Work placement with Prism in Nottingham’s Creative Quarter

Haya Kay completed a work placement with the Work Placement and Employability Programme in the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies. Once she registered her interest she subsequently applied and was accepted onto a placement with professional consultancy firm Prism, based in Nottingham’s Creative Quarter. Haya worked on developing and creating promotional and performance …

Routes into China – a trip down memory lane

Routes into China – jiù dì chóng yóu or; a trip down memory lane Exactly four months on from our recent ‘Routes into China’ conference held at Nottingham Contemporary in July, I just want to remind myself of everything I learned on the day. What I loved about this conference is how much the whole …

Work experience with Bell Tent Boutique

Languages for Business is a university-based project that offers language skills and intercultural expertise to small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, primarily via student placements. But of course, it’s not just beneficial for the businesses… The scheme has provided students with the opportunity to put their language skills into practice in …

Do you want to get published, become an editor, or simply become involved with a new, exciting academic project?

After publishing its first issue in April of 2017, the editors at Languages, Texts, and Society are busily preparing for Issue 2, due early in 2018. There are submissions to sort through, articles to be edited and formatted, book reviews to be collated, peer reviewers to find, and style templates to be applied. Now that …

Interview with Rebecca Jeffery, former American and Canadian Studies student and BBC Apprentice candidate

What are you doing currently and what made you decide on your career pathway? When I graduated in American and Canadian Studies from Nottingham University in 2006 I wasn’t entirely sure where to go next – I knew that I wanted to work in business… but I didn’t know what to focus on! I managed …

Britain’s “Tippex” Spies

Britain’s intelligence services have a diversity problem. That was the stark message delivered in a recent interview by Robert Hannigan, the Director of GCHQ, the UK intelligence agency responsible for intercepting and analysing electronic communications. In GCHQ’s case, less than 3% of its workforce has an ethnic minority background. To make Britain’s intelligence services truly …

Reflections on Fidel Castro’s death

Since January 1959, Cuba has generally been somewhat ill-served by the outside media, being so often the object of preconceptions, half-truths and superficiality. And never more so than in the media’s responses to Fidel Castro’s death (25 November 2016), responses which – ironically –  were often stuck in the very ‘time-warp’ which, they repeatedly told …

The End of the World as We Know it? US Foreign Policy under President Trump

Donald Trump’s successful bid for the White House was marked out by a call to put ‘America First.’ In many quarters, Trump’s sound bite was interpreted as harking back to an isolationist mantra that had gained popular currency within the United States in the years leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December …

Sail On, L. Cohen

I was thinking of Leonard Cohen on the night of November 8th, aka Election Day in the US. His song “Democracy,” from his 1992 album The Future, was playing on a loop in my head. I had just finished high school in the summer of 1993 when I saw Cohen in concert, the very last …

The 2016 Election: A Seismic Shift to the Right

The stunning upset victory of Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential election signifies a seismic shift to the right in American politics. After January, when the family of Barack Obama cedes the White House to the Republican billionaire, Republicans will also control both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. It …