糖心TV

On Wednesday 5th June, PaIS were lucky to welcome Lee Webster to give a talk as part of our Seminar Series.

Lee Webster is Policy and Advocacy Manager at Womankind Worldwide, a women's rights and international development NGO, and has an MA in Gender and Development from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

In the lecture she examined the roles that women play in mitigating conflict and building peace at local level in Afghanistan, Liberia, Nepal, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. She showed that despite their active contribution to peace at local level, women are still marginalised from formal peace negotiations. The session explored how Womankind used new research, media and public pressure to influence the UK Government's policy and practice on women, peace and security.

Lee was also kind enough to answer questions afterwards.

Click the above image to read the report From the ground up: Women’s roles in local peacebuilding in Afghanistan, Liberia, Nepal, Pakistan and Sierra Leone.

2013 GR:EEN - GEM PhD SUMMER SCHOOL
The Arab Spring, Domestic Democratic Transitions and the Evolving Euro-Mediterranean Framework
August 18-23 2013 @ La Manouba International Summer School in Carthage, Tunisia

CALL FOR DOCTORAL APPLICATIONS
DEADLINE: JUNE 28th 2013

Engulfed in a wave of political, economic and social transitions; the countries in the Arab world have so far had great difficulty in: successfully negotiating their political, economic and social transitions; ensuring the safety of their citizenry; or striking a sustainable balance between the interests of those in power and their citizenry’s fundamental rights. Furthermore, Islamist regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya seem unlikely to meet the hopes articulated by the revolutions’ initial demonstrators. Overall, the “Arab revolution” therefore appears to some observers to be entering its 2nd phase: the necessary chaos before any reconstruction.

Accordingly, the Summer School will seek to discuss a range of topics concerned with the interactions – be they internal or external – affecting regions in transition with an eye on fostering information sharing and joint training. This common platform will thus bridge different communities sharing a common interest in transitional regimes and their implications for human security, human rights and democratic regime building. The Summer School will position its teaching and research within the broader debates regarding both the challenges facing post-revolutionary societies – be they social, economic, political, cultural or religious; as well as the wider global consequences they induce.

Keynote speakers will include:

• Prof. Gilbert ACHCAR (University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, UK)
• Prof. Mario TELÓ (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Institut d’Etudes Européennes, Belgium)

Read more about the programme, speakers, and entry criteria (PDF)

‘Security and the Everyday’
31 October - 1 November 2013
Keynote: Professor Jutta Weldes (University of Bristol); Professor François Debrix (Virginia Tech)

More and more research in critical security studies pays attention to the realm of everyday experience, popular culture and fictional narratives, and how they produce and reproduce discourses of security and representations of identity. At the same time, distinctions between politics and entertainment seem increasingly tenuous in a world of globalized spaces of hyper-reality. From the real-time images of remote controlled drone strikes to the imagined realities of video game franchises, and from the realpolitik of TV shows and comic books to the narratives of IR textbooks, virtual and actual realities blend into each other. This conference explores the interconnections and implications of this inter-textuality of security and image, narrative and identity, and power and fiction.

If you are interested in participating please send details of your affiliation, an indicative title, and an abstract of no more than 250 words to Georg Löfflmann (g.lofflmann@warwick.ac.uk).

Deadline for abstracts: 9 September 2013

PhD Candidate Damian Gannon was recently selected as the cabinet member for finance in Coventry. Damian has been a councillor for two years and will now be responsible for the City Council's budget.

Damian's PhD research focuses on the role of subjective understandings of democracy in shaping democratic practice.

Read about the promotion in the

Visit Damian's ePortfolio

Lauren Tooker, a first-year Erasmus Mundus doctoral fellow in PAIS, has been awarded a prestigious international fellowship by the US Social Science Research Council. Granted through a competitive global selection process, the six-month fellowship in Postcolonial Identities and Decolonial Struggles funds participation in international workshops at 糖心TV and at Carnegie Mellon in the US, as well as preliminary summer field research.

Lauren’s doctoral research looks at how we imagine and respond to indebtedness as a question of ethics in the global political economy.