Executive Committee candidates announced - vote now!

My name is Juanita Elias and I am Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick where I am currently Deputy Head of the Department and Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. I was interim Head of Department for the 2018/19 academic year. I recently served as lead co-convenor of BISA’s International Political Economy working group (IPEG). In these roles, I have demonstrated strong communication, leadership and organisational skills as well as high levels of collegiality; qualities that I will bring to the role of BISA vice chair in working with members, trustees, and the BISA team.

As vice chair I would look to support the development of BISA as an association that works to promote the discipline and the professional development of its members – including the Association’s efforts around equality, diversity and inclusion. I will seek to further develop the important work that BISA does to support early-career and historically underrepresented scholars. I am committed to promoting both research excellence and pedagogical innovation in International Studies and look forward to contributing to BISA’s important work in these areas.

I’m a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester, UK where I research and teach gender, feminism, security, peacebuilding, post-conflict contexts and the United Nations. I am the former Conversations Editor of the leading international studies journal International Feminist Journal of Politics, and currently serve on the editorial board. An active member of BISA since 2006, I served as the convenor of the Gendering IR Working Group 2013-16.  

I have lived experience of disability and gendered forms of marginalisation, and am passionate about paying attention to all forms of diversity, including disability, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, trans and non-binary, class, religion, and periphery - and beyond. Moreover, I have already implemented EDI principles in teaching with a focus on diversifying the curriculum at the University of Manchester.

As BISA’s Equalities, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI) officer, I would lead BISA in implementing its EDI policies, working with the Executive Committee to ensure BISA activities meet the ambition of the strategy. I would complete an EDI audit of BISA’s existing practices, with specific attention to the conference and awards. I would explore how to foster an inclusive environment for diverse postgraduate and early-career researchers within the BISA community, recognising how marginalised peoples are more likely to face systematic barriers to staying in academia. I would be keen to support the BISA community in embedding EDI into teaching and learning activities, as I view intellectual, pedagogical and methodological diversity as linked to EDI.

I am running for re-election as trustee with the learning and teaching portfolio. Over the past two years I’ve tried to learn about what our membership would value from the association in regard to our development as teachers. We have made some significant progress with our teaching and learning awards and we will be hosting a teaching and learning café at BISA in Glasgow. We have also held some online events. Going forward I want to further raise our profile and look at out-of conference opportunities to support each other in our teaching. I remain passionate about teaching, and about looking at ways to support innovation in our teaching in meaningful and productive ways. If re-elected my priority will be on helping develop a strong network of colleagues who can support each other in designing our teaching, exploring different tools/techniques we can deploy in the classroom, and in bringing different forms of assessment and teaching materials into the curriculum, including how to diversify, decolonise and indigenise our curriculum. I will use our teaching and learning awards to help showcase leadership in teaching, and I will continue to showcase learning and teaching at the annual conference with teaching and learning cafés.

For the past two years I have served as an active member of the BISA Executive Committee, and am delighted to be standing for re-election. BISA is a strong, vibrant and diverse scholarly community, with a collegiate membership base. I’ve benefited greatly from the sense of community BISA provides and I’m committed to ensuring others have the opportunity to do the same. In my two years as trustee, I’ve planned and helped to organise two development day events for ECR and PGR colleagues ahead of the annual conference, contributed to judging panels for BISA’s prizes and awards, hosted a series of online events for members, and been an active participant in each of BISA’s trustee meetings. Should I be fortunate enough for members entrust me with a second term as trustee, I will continue to play such an active role. Building on my two years’ experience on the executive, I will seek to play a leading role in BISA’s activities, further supporting ECR and PGR colleagues, and helping to ensure that the Association delivers on its equality, diversity and inclusivity commitments.

Serving BISA through my research expertise and following my experience as the FPWG’s convenor is my application’s main objective. I would like to continue focusing on activities that target at a balance between practice and theory for a better (and in my instances alternative) understanding of IR.

I seek to contribute to the expansion of BISA’s activities through innovative practices, e.g., finding ways to promote regional scholarships, bringing together different associations and institutions in order to create links between the theoretical expertise and field work research and launching new ideas, research topics but equally different approaches. That would allow BISA to demonstrate leadership and thus apply for joint programmes promoting inclusion and diversity. Fostering relations between BISA and regional contexts achieve the goal of analysing regional and theoretical challenges that emerge in this new era for IR. Thus, it is also important to raise funding through schemes for BISA’s activities.

My experience to date, my will to enhance my skills through the role of the trustee within the BISA association, my understanding that self-development requires interaction with colleagues that share the same objectives and my passion for what BISA does, explicate why I have chosen to apply for this role.

Hello! It’s a real privilege to be considered for election to the BISA Executive. I’ve been a member of BISA for many years, and previously co-convened the Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group.

I’m standing for election now because the challenges of global politics today mean we are at a vital moment for championing International Relations research - which has surely never been more relevant. The challenges we face as university researchers, teachers, and students, moreover, mean it is also such a critical time to support IR colleagues across all institutions, career stages, specialisms, backgrounds, and experiences.  

If elected, I will bring experience of helping to build an inclusive research environment from my current role as Associate Dean for Research, and from the four years I previously served as a school Research Director. I will bring an enthusiasm for collaboration that underpins much of my own academic work, and a curiosity toward developments across the field of IR. Above all, though, I would bring a commitment to learn from, and work with, BISA members in order to champion your own priorities and interests, and to help the organisation continue with its fantastic work. Thank you! 

I am currently Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. As an interdisciplinary social scientist and political ethnographer, my research and teaching seeks to bridge the disciplines of IR, political geography and comparative politics, and centre issues relating to security, mobility, space, and borders in Israel-Palestine within a range of contemporary academic conversations and debates. I have published in a wide range of journals and am also a newly appointed member of the editorial team at Mobilities.

If elected to the BISA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Trustee, I would bring my organisational skills as former Director of Undergraduate Studies at Newcastle Politics (during Covid times!) to represent and advance the diverse interests of BISA members. In particular, I would seek to expand opportunities for new and innovative forms of cross-disciplinary research and teaching at our annual conferences. In particular, I would seek to continue the work of the BISA Executive Committee in increasing the visibility and representation of scholars from underrepresented regions, as well as those experiencing restrictions to their international mobility in other ways, while expanding and diversifying pathways to the recognition of excellence in research and teaching through our awards and prize-giving schemes.

I am a Professor of International Politics at the University of Sheffield. I am an interdisciplinary researcher, with much of my work focusing on the global politics of health. As a result, I am particularly interested in fostering collaborations between IR and other disciplines that can work together to understand and contribute to addressing big contemporary global challenges. My experience of BISA, especially as an active member of the Global Health Working Group and the Research Directors’ Forum, is that it is extremely well-placed to facilitate those links, and equally importantly has a cultural openness to interdisciplinarity. In addition to contributing to this work, as a trustee I would bring to BISA a strong commitment to supporting the development of Early-Career Researchers within and beyond the UK; an understanding of the importance of teaching IR to the future of the discipline (and, indeed, the world!); and extensive experience of the funding and impact agendas that all colleagues in the discipline are now having to engage with. I have benefitted hugely from being a member of BISA for over 20 years, and hope to play a small part in ensuring its success over the next few.