In Week 7, before the Easter break, I was due to teach on the topic of gender in my Level 5 Security Studies module. I was extremely reluctant to perform the same lecture format as usual for this particular topic and so spent a few hours putting together some contemporary sources (Twitter feeds, newspaper reports, […]
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Having already spent some time this week discussing Thatcher and the EU, there is a temptation to revisit the topic as part of the on-going efforts by (seemingly) every political commentator in the country to appropriate her memory. However, such obsessing with the past is a big part of the British dysfunction when it comes […]
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In one of those odd coincidences, I have been thinking about Margaret Thatcher recently. I got an email a couple of weeks ago, about a chapter on her that I had written for an edited collection three years ago: The editors have just got around to final proofs for publication later this year, so I […]
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One of my twitter correspondents – Purple Revolution – has come back to me several times ony postings about making the EU work (e.g. last week’s). PR’s argument is that since the Union lacks any affective identification (i.e. people don’t identify themselves as Europeans), it cannot work as a democracy. Twitter is – as my students […]
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Somewhat embarrassingly (at least as a political scientist), I’ve only just read Matt Flinder’s Defending Politics, occasioned by my award this week. What Flinders argues is that the current malaise around politics in general, and democracy in particular, is driven by a lack of understanding on the part of the general public of the nature […]
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I won a prize last night: I am now the proud recipient of the Political Studies Association’s 2012 Sir Bernard Crick award for outstanding teaching. And since the judges did commend my use of online media, I guess it’s inevitable that I write a blog about it. It would be wrong to say that I […]
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