During the visit, the collaboration between Katherine Kwa and Gertraud Medicus continued, with a recent journal paper published and another paper submitted to Geotechnique Letters, currently under review. The focus of their collaboration is on using the Hypoplastic constitutive model to analyze embedded anchoring systems for floating offshore renewable energy infrastructure. They employ two numerical approaches, one at an element scale in Matlab and another as a boundary value problem in Plaxis 2D. The visit involved discussions on the design of numerical models and benchmarking for consistency, as well as planning a new workflow between the models for future simulations.

Gertraud Medicus is an expert in Hypoplasticity, and Ms. Kwa expressed pleasure in working with her and learning more about offshore geotechnical applications. A guest lecture was delivered in person, attracting approximately 15 viewers, followed by a Q&A discussion. Katherine Kwas's future plan involves creating 2D-maps of changing soil strength around an anchor to understand the evolving soil response and anchor capacity, leading to another journal paper.

Ms. Kwa highlighted the productivity and value of meeting and discussing in person after two years of virtual collaboration with Gertraud Medicus. 

Read the full report here

The writer and critic, Professor David Herd (University of Kent), participated in "Telling Encounters," an event at the University of Innsbruck devoted to the theme of forced migration. In his lecture titled "Refugee Tales and the Politics of Welcome: Walking Against the Expulsive Environment," he discussed immigration detention as a measure of migration control used in no other European country except the UK.
He outlined the rationale underlying Refugee Tales (www.refugeetales.org/), an internationally acclaimed initiative against the detention of asylum seekers involving high-profile writers, aid-workers, volunteers, and refugees.
In an interview with FREIRAD (to be aired on 23 May), he addressed the danger of immigration policies contravening human rights and the need for international collaborations to work towards a more constructive way of negotiating the forced displacement than is currently prevalent. His stay in Innsbruck served also to plan precisely such a collaboration between Refugee Tales and ARENA (Archive of REfugee NArratives), a project developed by Professor Helga Ramsey-Kurz at the Department of English of the University of Innsbruck.

As a part of this collaboration, two public 'Walks in Solidarity with Refugees' will take place simultaneously in Kent and Tirol on 17 June (for more information, please visit https://www.uibk.ac.at/anglistik/arena/news-events/).