We have had some recent changes in the WCC UK Steering Committee which we wanted to update you on.
Sadly, our co-chair Claire Millington has had to step down for personal reasons. Claire’s term was due to last until the April 2021 AGM. We are very grateful to Laurence Totelin for agreeing to step in to take up the co-chair role earlier than she was scheduled to. We are also extremely grateful to Claire for all she has done during her time on the WCC UK steering committee, including her leadership of the #WCCWiki initiative and her work on governance issues.
Our long-standing ECR liaison, Kate Cook, has agreed to become a full steering committee member, following our standing practice when we have had a steering committee member step down in the past; we will be preparing a formal policy on how we handle these kinds of transitions for approval at the AGM.
Kate’s move means that we have a vacancy for an ECR liaison, to work with Anna Judson. Acting as a liaison is a great opportunity to meet new people and get some event organising experience in a friendly environment; at the moment we are at the early stages of planning an ECR event for 2020. If you’d like to volunteer or to find out more about what being a liaison involves, please e-mail us at womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com.
Nominations are being
solicited for joining the Steering Committee of the Women’s Classical Committee
UK. The
Steering Committee runs the WCC UK,
including organizing events, workshops, and future development of the WCC UK. Two
new Committee members will be elected by the membership, and will serve for
four years, with the option to renew for a further four year term. The Steering
Committee wishes to encourage a diverse organization comprised of
representatives from any background, location, or career level.
In addition to nominations of others, we also strongly encourage members to nominate themselves if they are interested in the roles. Nominees must be members of the WCC UK in good standing (please check with Carol Atack, carolatack at gmail.com, if you are unsure of your membership status). Names of nominees should be submitted to Thea Lawrence, the Elections Officer, by Friday 31st of January 2020.
The Elections Officer will then contact nominees for
permission to place their candidacy on the ticket. The Elections Officer will
require a short CV (1 page) and an election statement from each nominee. These
will be made available on the WCC UK website for members to review prior to voting.
For previous examples of such materials, see here.
Voting will open on Monday 3rd March and run until Friday the 3rd of April 2020. The elected members will be announced in early April, and will assume office at the AGM later in the year.
If you have any questions about the Steering Committee or the process of elections, please e-mail us at womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com
We are very excited to be starting preparations for the launch of our Short-term Mentoring Scheme. This is the final element of our new mentoring programme, which complements both the Take A Graduate Student To Lunch scheme we run at the Classical Association conference and the Mentoring Triads which are running this academic year for the first time.
The short-term scheme provides the possibility of consulting a mentor on a specific topic for a brief consultation by e-mail, for a short period of no more than three months. The WCC UK will maintain a database of mentors, and assign mentees to appropriate mentors as and when they sign up. Mentors and mentees may join the scheme at any time of year, and people may be both mentors and mentees at the same time.
In order to set up this scheme, we need mentors! The guidelines for mentors are as follows:
You should respond to your mentee’s initial email within two weeks.
You are not obliged to advise on any issues other than those that you signed up to the scheme to help with.
You should be clear and explicit about your ability to comment on any written material, and provide a clear timeframe of when you can provide comments if you are able to do so.
You agree to communicate by email in the first instance. Any other means of communication should be arranged at your and your mentee’s discretion.
Please remember that your mentee may have had different experiences from your own when giving advice.
Please make reasonable time for your mentee, and inform them of the timeframes in which they might expect to receive responses from you.
The scheme administrator will ensure that no mentor is overburdened at any given time.
After sign-up, mentors will be consulted annually as to whether they wish to remain on the database. You can request to be removed from the database at any time.
Signing up does not guarantee that you will be matched with a mentee.
The full WCC UK Mentoring Code of Conduct can be viewed here.
If you would like to sign up to offer support as a mentor as part of this scheme, please use this form.
The scheme will open for mentees in roughly one month’s time, once a database of mentors has been accumulated. Please note that you can still sign up to be a mentor once the scheme is open to mentees.
This scheme is for members of the WCC UK in good standing only; if you would like to sign up to the WCC UK, you can do so here.
The WCC UK steering committee and liaisons note that the University and College Union are calling for industrial action consisting of strikes from Monday 25th November to Wednesday 4th December, and action short of a strike from Monday 25th November. We support the aims of the strike, particularly since UCU is seeking to address issues around the gender and ethnicity pay gap, casualisation, stress and mental health which impact our members.
In our own launch survey, we identified that women were much more likely than men to be in casualised or part-time positions than men, even though about the same number of men and women are employed in the discipline. In a 2019 survey on the impact of casualisation in higher education, 71% of respondents said they believed their mental health had been damaged by working on insecure contracts and 43% said they believed that such contracts had affected their physical health. Other studies have also revealed that young workers are more likely to experience anxiety or depression if they are employed on temporary or casual contracts. The gender pay gap also exists at all HEI institutions where classics is taught; in the HE sector, women on average were paid 15.9% less than their male colleagues in 2018.
We recognise that the decision whether to strike or not is a difficult one, particularly for those in precarious employment. We encourage our members at striking institutions to consult the national UCU strike fund guidelines and to enquire about the details of their local branch strike fund, and then make decisions accordingly. Members at non-striking branches may wish to donate to the national fund or a nearby local fund in solidarity. If you have further questions about strike action, we encourage you to contact your local branch for guidance.
In response to feedback gathered from members, the WCC UK is developing a mentoring scheme with three strands. The first is the Take a Grad Student to Lunch Scheme, which ran successfully for the second time in Summer 2019. The second, launched here, is the Co-Mentoring Triads Scheme.
The Co-Mentoring Triads Scheme is designed to facilitate a fixed-term, mutually beneficial mentoring arrangement to be established among three members, to avoid the hierarchy present in traditional mentoring relationships. Co-mentoring triads will run for one academic year. Triads will be grouped together around specific themes and interests that the members wish to explore in the coming year, as well as other factors such as preferred method of communication and location. Members from all careers and career stages are welcome to sign up. Triads will be matched up by the Mentoring Officer and informed of their triad’s membership by the end of September.
Initial contact will be made by e-mail. Other methods of communication will be agreed upon at the triad’s discretion; these may include e-mail discussions, Skype calls or in-person meetings. Regularity of contact will be determined at the discretion of the triad. Triads are expected to contact each other at least four times over the course of the year. Worksheets and guidance will be provided by the WCC UK which may help to structure the mentoring arrangement. You are not obliged to use these, but they may help you to get the most out of your triad. Please be reasonable with your demands on your colleagues’ time and respectful of the commitment they have made to you. By signing up to the scheme you agree to abide by the WCC UK’s Mentoring Code of Conduct.
The scheme is open to all WCC UK members in good standing. Please sign up here by Friday 13th September. If you have any questions about the scheme, please contact the Acting Mentoring Officer, Christine Plastow, at christine.plastow [at] open.ac.uk.
The WCC UK warmly invites members to consider proposing an event to be held under WCC UK auspices.
As outlined in our events policy, we run events with an organising team made up of three people (or a triad), one of whom needs to be a steering committee member or liaison; any member is welcome to put an event proposal forward for the steering committee’s approval.
To help members who would like to put on an event but perhaps haven’t had any experience of event organising yet, we have put together a short guide titled So You’re Organising A WCC UK Event: An Event Organiser’s Starter Pack. It gives helpful advice on how to propose an event as well as useful tips on event organisation which we’ve picked up over the last few years. We hope that this pack will make organising a WCC UK event more straightforward, and will demystify some of the things that go on behind the scenes to get our programming together.
If you a PhD student or an early career colleague who is interested in finding out more about running an event but not quite ready to propose one of your own, we offer the opportunity to shadow a triad to gain some some experience of event organisation; if this sounds like something you would be interested in, drop a line to the Administrator at womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com.
We’re looking for our next Treasurer! Our current Treasurer, Dr. Carol Atack, intends to step down from her post at our next AGM; we are looking for someone interested in taking over the role from April/May 2020 so that they have the opportunity to shadow Carol and get familiar with how the financial side of the WCC UK works. The Treasurer currently serves a five year term. The post would thus suit someone in reasonably stable employment, particularly with a fixed institutional postal address; these are desiranda rather than essentials, and we welcome all enquiries and expressions of interest.
Click below the cut to see a detailed role description of what the Treasurer currently does. If you’d like to discuss this opportunity in more detail or volunteer for the position, please drop us a line at womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com.
Following our AGM in May, we have some new faces on the steering committee!
First of all, we offer our heartfelt thanks to Amy Russell and Rosa Andújar, whose terms as steering committee members has ended; to Jane Draycott, stepping down as ECR liaison; and Emma Bridges, stepping down as alt-ac and part-time liaison. Jane, Emma, Amy and Rosa are founding members of the WCC UK, and we are incredibly grateful to them for everything they have done for us as an organisation since we were founded. We also thank Vicky Donnellan for her service as alt-ac and part-time liaison. We look forward to working with them all as members in the future.
Our two new committee members, following the 2019 elections, are April Pudsey and Lizzie Lewis; April will be co-chair from April 2021.
On the liaison front, we welcome Amelia Dowler and Lily Mac Mahon, who join us as our new alt-ac liaisons; Anna Judson, who takes up the ECR liaison portfolio; and Manuela Irarrázabal Elliott, who is our new disability liaison. We also welcome Kathryn Adams and Miller Power, who join Katherine McDonald as part of our website and social media team.
Finally, we are grateful to Christine Plastow for taking on the role of Acting Mentoring Officer; building on our successful Take A Grad Student To Lunch scheme at the CA over the last two years, she will be overseeing the organisation of a new WCC UK mentoring scheme and has played a major role in planning what it will look like. Watch this space for more details.
Over the coming year, we are going to be thinking about the role of liaisons within the WCC UK and whether our current positions are operating as we would like them to. We plan to circulate a survey to members in the autumn to see what you think about what the WCC UK should be doing, including an opportunity to give us some feedback on these issues.
The Women’s Classical Committee UK is organising an event aimed at mid-career scholars, to be held on Friday 13th September 2019 at the University of Glasgow, from 11am to 4.30pm.
The Women’s Classical Committee UK run a mid-career event annually to help colleagues in open-ended employment discuss the issues and challenges that face academics, particularly women, at mid-career. Topics to be discussed may include decisions about whether and when to move institutions, questions around disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity and collaboration in research, expectations about international mobility and balancing this with family/caring duties, managing institutional expectations (which may be gendered) around types and levels of administrative service, taking on leadership positions, ways of supporting precarious colleagues, and strategies to tackle unconscious bias in the workplace. Those who register their intent to attend will be invited to fill in an online questionnaire, the results of which will inform the precise choice of topics for discussion sessions. We envisage that the day’s discussions will help to set priorities for resource development and future campaigns by the Women’s Classical Committee UK.
The WCC UK recognises that the term ‘mid-career’ is open to a range of interpretations, but also that different challenges face women in classics in different situations and career stages. This event is aimed primarily at women who self-define as having reached mid-career; markers of this may include being eight or more years after the award of their PhD, holding an open-ended contract, and having an established publication profile. If the event is oversubscribed then we will give priority to women in this situation, but we welcome applications to register from anyone of any gender who feels they would benefit from attending.
Registration Options
In-person registration is free for paid-up members of the WCC UK, who have received instructions on how to access this ticket type over e-mail. If you need the instructions to be resent, please e-mail us at womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com. For non-members, tickets cost £10. You may register for the event at over at Eventbrite.
The WCC UK is committed to providing friendly and accessible environments for its events, so please do get in touch if you have any access or childcare enquiries. The catering for the event will be fully vegetarian; please indicate any further dietary requirements via the event’s online questionnaire in due course.
Child-friendly Policy
The Women’s Classical Committee UK is committed to making our events as inclusive as possible, and recognises that the financial and practical challenges of childcare often impede people from participating in workshops and conferences. Anyone who needs to bring a dependent child or children with them in order to participate in one of our events is usually welcome to do so, but we ask you to inform us of this in advance so that we can take them into account in our event planning and risk assessment.
Attendees who wish to bring children are welcome to do so; the safety and well-being of children remains their carers’ responsibility at all times.
The Women’s Classical Committee UK invites submissions for this year’s panel proposal for the Classical Association Annual Conference 2020 (Swansea University, 17-20 April).
Storying Gendered Emotions in Classical Antiquity
Organised by Maria Gerolemou (Exeter) and Irene Salvo (Göttingen)
Although studies on emotion in ancient Greek and Roman cultures are currently thriving, gender differences in emotional experience and expression have been comparatively little investigated. This panel aspires to invite further reflections on the topic. Discussion will focus on (but it is not limited to) the following interrelated themes and aspects:
1. Gender difference a) Gender-specific patterns of emotions: are there any stereotypical emotions that are considered socially acceptable for females and males? b) The way women and men experience and express emotions; e.g. verbal and non-verbal expression of emotion; different frequency and intensity of emotional expression.
2. Embodied narratives c) Storying emotion: Narratives that construct, thus shape their ‘consumer’s’ gendered emotional expression, or undo it. d) Forms of narratives that are conveyed through images, objects, monuments, or places, and that evoke a gendered emotional and embodied experience.
3. Queer readings e) Intersectional readings of emotional lives; emotions are considered to be agentic forces which are subject to various factors such as age, race, sexuality, and class; hence, whilst patriarchal culture can impedes agency, class as well seems to play a role in how members of the same gender tend to experience emotion (see e.g. slave women). f) Queering historiographical narratives on gender and emotion traditionally interpreted mainly as evidence of political or military history.
We warmly encourage Classicists at any career stage and of any gender to submit abstract proposals for 20-minute papers. Please send an anonymous abstract (300 words maximum) no later than Wednesday the 14th of August 2019 to womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com.
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