We hope that you are keeping safe and well and that you had a lovely summer. We have some updates for you in our first newsletter of the new academic year:
- PSA Parliaments Annual Conference 2022 in Birmingham & Online
- PSA Annual Conference 2023 in Liverpool & Online
- PSA Parliaments Online Brown Bag Seminars
- Urgent Questions with Pete Dorey
- PhD Opportunity in Irish Politics at the University of Liverpool
- Workshop on Belonging, Inclusion & Exclusion at Westminster
- Gen+ParlNet: Call for Abstracts & a Save the Date
- Congratulations to Wang Leung Ting!
- Recent Publications that have Caught Our Eye
- Recently on the Blog
If you have any notices/messages you would like us to circulate to the group, please let us know.
1. PSA Parliaments Annual Conference 2022 in Birmingham & Online
Our Annual Conference will be held at The Exchange in Birmingham and online on 3rd-4th November 2022.
The theme of the conference is What Next?
The deadline for submitting paper proposals is Friday 16th September but we have already made tickets available for those who know they will be attending.
The conference (including lunch and refreshments) is free for all attendees, whether presenting or in the audience, but you must register beforehand.
Please see here for full details of the conference, including how to submit proposals and book tickets.
We are very much excited to be meeting up in person after two years of online conferences and we hope to see as many of you there as possible!
2. PSA Annual Conference 2023 in Liverpool & Online
The 73rd Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association will be held in Liverpool and online on 3rd-5th April 2023 (see here for details) and PSA Parliaments will be convening a number of panels.
The submission process is different from previous years in that specialist groups have been given an exclusive timeframe until the 12th September for them to receive papers and propose panels ahead of the open call in October.
If you would like to propose a paper or a panel to be held under the auspices of the prize-winning PSA Parliaments group, then please fill out this form before 12th September.
As always, we do not have any preferences in terms of theory, method or empirical focus and we welcome papers from PhD students through to professors, as well as from practitioners. We are fully committed to avoiding all-male panels. We are also seeking to increase the proportion of papers on our panels from people from an ethnic minority background so please get in touch with Alexandra if you come from an ethnic minority background and would like to discuss how your research could be highlighted on our panels.
3. PSA Parliaments Online Brown Bag Seminars
After the success of our online events over the past couple of years, we’re hoping to hold some online seminars this year.
The purpose of the seminars will be to allow people to showcase their work and to generate debate and discussion. As such, papers presented will be recently published work, or work accepted for publication, rather than work in progress. The seminars will last an hour and will be held on Wednesday lunchtimes on an ad hoc basis.
If you would like to present a paper, or want to nominate someone, then please email Stephen.
4. Urgent Questions with Pete Dorey
This month’s interviewee is Professor Pete Dorey, co-author of House of Lords reform since 1911: Must the Lords go? (Palgrave Macmillan) and the textbook Exploring British Politics (Routledge).
Head over to Urgent Questions to read about being an ageing indie kid, curries and how delivering newspapers shapes your politics!
5. PhD Opportunity in Irish Politics at the University of Liverpool
The Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool invites applications for a PhD studentship beginning in September 2022.
Potential areas of research include power-sharing, post-conflict governance, gender and the politics of Northern Ireland/Ireland, constitutional change, political economy of Ireland/Northern Ireland, British-Irish relationships, parliamentary studies, or UK devolution. Applications broadly focussed on the governance and politics of Northern Ireland, or comparative projects which include the governance and politics of Northern Ireland, will also be considered. Qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods projects are welcome.
Full details of the studentship, including how to apply, can be found here.
6. Workshop on Belonging, Inclusion & Exclusion at Westminster
Colleagues from London South Bank University and the University of Leeds are holding a workshop on ‘Belonging, Inclusion and Exclusion at Westminster’ in London on Friday 23rd September (1-4pm).
More details are available here.
7. Gen+ParlNet: Call for Abstracts & a Save the Date
Our friends at Gen+ParlNet will host three online seminars this academic year (the + is to make explicit that Gen+ParlNet very much welcomes research addressing gender and parliaments from intersectional lenses).
The seminars aim to provide a wonderful opportunity for researchers to get new eyes on their research from colleagues in the field.
Each seminar will feature two papers which will be circulated in advance. After a brief introduction by the author (10 min), a designated discussant will comment on the paper. Hereafter, all participants will be able to give their comments on the paper. The seminars will last for 90 minutes each (though Seminar 3 may be extended) and will be open to all who pre-register.
The three seminars will be held on: Thursday, November 10 at 09.00; Thursday, February 02 at 15:30; and Tuesday, May 02 at 9:00 (all Brussels time).
The first two seminars are open for submissions of abstracts that address questions relating to gender+ sensitive parliaments in a wide sense, and we encourage all scholars to submit their abstracts for one of these seminars to Mette Marie Staehr Harder no later than October 1st.
A website for the network will be up and running shortly but, in the meantime, you can register for their mailing list by contacting Sonia Palmieri and you can follow them on Twitter here.
8. Congratulations to Wang Leung Ting!
Congratulations to a good friend of PSA Parliaments, Wang Leung Ting, who has recently taken up a lectureship post in comparative politics at the University of Reading!
9. Recent Publications that have Caught Our Eye
Cherry Miller has published an article, Between Westminster and Brussels: Putting the “Parliament” in Parliamentary Ethnography, in Politics & Gender.
Moritz Schmoll and Wang Leung Ting have published an article, Explaining Physical Violence in Parliaments, in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
David Judge and Mark Shephard have published an article, Divining the UK’s national interest: MPs’ parliamentary discourse and the Brexit withdrawal process, in British Politics.
Monique Doyle, Jennifer Rault-Smith and Rashaad Alli of the South African Parliamentary Monitoring Group have published a report on parliamentary oversight in light of state capture and the Zondo Report.
The Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) have published four new policy briefs on parliaments and public debt management:
- Debt management for parliaments
- Debt Management Legal Frameworks: A Primer for Parliaments
- Role of Parliaments in Oversight of Public Debt Management
- Debt Decision-Making and Oversight in Emergency Contexts
More details about the briefs can be found here.
Ben Worthy, Cat Morgan and Stefani Langehennig have published a project report for their Leverhulme Trust funded project, Who’s Watching Parliament?, which looked at how new data tools like TheyWorkForYou are impacting upon Parliament.
The House of Lords Liaison Committee have published a report Review of House of Lords investigative and scrutiny committee activity in 2021–22.
And, finally, new issues of Parliamentary Affairs, Government & Opposition, Representation and the Journal of Legislative Studies have been published.
If you would like your published research to be featured in this section, please email Stephen with details.
10. Recently on the Blog
We published three great blogs over the summer:
- Keeping an eye on the money we don’t have. Parliament’s oversight role on public debt by Franklin De Vrieze
- Breaking the Glass Chamber: Women, Politics and Parliament, 1945-1997 by Anna Muggeridge
- The Butterfly Effect: Representation as Fractal Politics by Alex Prior
If you have an idea for a blog on some aspect of parliamentary study, please get in touch with our communications officer, Chris.