Author: kmoss

To help mark International Women’s Day 2022, a new project is investigating the impact of lockdown and the stories women tell of their experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers at the University of Lincoln, University of Leicester and Robert Gordon University, are encouraging women to share photographs of themselves writing on social media, using the hashtags #womenwritinglockdown #IWD2022. The images will then be considered to become part of an online exhibition.

The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is titled ‘A [Socially Isolated] Room of One’s Own: Women Writing Lockdown’. It aims to investigate the impact of lockdown on women’s writing, specifically in the early period of the pandemic.

A century ago, Virginia Woolf delivered a series of lectures to female students at Girton College, Cambridge, which a decade later were published in book form as A Room of One’s Own.

In that book, Woolf argues that, in order to write, ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own’. When Woolf forged that initial, visionary connection between women, writing and space, she envisaged it as a positive opportunity to allow women’s creativity to flourish in a space they have commonly considered to be their own: the home.

Between March and May 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK Government issued a directive insisting that all UK citizens should stay at home. Commonly known as ‘lockdown’, this project explores the differing effects the directive had upon women and men, measured through the stories women told about those first 12 weeks.

For example, domestic violence rates doubled during the first three weeks of lockdown. Given that women in the UK perform 60% more unpaid labour than men, women were disproportionately affected by the competing demands of work and home schooling. In addition, academic periodicals quickly recorded that submissions from female authors dropped noticeably in proportion to their male colleagues.

The project will investigate how lockdown impacted on women’s experience of writing, when and where they wrote, as well as what they wrote about.

Professor Lucie Armitt, who is leading this research explains, “The project will explore published fiction and poetry, blogs and social media posts, newspaper articles, features and oral history archives. It will also include creative writing produced in our project partner Liv Torc’s bespoke creative writing workshops for the project.”

The final major output, due for launch in June 2023, will be a virtual exhibition. ‘The Lockdown House’, bringing together a collection of our findings, images, diary entries, social media posts and a Discussion Board.

To find out more about the project, including how to get involved in the creative writing workshops, people can contact researchers at womenwritinglockdown@lincoln.ac.uk, https://www.facebook.com/Womenwritinglockdown/, https://twitter.com/WomenLockdown, and https://www.instagram.com/womenwritinglockdown/

For many students, the transition to University is seen as a significant life event. Although the transition is traditionally perceived as beneficial, it does entail an adjustment period. This process presents the opportunity that encourages students to gain independence and push themselves out of their comfort zone, which involves responding to new academic and social challenges that may emerge. As such, this research hopes to investigate whether a game environment can provide support for new and returning students through the transition to University.

If you are a student at the University of Lincoln, you are invited to partake. In the first part of the study, you will be asked to complete two questionnaires about how you feel about University transition. Part two of the study will require you to download the ‘Transition to Lincoln University’ game from the Microsoft Store. You will be asked to spend a minimum of 30 minutes playing the game. The game developed will act as a virtual guide to help prepare individuals to transition to higher education. The game will be a digital replica of the University, taking you through a university student’s typical day. Part three will take place within three months time, and you will be asked to complete additional questionnaires. These will ask you questions about how you found the gameplay and your feelings and university experience.

Participation is voluntary, but the results of this study could impact the way future applicants are inducted. If you would like to take part you can find the link here: https://lncn.ac/vg&a-part1

The project “Video Games and Anxiety” contributes to research conducted on behalf of The University of Lincoln and has received a favourable ethical opinion from the University Research Ethics Committee (2021_4011).

Staff and students are invited to join in on a Christmas-themed photography competition – focussed on the famously festive red Poinsettia flower which will provide fresh data for machine-learning research while supporting a local charity.

For each poinsettia photograph submitted, the University of Lincoln will make a donation to Mint Lane Café – a community café and charitable organisation in Lincoln City Centre, which makes nutritious meals for those in food poverty by using ingredients which might otherwise be wasted.

The donations will support volunteers at the café to provide delicious Christmas meals throughout the festive season, to Lincoln residents who might otherwise not be able to afford it.

The poinsettia images will be entered into a ‘Holiday Hackathon’ competition – bringing together students from all over the UK, and further afield, to work on machine learning challenges to define the perfect poinsettia.

The photographs submitted to the hackathon will help to shape the future of the flower industry, as technological innovation, artificial intelligence and robotics such as this are transforming the UK’s agricultural sector.

More information about the Holiday Hackathon, including how to submit images, can be found here.

We are pleased to launch the Active Online Reading project student and staff surveys. These surveys are designed to find out more about how students read online for their studies and to identify effective pedagogies to support them in doing so.

The student survey can be completed here:  https://unilincolnlalt.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8wvaLTjYgIb4frM

[This is for all levels of study at all institutions. We welcome responses from the UK and internationally. We are offering a small number of Amazon vouchers for student respondents, to be drawn at random in January 2022]

The staff survey can be completed here: https://unilincolnlalt.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6QpuNubrrJBoTwW

[This survey is open to anyone with responsibility for teaching or supporting students to read at university, including lecturers, librarians and educational technologists. As with the student survey, we welcome responses from the UK and abroad.]

Please share the survey as widely as possible, with your students and colleagues (if you are a member of staff) and with your peers (if you are a student). Both surveys will remain open into January 2022.

The surveys can also be accessed via the following QR codes:

Student survey:

Staff survey:

This research has received ethical approval from the University of Lincoln (reference 2404).

For more information, please visit Active Online Reading.