Political Science Conferences, Winning Awards and Fabulous Colleagues
I have loads of semi-written blog posts in notebooks and on scraps of paper and I will eventually get round to typing them up and finishing them. While I have a few minutes though, I wanted to share what is now no longer really news but is still quite exciting: I won an award. Or rather my paper did. The paper I presented at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) World Congress on 24th July 2014 in Montreal won the Francesco Kjellberg award for new scholars. Ok I see you raising an eyebrow, new scholar? Well I wasn’t entirely comfortable about that either but this is measured by time since PhD and I therefore do fit the criteria. Details of the prize are on the IPSA website. I am totally blown away that anyone would think that my work is ‘outstanding and worthy of publication in a leading political science journal’ (the other criteria). I therefore wanted to say thank you publically to those who made this possible and who are responsbile for this hideous picture of me grinning like a drunk (I wasn’t!) Cheshire cat coming into existence. There are several more pictures from the conference including another of me receiving the award on the conference flickr stream.
Me at IPSA 2014 Closing Ceremony receiving my award
First Heather MacRae of York University in Toronto for introducting me to the idea that political science might be fun (and being right) and for nudging me to submit the abstract; next to Yvonne Galligan of Queen’s University Belfast for nominating the paper and then for pushing me to finish it and allowing me a little extra time to do so while I was in hopsital; to Bradford University School of Management for agreeing to fund the trip and of course to the prize panel who awarded the prize.
However, the prize wasn’t the highlight of Montreal, far from it. The highlight was actually having dinner with colleagues from a handfull of different countries chatting away, partly about our work, partly just about life. I was again struck by how much real academic work and thinking happens when you just start talking to people who are interested in similar things. So dinner was great and our panel session really just formalised some of those discussions. Political scientists do things differently to lawyers in terms of conferences. There is an overuse of discussants which apparently is normal and I’ve never been to a conference without coffee breaks before. There was also a lot I just didn’t know anything about or understand but I did like the atmosphere generally. Heather said, as we left ‘I’ll never turn you into a political scientist, will I?!’ – well Heather, you may be closer to that than you think!
Oh and if anyone actually cares what the paper was – it was on Gender and the Court of Justice of the EU and the draft (yes I know about the typos etc) can be downloaded below. I’ll let you know what I do with it next! but if you have comments let me know.
My Conversations 