News

The School for Cross-faculty Studies at the University of Warwick is proud to be part of a diverse and inclusive community of staff and students. Our community includes many neurodivergent individuals across the spectrum, whose different perspectives, strengths, and ways of thinking enrich our learning environment and strengthen the collaborative work we do. To mark Neurodiversity Celebration Week, we spoke to one of these neurodivergent community members Ruhi - a first year GSD and Life Sciences student - about living with autism, and how the Higher Education sector still has a way to go to support neurodivergent individuals.

Click here to read Ruhi's story

A PhD candidate within our GSD doctoral programme recently presented a paper discussing the ethical and methodological challenges of her research at the Annual Western Society of Criminology Conference, which was held from 5–7 February 2026 in Denver, Colorado.

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Professor Elena Korosteleva, Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development (IGSD), has been invited to launch her highly acclaimed book Complexity and Community in International Relations: Nurturing Resilience in Central Eurasia, published by Oxford University Press in December 2025, internationally.

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Prof. Korosteleva was invited to speak at the EUI workshop on 28 April, with a focus of developing an integrated resilience approach, with reference to Ukraine and other countries. The workshop organised by Prof. Inna Melnykovska Jean Monnet Fellow, Robert Schuman Centre (EUI), innovatively looked at the concept, case-studies, research methods, and designs of the future, to capture the moments of resilience nurturance. This workshop also drew on expertise of EUI Professors, Trine Flockahart (Multi-oder world) and Kalypso Nicolaidis (demoi-cracy), as well as resilience conceptualisation by Prof. Korosteleva (Warwick) and other speakers.

https://www.eui.eu/events?id=585709

Delighted to have shared my book Complexity and Community in IR: nurturing resilience in Central Eurasia (OUP2025) at the School of Transnational Governance European University Institute at the invitation of Trine Flockhart. I am exceptionally grateful to both Trine as Chair, and Liv Nelsen as my discussant; as well as to the meticulous organisation of the event by the STG staff and of course, to the audience and their thought-provoking questions, always. The AGMOW project, focusing on Anticipating Governance in the Multi-Order World, is more topical than ever before: it looks at the crisis of the Liberal International Order, and the disruption of the Global Rules-Based Order, and the emergence of other alternatives. Above all, the project drills into how orders emerge and are situated, at the sameness and diversity; and this is where resilience-governance, premised on societal agency (or Community of Relations) becomes to play a decisive role, for orders to be resilient, and sustainable, in a crisis-prone world. Watch the space, for Special Forums in relation to AGMOW, and new discussions - to be continued!

https://academic.oup.com/book/61660

https://www.eui.eu/events?id=583863

Dr Hita Unnikrishnan has been awarded a substantial research grant by the British Academy following their International Interdisciplinary Research Projects Awards 2026.

Dr Unnikrishnan, an assistant professor within IGSD, received almost £300,000 towards her research project titled ‘Building Resilience through Equitable Action on Temperature, Heat, and indoor Emissions’ (BREATHE), which is being co-investigated by Dr Lavanya Suresh (Birla Institute of Technology and Science), Dr Manik Gupta (Birla Institute of Technology and Science) and Dr Deepshikha Batheja (One Health Trust).

The BREATHE project, which will be carried out over a period of two years, aims to investigate how historical and intersectional inequalities influence differential experiences of heat stress and indoor air pollution (IAP) among members of peri-urban households within the global south.

Working on the hypothesis that women and vulnerable family members within patriarchally-structured households are more likely to suffer from higher rates of heat stress and IAP (due to factors such as more time spent within the home and exposure to unclean cooking fuels), Dr Unnikrishnan and her co-investigators will be combining historical research with large household surveys, satellite data analysis and machine learning models in the Bidar and Chikkaballapur districts of south Indian Karnataka. The project will be pivotal to understanding existing barriers regarding equitable health outcomes and the gendered considerations of climate impact, demonstrating the social and health implications of global sustainability that our School’s research division works tirelessly to raise awareness of.

We congratulate Dr Unnikrishnan on her outstanding achievement. Watch this space for more updates on this project to come!

Our Liberal Arts programme equips students with the essential skills valued by employers across diverse industries, as demonstrated by the wide range of careers our graduates pursue. Frances joined our first ever cohort of Liberal Arts students in 2016, and her final dissertation on improving sustainability in healthcare helped towards securing her role as a Net Zero Strategy Analyst for NHS England. We caught up with Frances to recount more of her experiences as an undergraduate, and how she believes a 2,000-year-old discipline like Liberal Arts is still relevant for helping students develop skills sought out by modern employers.

Click here to read Frances' story

In our ‘Beyond the Classroom’ interview series, we speak to our Liberal Arts module convenors to reveal the deeper purpose and vision behind their academic modules. In our first entry to the series, we spoke to Dr William Rupp about his module Do you hear the people sing? Revolution and the Modern Musical.

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Dr Uribe Botta is an environmental historian whose work is deeply interdisciplinary, bridging history, cultural studies, and the material world. He specialises in the role of plants — particularly orchids — as actors in global and colonial history.

Click here to read more.