Identity, Crisis and Change - postgraduate conference

On 12 June 2015 the 3rd Annual Nottingham Postgraduate Conference in Politics and IR, 'Identity, Crisis and Change', was held at Highfield House on University Park Campus. It offered a great opportunity for young researchers to present their work, share their expertise and network with other researchers.

The conference was entirely organized by postgraduate research students from the School of Politics and IR. The conference put forward multifaceted panels of discussion on various topics in 9 panels under 3 streams: Political Theory and Ideology, British and Comparative Politics, and International Relations.

In total, the conference had 72 registered participants from British institutions (including the Universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lancaster, Hull, Oxford, St Andrews and Nottingham) and also from Germany and Poland. Thirty papers were presented and discussed in the following panels:

• constructing identities in theory and practice, chaired by Dr Gulshan Khan
• post-communist identity politics, chaired by Dr Ksenia Northmore-Ball
• violence and colonialism, chaired by Dr Mark Wenman
• identity and terrorism in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, chaired by Dr Lyndsey Harris
• identity politics and the EU, chaired by Professor Steven Fielding
• comparative democracy, chaired by Dr Simon Toubeau
• peacekeeping and human security, chaired by Dr Catherine Gegout
• power politics, chaired by Dr Matthew Rendall
• hard and soft power, chaired by Dr Bettina Renz

The conference was concluded by an inspiring keynote speech delivered by Professor Kimberly Hutchings, Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queens Mary, University of London.

The organizers are very grateful for the generous support from the School of Politics and IR, as well as from the Centre for Conflict, Security and Terrorism (CST), the Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies (CSPI), the Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP) and the Nottingham International Law and Security Centre (NILSC). The conference could not have been successfully achieved without the kind support from the administrative and academic staff of the school.

Adam Lindsay, Fanni Toth, Dominik Steinmeir, Jing Cheng, Yared Akarapattananukul and Aref Ebadi
Conference organizers