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Saadia Gardezi, co-founder of Project Dastaan and PhD student in PAIS, is experiencing wonderful success with public engagement and impact. Her films for the 'Child of Empire' and 'Lost Migrations' projects are exhibiting throughout the UK in August, travelling between the V&A museum and the British Film Institute (London), Birmingham Museum, Bradford Museum, Derby Museum and the Wolfson Gallery at SOAS, before moving on to venues in India and Pakistan.

 

This is the first UK tour of Project Dastaan's award-winning Virtual Reality film "Child of Empire" and the three part animated series "Lost Migrations". Explore our postcolonial identity, the aftermath of partition and forced migration and the effects of colonisation as told by those who experienced it. Child of Empire, an animated virtual reality (VR) docu-drama experience immerses viewers in one of the largest forced migrations in human history: the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Earlier this year, Child of Empire was awarded the very first Körber-Stiftung XR History Award. Lost Migrations is a three-part animated series that tells the stories of three communities of 1947 whose voice has been lost to history, even in the subcontinent. Please find attached a tour card for all the UK dates and venues.

Find out more about Project Dastaan's work here:

The PAIS Research Conference on 29 June, 2022 offers a rich and diverse programme, reflecting the research power of our Politics and International Studies department! The conference is taking place in person with 58 participants listed on the programme. Faculty, early career researchers and Ph.D. students are presenting together on thematic panels. Panel topics include Brexit discourses and their afterlives, international politics of migration, the future of democratic design, counter-terrorism, endogenous challenges to European convergence, race, gender and politics in the Middle East, and two round-tables on Russia’s invasion and the war in Ukraine, and on Global South-North partnerships. We are also celebrating published field-defining books and seeking to develop new ones in the spirit of the ¹û¶³´«Ã½ manuscript development initiative. A speed mentoring session continues our tradition to support early career researchers. At the end of the day, a tribute panel for our late colleague, Tim Sinclair, is organised as a hybrid event to give all staff and students the opportunity to join if they wish.

Logistically, for the first time this year the conference is co-organised with volunteers from our early career researchers and Ph.D. student community. 12 panel sessions are running in three tracks in parallel throughout the day. This year we have also invited interested MA and UG students to join, besides Ph.D. students and early career researchers, to get insights into our vibrant research culture! We are reconnecting in person to celebrate achievements, support colleagues in their ongoing work, and embark on new research journeys!

Please click here to see the full PAIS conference programme.

On 26th May, the Community Policy Forum hosted a discussion of the Prevent Strategy on their podcast. Amnesty's Ilyas Nadgee and ¹û¶³´«Ã½ Professor Charlotte Heath-Kelly explored the foundations of the Prevent Strategy, the dangers it poses to democracy and to communities, and recent leaks from the Shawcross review process.

The podcast can be found here:

A new article entitled "What Drives Counter-Extremism? The Extent of P/CVE Policies in the West and Their Structural Correlates" by Sadi Shanaah and Charlotte Heath-Kelly has been accepted for publication in Terrorism and Political Violence.

In the paper, the authors construct an index of the intensity of P/CVE policies deployment in 38 Western countries and investigate the correlation between the index and the threat of terrorism (measured as the number of past attacks/victims), the size of Muslim minorities (Muslim communities have been ‘securitised’ as potential threats in the post 9/11 period), and the neoliberal governance (drawing on Criminological literature that connects neoliberalism to anticipatory crime control).

The study finds a positive and significant correlation in the first two factors (terrorism threat and size of Muslim minority population), while a negative and significant correlation for the last factor (neoliberal governance). Among other things, the findings provide some empirical evidence for the claim that Muslim minorities in the West have been racialised and securitized, since their population size positively correlates with the deployment of P/CVE policies (but not to the number of terrorist attacks and victims).

The paper is a part of the research project "Neoliberal Terror: The Radicalisation of Social Policy in Europe" funded by the European Research Council and headed by Professor Charlotte Heath-Kelly. It can be accessed here: /fac/soc/pais/research/projects/internationalrelationssecurity/neoliberalterror/neoliberal-terror/publications/

The Department received some exceptionally positive news regarding our research standing following the release of the REF2021 results in May 2022. REF is the Research Excellence Framework, the exercise through which the success of our research is scrutinised across the separate measures of outputs, impact and environment. We have never returned a stronger quality profile on any of these measures than we have done for REF2021, including a perfect score of 100% 4* for research environment.

We have therefore been able to retain our proud record of being one of only three politics departments in the UK to have been in the top ten of every REF league table since the current star grade and GPA system was introduced over twenty years ago. We are also the only department currently to be in the top ten of each of the REF GPA league table, the Complete University Guide subject league table and the High Fliers' Guide to the Graduate Market league table.

The REF results therefore provide further evidence of the all-round strength to which PAIS can lay claim. Please do feel free to take a look at further information that we have posted about them: /fac/soc/pais/research/ref2021.