Now ready for a new training event, we would love to tell you about our first in-person meet-up. The Edinburgh Training event happened in the middle of April and the city welcomed us with timid blossoms and early signs of spring.
The excitement of meeting our colleagues in real life and actually sitting in a lecture room created a vibrant environment, where we had the opportunity to get to know each other, and learn from experts in the field (from Martin Pickering and Ruth Corps for Psychology of Language to Simon King for Speech processing and Ester Klabbers for Speech synthesis) and remind ourselves – or even discover – what academic life used to feel like before the pandemic hit.
Edinburgh weather and the Psychology department building (former George Watson’s Ladies College, which recently celebrated its 150th anniversary) added a note of melancholy and cosiness that greatly impacted our desire to learn, discuss ideas and think critically about our research. We also had the opportunity to talk about our projects and were free to use the format we preferred at the time. Some of us presented our research from a broader perspective, by showing different projects and how they relate to our research questions, while some of the others asked for specific feedback. Some of us showed a sample of their data, some others discussed theoretical issues.
While Edinburgh will not ever lose its magic, the way the light hits the city architecture, its shade and secret corners, we are now looking forward to meeting again, embracing Ferrara’s warmth and Italian “dolce vita”, which has always been a fertile ground for knowledge building and exchange.
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Authors and Editors: Blog committee
If you want to know more about our projects and the ESRs working on them, please look under the Training tab.
Photo by Anna Urlapova from Pexels