On 29 November, Professor Matthew Flinders chaired the panel at the Political Studies Association awards.
Professor Flinders, who can be seen here with the winners of the National Student Video Competition for 16-18 year olds, presented awards to the winners and gave a speech to PSA members and guests.
Professor Colin Hay was cited in the Independent on Sunday 20 November, commenting on the proposals to ban demontrations during the London Olympics. Read more (Independent website).
The United Nations Youth and Student Association Sheffield (UNYSA) are happy to invite you to our first lecture this year. This will be given by Dr Rhiannon Vickers, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, on ‘The UN: Mission Impossible?’ It will focus on the role of the UN and the challenges that it faces.
This will be held on Thursday 10 November, 5.30pm, in Arts Tower Lecture Theatre 5.
All are welcome.
The Department of Politics is delighted to announce its Graduate School Commencement Lecture 2011.
Professor Mary Kaldor (London School of Economics and Political Science) will speak on the topic of:
‘INCONCLUSIVE WARS’
Wednesday, 23 November 2011, 4:30pm
Hallamshire Medical School – Lecture Theatre 2
ALL WELCOME
Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Co-Director of LSE Global Governance. She is currently convenor of the Human Security Study Group, assembled at the request of Javier Solana, then High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union, which produced ‘A Human Security Doctrine for Europe’(2004) ‘A European Way of Security’ (2007) and ‘Helsinki Plus: A Human Security Architecture for Europe’ (2010). She has written widely on security issues and on democracy and civil society. Her recent books include The Baroque Arsenal (Andre Deutsch 1982), New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (Polity Press, 2nd ed. 2006), Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Polity Press 2003), Human Security: Reflections on Globalisation and Intervention (Polity Press, 2007) and most recently The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon: Human Security and the Changing Rules of war and Peace (Public Affairs, 2010) written jointly with a US Army officer. She directs the Global Civil Society programme that produces the annual Global Civil Society yearbook.
She will be delivering the 2011 Politics Department’s Graduate School Commencement Lecture entitled ‘Inconclusive Wars’. In the lecture she will challenge a traditional view that wars tend to the extremes, suggesting instead that contemporary wars are more often than not inconclusive. She will argue that contemporary wars can be interpreted as mutual enterprises in which the various warring parties benefit politically and economically from continued insecurity, rather than contests of wills. She will then reflect on the potential policy implications of this position.
The Politics department has once again been ranked in the top 3 in the country by the Complete University Guide.
The guide ranks departments by nine quality factors. These are student satisfaction, research assessment, entry standards, student:staff ratio, spend on academic services, spend on student facilities, good honours degrees, completion rates and graduate prospects.
The ranking of the University of Sheffield’s Politics department indicates an outstanding commitment to a high quality experience for students.
The Politics Department’s own Professor Matthew Flinders has a new three-part series on BBC Radio 4. The first edition of the show, ‘In Defence of Politics’, was broadcast on 26 September, and continues tonight (3 October) at 8.00pm. You can catch up with the series online.
In Episode 1, Professor Flinders examines fashionable cynicism and looks for the good in politics. Interviewees include Tony Blair and John Bercow. In tonight’s episode, he asks if politics is unfairly treated by the media, satire and fiction.
IPPR@universities has released the second edition of METIS, the journal of the student thinktank network. This year’s theme – education – emphasises the importance of a constructive dialogue between students, regardless of degree discipline and background, on policy matters and includes articles written by a number of Sheffield politics students.
IPPR@universities involves the formation of partnerships between the Institute for Public Policy Research and student-led politics and thinktank societies including The Exchange at Sheffield. The aim of the initiative is to extend IPPR’s networks and draw university students into the policymaking domain.
For more information on IPPR@universities please contact: universities@ippr.org or exchange@sheffield.ac.uk.
The Department has had two successful applications to the ESRC Festival of Social Science, which will run between October 29th and November 5th 2011. The ESRC Festival of Social Science offers fascinating insight into some of the country’s leading social science research and how it influences our social, economic and political lives – both now and in the future.
Dave Richards has been awarded support for an event on Executive Leadership in the Public Realm: Responding to Retrenchment. Matt Flinders has been awarded support for an event at the Showroom cinema on Wednesday 2 November at which will be held the premiere of a film about the life of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman entitled ‘The Trouble Being Human’. Professor Bauman will attend the screening and participate in discussion. Full details of both events will be made available nearer the time.
Information about the ESRC Festival of Social Science can be found at this link:
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/festival/
Is launching a new think tank with a
seminar on ‘Animals and Public Policy’ at the LSE on Thursday 30 June 2011.
Dr Katharine Adeney was the expert facilitator at a conference on managing diversity in federal systems that was held in Nepal in June 2011. The conference was conducted as part of the Forum of Federations’ program in Pakistan which is supported by German Foreign Office. More details about the program can be found at http://www.forumfed.org/en/events/event.php?id=694
