provided a solid overview of the sector and the challenges it is (and has been) facing since it came to prominence in the 1990s.

The series of presentations and breakout group discussions focused on existing business models and technology designs, linking them to the user experience and the ways in which users and customers are included in (or excluded from) those processes, and how that could be changed to better reflect their needs and aspirations throughout the whole value chain: from product design to after-sales services and dealing with solar waste.

Socio-economic impacts and what they mean for the users, including women and marginalised communities as particularly vulnerable groups, were given a lot of attention, though it quickly became clear that there still remains a lot to be done in order to fully understand what actual impacts off-grid solar has on users, and how exactly it is utilised within households.

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