Written by Dr James Paskins, Coordinator for UCL Grand Challenge of Sustainable Cities,  and Helen Hopkins, Coordinator for UCL Grand Challenge of Global Health.

On 29 January, the South Cloisters was filled, but not with students desperately trying to find a quiet place to work. The space had instead been commandeered by the UCL Grand Challenges to show off work from its small grants programme.

The cloisters echoed to the conversations of more than 100 grant winners, staff, students and donors. They had come to see the exhibition of 40 posters illustrating the achievements of the previous Small Grants winners, and to hear presentations from previous Grand Challenge winners.

The small grants programme began in 2009 with the first grand challenge, Global Health, and is now offered by all four Grand Challenges: Sustainable cities, Intercultural Interaction and Human Wellbeing.

(more…)

‘The Body in Pieces’ selectively displays fragments from the UCL Great Ormond Street Hospital archive. Occupying a gatehouse building and part of the North Cloisters, this exhibition renders visible a curious collection of artefacts as they become objects of broad academic significance, after a former life at the Hospital’s research facilities, the UCL Institute of Child Health.

Most striking are the plaster casts that fill the windows of the ‘North Lodge’, visible to passers-by on Gower Street. This assortment of disembodied limbs and torsos document a variety of bone conditions found in young patients. Beautifully executed around 1870, all troubled from within and sparsely labelled, they leave huge scope for fresh interpretation.

(more…)

Cultures of Surveillance is an interdisciplinary conference that was held at UCL from 29 September until 1 October addressing topics concerning security and surveillance. Speakers from multiple disciplines gathered to discuss security, safety, law and even CSI. Yes, the TV series. The title of the conference did nothing less than describe what it indeed was – an interdisciplinary conference. I found it incredibly exciting that we would be given the opportunity to approach the topic of surveillance from a variety of different angles, an opportunity that was particularly exemplified by the ‘Justice under Surveillance’ talk.

(more…)