The days are lengthening. It’s now almost daylight when I leave the house in the morning, and the garden is turning green – bluebells are appearing across all the beds in the garden. We inherited them from the previous owners and they are the highly invasive Spanish variety, which are almost impossible to control. But…
We all understand the relationships between physical activity and wellbeing. As Sheffield Hallam’s Steve Haake, Director of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, puts it, it comes down to a simple proposition about more people moving more, more often. But physical wellbeing is also intimately connected with mental wellbeing. Thursday 2 March is University Mental Health Day…
Desiderius Erasmus was born in the late 1460s, probably in Rotterdam. When he died in 1536, he was one of the most feted humanist scholars of his age. He had studied and taught at Paris, Turin, London, Cambridge, Leuven and Basel, moving easily across Europe which – in the course of his lifetime – was…
The great sociologist and social entrepreneur Michael Young had a reasonable claim to be one of the most influential shapers of contemporary Britain. In 1945, he wrote the Labour Party manifesto, which paved the way for the establishment of the NHS, the post-war Welfare State, public ownership, the National Parks and the new towns. In 1958, his…
If you stand on the hill behind Sheffield rail station – near the memorial to the victims of the 1832 cholera epidemic – and look across the city, Sheffield Hallam University dominates the centre of the city. Without it, there would be a large hole in the city centre. Universities do this to their cities.…
To be honest, Friday evenings are not normally the most energizing time of the week. At the end of a long and tiring week at work, they are normally a time to flop out, hoping there’s enough in the fridge to make something to eat. So it was very good to have a different Friday…
It’s coming to the end of my first year as Vice-Chancellor. As I reflect on the year that’s been, I wanted to thank each of you for your contribution to my first year as VC and to think about what’s ahead: Thank you to the many Sheffield Hallam staff, students and colleagues from elsewhere who…
You can bring logic into every situation. How does Father Christmas manage to deliver presents to every child in the world over one night? Tom Chivers is a man with too much time on his hands, and calculated that if we assume that Santa has to travel 342,510,000 km on Christmas Eve, and that he…
You know the puzzles: look in one way, and it’s a vase; in another way it’s two faces in profile. Optical illusions of all sorts make the point that what you see depends on what you are looking for. As I write this, we are halfway through the fortnight-long highlight of Sheffield Hallam’s year which is graduation.…
As Kathryn Schulz points out in her fabulous book Being Wrong, we all get things wrong, but rarely like to admit it. There are any number of reasons why we get things wrong: we look at the wrong clues in the evidence before us; we have the wrong prior beliefs; we fall back on stereotypes; we rely too…