When students arrive at university there is an expectation that they come already equipped with the skills they need to read academic texts. In contrast, many students have low confidence in their ability to read challenging texts, often experiencing this as a barrier to engaging with academic practices. Recent research has identified the importance of affect in the university context, exploring the impact of emotions around academic practices such as critical thinking and interpreting feedback, but has not looked specifically at reading as one such key practice. This paper draws on this research and reads it alongside data gathered from questionnaires and focus groups conducted with one group of first-year undergraduates. We found that students have a complex relationship with reading for academic study, and that many experience significant negative affects and self-perceptions in relation to their academic reading tasks. We explore some of these encounters, engaging the student voice and using affect theory to unpack some first experiences of reading in higher education.

This project uses magic to explore dissertation skills with students. Students in a session on preparing for the dissertation learnt a magic trick and then used their experience of learning the trick to reflect and to develop narratives around their dissertation topic focussing on the skills of researching and writing. We compared the results of the intervention group to those of a control group (who were given the same session but excluding the magic trick). The teaching sessions integrated skills essential for completing the dissertation such as critical thinking, linking, metacognitive reflection, and conceptualising the process of a long project. Previous research has suggested that using magic can stimulate curiosity, engage and motivate students, and that they will find the session more memorable (see Moss, Irons and Boland, 2017; Wiseman and Watt, 2020; Wiseman, Wiles and Watt, 2021)   The presentation reported the findings from pre- and post-session questionnaires completed by participants to evaluate the use of a magic trick in teaching dissertation skills by:   Evaluating the effectiveness of using a magic trick to teach dissertation skills. Evaluating the use of magic to make skills teaching more memorable. Evaluating the use of magic to support motivation and positive emotions around dissertation tasks. Evaluating the use of magic to counter some of the negative affects students encounter such as lack of motivation or negative self-efficacy beliefs.

The rise of the ekphrastic poem at the turn of the twenty-first century speaks of a preoccupation with the mediated representations that are increasingly a part of perceived reality. In the wake of “terror,” what we know and how we know it are subjects of fundamental importance. Mixed-media poet Claudia Rankine turns a revealing lens on the ontological implications of how combinations of words and images construct the world, taking in the virtual and material nature of contemporary existence as well as questioning the commercial and political image-texts that constitute reality for most people. I will argue that Rankine's hybrid and complex texts are representative of an increasingly urgent need to attend to the heavily mediated nature of experience and the emotional disconnect this often entails, revealing the need for a reassessment of the responsibilities involved in making representations for public consumption.