We're moving!

Dear Britannicans,

It probably hasn't escaped anyone's attention that things are happening at the English department at the moment. Substantial amounts of stuff are being moved from one room to another, people are running back and forth, and furniture is standing in the middle of the corridor. Basically, this is what's happening to the room arrangements:

Students' lounge -> Former department office
Department office -> One of the smaller researcher rooms
Researchers -> Former students' lounge

As this whole moving business means there is quite a lot of chaos in several rooms, and as there are still quite a few things to be done in the new students' lounge, we will keep the room closed for now. We hope that this short time of general disruption at the department won't bother you all too much, and we look forward to opening the brand new students' lounge to everyone later - hopefully at the beginning of week 8 :)

All the best,
The Board x

PS: Remember that our Anti-Valentine's sitz with Infå takes place at F on Wednesday 11.2! The ones of you who didn't manage to get a seat at the sitz are most welcome to attend the afterparty starting at midnight. See you there! :)

Upcoming events

Greetings, Britannicans! As promised, your sparkling, brand new board is setting off the new year with a new lineup of events!

 First off, we're hosting a fun and relaxing evening in the Student's Lounge on Wednesday 28th at 3pm. Feel free to join us if you want to sew overall patches, play board games and socialize with other people from the English Department! Do bring along any of the following things if you feel like it: your overall and sewing equipment, board games, snacks, friends!  We will also be selling drinks and patches.

F*CK V-DAY SITZ
Roses? Romance? Happiness? Ugh. Britannica and Infå are once again collaborating to host a Valentine's Day sitz party together! However, this year we're straying from tradition (as you can see from the clever and tasteful title). More information can be found here! The spots are indeed already filled, but go ahead and sign up for the queue in case somebody on the main list doesn't make it to the sitz. There is going to be an afterparty starting at midnight, which is open for everybody, so come and party with us!



All the best,
Kathy

Students' lounge update

Just a short post to say THANKS to everyone who have joined us in supporting the students' lounge! Our petition has a lot of signatures already (way more than is shown in the picture below!) and it is still lying on the table in SL if there is someone who still wants to sign it. Also thanks to everyone who didn't mind being caught on camera during the very informal "photosession" on Tuesday - pictures will be up later!

Also, the latest news to those of you who didn't come to the subject moot: The students' lounge will be moved to the room that is now the department office. The biggest reason for this is that the department wants to make more room for researchers, and while the department office isn't suitable for this purpose, the room that is now SL could house more researchers than the majority of the offices at our department. This decision will, of course, mean less space for us, but it is way better than losing our sacred recreational space altogether, and we choose to see it as an opportunity to clear out unnecessary things from the students' lounge and furnish/decorate a new cozy corner for everyone. We will give you more information about this move as soon as any concrete plans evolve!

Right now, there doesn't seem to be a need for sending the petition anywhere, but we will save it for the future in case of emergency! As mentioned, it is still possible to sign it, so feel free to do so if you haven't already.

x The board

PS. An additional hanks to everyone who participated in the backwards sitz - hope you had a blast!

TAKE ACTION for the students' lounge

Dear fellow Britannicans,

This will be one of the longer posts on this blog, but we'd appreciate it if you took your time to read it. If you're busy doing tutorial work or studying for exams or whatever, the bold parts should tell you the most important things.

It probably hasn't escaped anyone's attention that there is a lot of structural changes going on at our university at the moment. To many of you, all this decision-making probably seems distant and complicated, and it might feel like "it's not really any of our business anyway", which is understandable. However, some of the things that are going on WILL actually affect most of us in one way or another. Here's one thing that makes the Britannica board raging mad: We might lose our students' lounge. Older students have told us that rumours about this have come and gone for several years now, and so far nothing has happened, but now it's being discussed again, and it seems to be pretty serious.

HERE'S WHAT WE KNOW RIGHT NOW:

- As the new structural changes come into effect, one more subject (gender studies) and a number of new researchers are apparently going to be squeezed into Arken, which despite its numerous corridors and departments does not have an endless amount of space.
- The room that is currently our students' lounge is considered big enough to fit four researchers and therefore, we might be forced to move out of there.
- Department secretaries are considered "unnecessary" and such services are somehow going to be centralized, which means there will no longer be a department office (not in the same way as there is today, anyway) and that room will be used for some other purpose - this could perhaps be turned into a new but smaller version of the students' lounge.
- However, the department has to motivate why they want to use a room in a particular way, and there is no guarantee that the "higher instances" (i.e. the people making this kind of decisions) will consider it necessary for us to have a room like the students' lounge at all - especially if the suggestion just comes from the staff.
- These decisions are being made behind closed doors, which means that we might not get any "official" information about this before the decisions have already been made.

HERE'S WHAT WE'RE GOING TO DO:

- We need to show the "higher instances" that the students' lounge is actually being used and that we need it in order to stay sane (where else would we hang out between classes and complain about our heavy workload and drink coffee and do group projects?!).
- Next Tuesday, the 14th of October at 12 noon, we're meeting up in the students' lounge. We will have a small "photosession" in order to gather visual proof that people actually use the room. The more people in the pictures, the better, so please do come along, even if you don't consider yourself photogenic - the point is to make the photos look natural, so you're more than free to put your nose in a book for the pictures, or sit with your back against the camera.
- The board will also put together a sort of angry letter/petition to the decision-makers that we can use later, if necessary. You will be able to sign this petition-thingy during the photosession, and we'll probably leave it in the students' lounge afterwards so people can sign even if they can't make it to the meet-up on Tuesday.
- After this, we're going to contact Kåren - this is the kind of issue they should be able to help us with (at least according to a representative of theirs that we spoke to in the spring).

So basically: If you think Britannica, and by extension, all students at the English department, should get to keep our beloved room: SHOW UP IN THE STUDENTS' LOUNGE TUESDAY 14.10 AT 12.

Thanks x

The Board