Other News

Dr. Maria Koinova, Reader in IR and Principal Investigator of the ERC Project “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty,” is giving a keynote lecture on 7 April, 2016 at a conference at the Central European University in Budapest on “Diasporas in Eastern Europe.”

The lecture is entitled “Diasporas, Sending States and Socio-spatial Positionality” and will feature how the socio-spatial position of diasporas in specific contexts empowers diaspora entrepreneurs in different ways, and accounts for trajectories of transnational diaspora mobilization. More information could be obtained here.

Ben Braun, who many people will remember from his time as a PAIS PhD student within the IPE Cluster, was awarded a PSA Thesis Prize at the Political Studies Association’s recent Annual Conference Dinner. This was the Sir Walter Bagehot Prize for the Best PhD in Government and Public Administration for the thesis ‘Central Bank Agency and Monetary Governability in the Euro Area: Governing through Money, Trust and Expectations’. Ben was a GEM School PhD student supervised by Matthew Watson and Amandine Crespy of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is currently in the second year of a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Köln, and in the last week he has also found out that he will be going to the Center for European Studies at Harvard University next year on an equally prestigious JFK Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Stuart Elden’s book Foucault’s Last Decade has just been published by Polity Press.

The book is a study of the work Foucault conducted between 1974 and his death in 1984. In 1974, Foucault began writing the first volume of his History of Sexuality, developing work he had already begun to present in his Collège de France lecture courses. In that first volume, published in late 1976, Foucault promised five further volumes, and indicated some other studies he intended to write. But none of those books actually appeared, and Foucault’s work – which we can now closely track from his courses – went in very different directions. At the very end of his life, two further volumes of the History of Sexuality were published, and a fourth was close to completion. In contrast to the originally planned thematic treatment, the final version was a much more historical study, returning to antiquity and early Christianity.

The Paris courses, other lectures, shorter publications, and related materials – some collaborative and some unpublished – are used in this book to provide an intellectual history of this final project of Foucault’s career. Research for this book was conducted in archives in France and California, and the account shows how Foucault’s pursuit of a problem led him to rework the project in both scope and shape. The book is broadly chronological, and shows how all of Foucault’s concerns in this period – from race to confession, from governmentality to neoliberalism – are all, in various ways, connected to the project on sexuality or, as he reconceived it, on the relation between truth and subjectivity.

The book is partnered with a second study, on the period immediately preceding the last decade, tracing how Foucault moved from The Archaeology of Knowledge to Discipline and Punish. That book, Foucault: The Birth of Power, is forthcoming with Polity in early 2017, and it analyses Foucault’s early Collège de France courses in relation to his political activism and research on health, madness and discipline.

Dr Charikleia Tzanakou presented her research on ‘Knowledge policies for whom’ to a workshop for European policy-makers ‘Researching the Europe of Knowledge: Insights for policymakers from the UACES CRN’. The aim of this workshop was to showcase the collaborative work of CRN members to a wider audience and create a unique opportunity to stimulate debates between scholars and policymakers through substantive exchange on the politics and policies of the Europe of Knowledge. It took place in Brussels, at the premises of the Directorate General of Research and Innovation, European Commission. More information can be found here.

The workshop was organised by the UACES ERA CRN (European Research Area Collaborative Research Network) which has led to the creation of an ECPR Standing Group on Politics of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation.

On the 17th of March, Dr Dominic Kelly joined an international panel of experts as an invited guest speaker at the Parliamentary Public Debate 'Remember Fukushima'. Chaired by Catherine West MP, Shadow Foreign Minister, the debate reflected upon the events at Fukushima and their impact upon the future of nuclear power in Japan and throughout the globe. Framed by a speech written specially for the occasion by former President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, the discussion ranged across the natural and social sciences.

In addition to detailed analysis of the physical and psychological impact of the Fukushima disaster, the debate featured moving personal testimonies from local residents. Dominic's contribution focussed on the historical and international context of Japan's nuclear policy, on the actions taken by the Japanese government in the aftermath of Fukushima, and on Japan's continued reliance on nuclear power into the foreseeable future. These remarks sparked a lively discussion concerning the proposed nuclear development at Hinkley Point in Somerset.