The SPOTLIGHT Scholarship Blog is live!
After months of preparation, we are excited to announce that the SPOTLIGHT Scholarship Blog is up and running. The SPOTLIGHT Scholarship Blog is a digital space where students and faculty members of all UCU tracks can post their academic work linked to a (socio)legal, political or historical issue. Publications will include opinion editorials, academic articles, and thesis summaries, which will be published throughout the academic year. In this news item, they would like to briefly explain how they got here, give their thanks to the NPO for their generous funding that made this possible, and outline their publication schedule for the upcoming year.
For both students and professors, there is that pressure to publish combined with the difficulty of doing so in our fast-paced UCU environment. This is where Dr. Diana-Odier Contreras, our Law Fellow, had her idea of a joint student-faculty blog space with engaging themes that showcase UCU knowledge, reflections, and interdisciplinary nature. Moreover, most digital scholarship blogs either target students or academics exclusively, but this blog is a shared space aimed to foster a UCU-wide academic community and celebrate all kinds of academic perspectives.
We owe our thanks to the Utrecht University’s Nationaal Programma Onderwijs (NPO) program that funds our blog’s efforts. This is a program that is set up by the Dutch government in partnership with higher education institutions so that they have more funds to support student wellbeing, particularly after the negative impact on education from COVID-19. The UU site that explains this program is here: https://students.uu.nl/en/corona/back-to-better-npo. The UCU Communications Team helped us build this website and continues to support us in its maintenance. Without our dedicated Communications Team, this blog would not be the same, thank you!
Each month, we will publish a news item that either puts an Utrecht-based or international academic feat in the spotlight, or use our platform to raise awareness on a (socio) legal, political, or ongoing historical conflict. Would you like to nominate someone for their outstanding academic contributions? Do you have an issue or recent development that is close to your heart but relatively unknown in your community? We encourage you to submit this here!
We are excited to share this platform with you and look forward to building an academic community with UCU students and professors here!