Postgraduate students from across the world are gathering at the University of Aberdeen for the seventh annual College of Arts and Social Sciences Postgraduate Conference.
Moving Forward is a conference designed by and for the postgraduate population and this year will see students from as far afield as the USA and India gather at King’s College.
The conference provides a unique opportunity for students from different departments, disciplines and universities to come together for the discussion and debate of common issues.
It also provides an annual opportunity for students to establish and maintain academic networks and to present past, current and proposed work in a supportive yet professional atmosphere.
The two-day conference runs from today (July 27) to July 29 and is expected to be attended by around 150 students.
Each year a volume of selected essays is produced from the conference following the theme so for 2010 the collection of papers will reflect the diversity of the University of Aberdeen's College of Arts and Social Sciences and the research aspirations of the University.
Moving Forward has a long history at the University of Aberdeen. Although the conference has changed and grown over the years, its first inception came 10 years ago, in 2000, when 20 postgraduate students in Law and Social Sciences came together for one day to share in each other's research.
Since then, the conference has grown to include visiting delegates, and to embrace the many other disciplines in the College of Arts and Social Sciences.
From 2002-2005, the event used themes to help direct the focus of presentations, like Shifting Boundaries in 2004. But no theme resonated quite so strongly as that of 2005, Moving Forward, which quickly became the permanent short title for the conference.
Today, the conference is one of the widest-reaching, and well-established postgraduate conferences of its kind in the UK.
Full details of the conference are available at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cass/pgradconf/Home.html