In this month’s newsletter, we have the following announcements/information:
- Our Annual Conference: please remember to register!
- PSA Conference 2020, Edinburgh: Call for Papers
- Job Opportunity at Birkbeck
- Recently on our blog
If you have any notices / messages you would like us to circulate to the group, please let us know.
Best wishes,
Marc (@marcgeddes), Louise (@LouiseVThompson) Alex (@A_Meakin) and Seán (@S_Haughey)
1. Our Annual Conference – Please remember to register!
A reminder that our annual conference is now open for registration. It will take place on Thursday, 7 November (6pm-8pm) for a welcome wine reception, and on Friday, 8 November (9.30am-6pm) for a one-day event. The conference will take place at the National Assembly for Wales.
The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Parliaments: Coming of Age?’, and we are covering a range of panels and papers, including on scrutiny, comparative perspectives, changing forms of representation, and governance. We have papers on the UK Parliament and devolved parliaments, as well as international perspectives.
Please note, at our conference we will also have a keynote event (tbc) and our essay-prize giving. We have also allocated time/space for our AGM to discuss where to take the conference next year (among other things).
For more information and to register, please click here. Registration closes on Friday, 18 October.
If you have any questions, please contact us: psa.parliaments@gmail.com
2. Call for Papers for Panels at PSA 2020: Reimagining Politics
We will be holding our usual range of panels at the PSA annual conference which is being held at the University of Edinburgh next year (6-8 April 2020). If you would like to give a paper on one of our panels, please complete a paper proposal form here. There are no panel themes, so all paper and panel proposals relating to parliaments or legislatures are welcome. The call is open to all members of the group and postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to apply (and would be eligible to apply to the PSA Postgraduate Access Fund for financial support to attend the conference). We would also encourage practitioners working in or with parliaments or legislatures to apply.
We are also interested in any suggestions for full panels, particularly those which align to the conference theme. Panel proposal forms are available here.
The deadline for paper and panel proposals is Monday 14 October. This is one week earlier than the PSA’s deadline for papers, ensuring that any papers which we are unable to accommodate can still submit through the general conference call. We will reply to all proposals by Friday 11 October.
3. Job Opportunity at Birkbeck
There is an opportunity for research assistance work at Birkbeck University for a Leverhulme-funded project, led by Dr Ben Worthy on monitory democracy at Westminster. For more information, please click here.
Also, see Ben’s recent blog on our website for an insight into the project: Who is Watching Parliament?
4. Recently on the blog
Some of our recent blogs include:
- Free (and Near-Complete) Access to Membership Data from the Select Committee Data Archive, 1979-Present! Stephen Holden Bates (University of Birmingham), Mark Goodwin (Coventry University) and Steve McKay (University of Lincoln)
- Who is Watching Parliament? Ben Worthy (Birkbeck)
- Brexit and parliamentary legitimation: beyond constitutional minutiae David Judge (Strathclyde)
- The Study of Parliament Group and the development of specialist select committees, 1964-1985 Gavin Drewry (Royal Holloway)
If you are interested in publishing a blog, please get in touch with our Communications Officer Alexandra Meakin (a.meakin@sheffield.ac.uk) for a chat about how to get involved.