Café Scientifique | Public Engagement with Research

Café Scientifique

Join us at one of our monthly Café events, normally held at Aberdeen Art Gallery, where we hear from a different researcher each month on a range of exciting topics. Cafe's include topics from research across the whole university - recent talks include Dolphin Social Behaviours, Prehistoric Carved Stone Balls and The Orkney and Shetland cancer gene.

View our upcoming events below.

Musical Traditions of Scotland’s Northern Sailors

Date: Wednesday 23rd April
Time: 7pm
Venue: Aberdeen Art Gallery

Join us for our April Café Sci where we will be joined by Dr Frances Wilkins for a fascinating audio-visual exploration of the music that emerged from the seventeenth century in the wake of the Scottish whaling and fishing industries and the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The talk will be accompanied by live renditions of instrumental music and songs and archive recordings from these times.

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The Female Category in Sport

Date: Thursday 1st May
Time: 7pm
Venue: Aberdeen Art Gallery

Join researchers for a panel event discussing the complex issues surrounding the female category in sport.

The event aims to educate and provide clarity on complex issues surrounding the female category in sport and related matters.

The discussion will include issues such as:
◦ Sport policies concerning the female category, including their
current articulations, history and recent evolutions
◦ Major sport governing bodies’ current thinking around this
category and how these policies have impacted athletes,
including trans women athletes and women athletes with
variations in sex characteristics
◦The effects of these policies at sub-elite levels of competition

The event will also look to future reforms and debates in this area.

Speakers:
Blair Hamilton (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Hugh Torrance (LEAP Sports Scotland)
Madeleine Pape (University of Lausanne)
Sone Erikainen (University of Aberdeen)
Federico Luzzi (University of Aberdeen) (moderator)

This event is organised by the Philosophy Department of the University of Aberdeen as a Royal Institute of Philosophy Local Partner and by the University of Aberdeen’s Public Engagement with Research Unit. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Royal Institute of Philosophy and the Scots Philosophical Association.

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Using virtual reality in eyewitness memory research

Date: Wednesday 18th June
Time: 7pm
Venue: Aberdeen Art Gallery

Eyewitness memory research typically involves participants viewing a mock-crime event (e.g. a bank robbery) on a computer screen and later reporting on what they remember from the event. While videos can effectively depict complex events, the controlled laboratory environment often feels disconnected from real-world experiences. Virtual reality overcomes some of these limitations: it takes participants directly in the environment and thus increases the sense of presence. In this talk Dr Eva Rubinova will share some of the work conducted in her lab over the past year using virtual reality stimuli portraying interpersonal conflicts consistent with early stages of domestic abuse. The talk will focus on the impact of emotion on memory and assessing methods which facilitate detailed memory recall.

Register