Other News

The top ten ISI ranked journal Security Dialogue has recently published a Special Issue on ‘Resilience and (In)Security.’ This marks one of the key interventions on resilience from a critical perspective and is sure to become a standard reference point in the field. Impressively, the collection includes articles by no less than four members of the International Relations and Security Cluster in PAIS:

• James Brassett and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2015) Security and the performative politics of resilience: Critical infrastructure protection and humanitarian emergency preparedness, 46(1): 32-50.
• Charlotte Heath-Kelly (2015) Securing through the failure to secure? The ambiguity of resilience at the bombsite, 46(1): 69-85.
• Jon Coaffee and Pete Fussey (2015) Constructing resilience through security and surveillance: The politics, practices and tensions of security-driven resilience, 46(1): 86-105.

Resilience is an important and burgeoning theme across the Social Sciences and PAIS has led the way in developing collaborative networks and notable events and projects. Indeed, this rich vein of research activity has already produced a number of books, articles, and an already well-cited Special Issue of Politics edited by James Brassett, Stuart Croft, and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2013), entitled: ‘Security and the Politics of Resilience’, 33(4). The latter features an interview with Helen Braithwaite OBE, one of the architects of the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act, who sits on PAIS’ Impact Advisory Board.  

More information can be found on the Security Dialogue website.

We are inviting you to take part in The Faculty of Social Sciences photography competition to celebrate
The University of Warwick’s 50th Anniversary!

The theme is ‘What does politics mean to you?’

First prize is £100 and a framed print of your winning entry
Second prize is £50

The best 10 entries will be printed, framed and displayed within the Department of Politics and International Studies and at The Festival of Social Sciences.

• You can enter more than one photograph
• All entries must be your own work
• Digitally manipulated photographs accepted
• All images should be high resolution (able to be printed out to A3)
• When submitting your entry please let us know your inspiration
• This competition is open to all students and staff members within the faculty of Social Sciences

All entries to Charlotte.lewis@warwick.ac.uk with your full name and the department you belong to.

The competition closes on Friday March 20th 2015 and winners will be notified by Friday March 27th.

The National Student Survey (NSS) is now open for our finalists at the link below. The NSS is widely recognised as a key measure of student satisfaction and the results are highly visible and often reported in the media. Results are published nationally so that performance in teaching and learning can be evaluated and compared across university departments.

In partnership with our students, we have built the department together.​ Thank you! We’d love your feedback on the time you have spent with us.

TAKE THE SURVEY – DIRECT LINK TO COMPLETE THE NSS

Why else should PAIS finalists complete the survey?

• £5 Eating@Warwick Credit for all who complete online to spend in the SU, Dirty Duck, Rootes Grocery store etc.
• Prize draws of 2 iPad Minis (third generation) if over 70 per cent of PAIS finalists complete the survey in the first 2 weeks.
• Prize draw of an iPad Air 2 as soon as over 90 per cent of PAIS finalists complete the survey.
• It will take just 5 minutes to complete
• It would be great to show the university (and other departments) that we have the best and most engaged students – with the highest response rate at Warwick!
• The higher the response rate, the more representative our results will be.

Please do remember that that the £5 credit only applies to all those who complete online so please complete today to ensure you do not lose out.

Moreover, as soon as we hit our targets, the faster the iPad prize draws will take place! It would be fantastic to hold them in the next week or two!​​

One of the first published pieces of work from Matthew Watson's ESRC Professorial Fellowship project has been included in an online collection of the most downloaded articles in 2014 from Routledge's Social Science Journals. The article in question appeared in the December issue of Economy and Society, and it is entitled 'The Great Transformation and Progressive Possibilities: The Political Limits of Polanyi's Marxian History of Economic Ideas'.

The article is now fully open access and can be downloaded for free from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03085147.2014.895540#.U3N-xk1OXcs.

Matthew's ESRC project is called 'Rethinking the Market', and it has its own stand-alone website: www.warwick.ac.uk/rethinkingthemarket.

The overall objective of the project research is to show how the idea of the market has become fixed in public discourse through first having been used to delimit how we might think about everyday economic life. His Economy and Society article shows that this process of narrowing the debate about feasible economic alternatives can come from the most unexpected of sources.

Much has been made in the wake of the global financial crisis about the potential for activating a Polanyian voice to lead progressive demands for carving out new spaces of economic interaction that are definitively beyond the market realm. Yet here Matthew argues that Polanyi's own chosen history of economic ideas makes it more difficult to think through how these spaces might be first accessed and then activated. It appeals to a historical lineage that inadvertently serves to naturalise the market form, despite his own expressed antipathy to economic theories that did likewise.