News
April 2012: I’ve started a ‘Listening’ Wiki. Add your quotations, aphorisms, pictures, photographs etc. here: The Listening Wiki
March 2012: Hard to believe, but I won 2nd prize in the Three Counties Open Photography Exhibition at Keele University. Scroll down the The Week@Keele to see …
September 2011: The fifth and final ESRC seminar on Biosecurity was held at Goodenough College, London, on 22 and 23 September. Details can be found here: The Future of Biosecurity
July 2011: Launch, in London, of a new think tank, Green House. I have written a paper for Green House called Sustainability Citizenship
June 2011: Launch of ESRC/EPSRC Energy and Communities project website (see first November 2010 entry below): Reducing Energy Consumption Through Community Knowledge Networks
May 2011: On the 26th May we ran the fourth in our five-seminar ESRC-funded seminar series on Biosecurity. This one was held at Keele, and the details can be found here: National Regimes
April 2011: Grant award. I have won a 19-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship to write a book on ‘Listening for Democracy’. The award begins on October 1st 2011.
November 2010: The third seminar of our ESRC-funded series took place at Birkbeck College, London. This one was on Implementing Biosecurity
November 2010: I authored a report on Environmental Citizenship and Pro-Environmental Behaviour for the Sustainable Development Research Network. Launched on November 15th at the Royal Society in London.
November 2010: Grant award. A group of researchers at Keele has won a 30-month £452,928 grant to conduct research on ‘Reducing Energy Consumption Through Community Knowledge Networks’. Work will start in March 2011. A website is on its way, and there’ll be more detail there in due course. In the meantime, here’s the ESRC press release: Energy Communities
October 2010: the Spanish translation of my Citizenship and the Environment has been published by Proteus Publishers: Ciudadania y Medio Ambiente
October 2010: my article on Democracy and Nature: speaking and listening published in Political Studies Vol 58 No 4: 752-768
June 3-4 2010: the second seminar of our ESRC seminar series on The Socio-Politics of Bio-Security: Science, Policy and Practice has taken place. This one dealt with the alien/native paradigm, and involved debates about the meaning of ‘natural’, and the implications of this for conservation policy. Details of the seminar can be found here: Biosecuring Science
24 May 2010: I took part in a BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme called Doomed by Democracy? which explored the issue of democracy’s capacity to deal with environmental problems, especially climate change.
April 15 2010: the Green Party’s General Election manifesto was launched today. I was lead writer on it, and it can be seen here: Green Party Manifesto 2010
November 2009: the first seminar in the 5-seminar series announced below (see August 2009) has now taken place. Details available on the website
August 2009: The website for The Socio-Politics of Bio-Security: Science, Policy and Practice ESRC Seminar Series (see May 2009 entry) is now live
June 2009: I have been asked to join the Science Advisory Committee of Natural England
June 2009: My 1987 book, An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset, has just been reissued as a paperback by Cambridge University Press: An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset
May 2009: Dr Kezia Barker (Birkbeck College, London), Dr Sarah Taylor (Biological Sciences, Keele University) and myself as Principal Investigator, have been awarded £17,800 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for an 18-month series of 5 seminars on ‘The Socio-Politics of Biosecurity: Science, Policy and Practice’.
April 2009: My Keele colleague Dr Steve Quilley and I got through to the last 40 (out of 300) in the Sustainable Development Commission’s ‘Breakthroughs’ competition. The short-listed categories and ideas can be found here: Shortlisted Breakthroughs, and our idea – the Ecological Innovation Zone – can be found here: The Ecological Innovation Zone
March 2009: My 1993 book, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason, has just been reissued as a paperback by Cambridge University Press: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason
March 2008: I was elected to the UK Academy of Social Sciences (ACSS). The Academy ‘responds to Government and other consultations on behalf of the social science community, organises meetings about social science and seminars on topics that span social science disciplines, and sponsors a number of schemes that promote social science and enhance its value to society.’ The Academy’s website is here: UK Academy of Social Sciences
10 December 2007: the Keele School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy (SPIRE) won a Staffordshire Green Award for a pilot recycling project, designed to test the appetite for recycling among staff and students. Read about it here: Staffordshire Green Award
July 2007: We have made a 5-minute video advertising the MA/MRes programme on Environmental Politics that we teach at Keele University. Prospective students – and anyone else – can watch it here: MA/MRes Environmental Politics
April 2007: I was awarded the Harrison Prize for the best article published in 2006 in the Political Studies journal. The article is called ‘Thick Cosmopolitanism’. The citation can be found here: Citation, and the article can be found here: Thick Cosmopolitanism
25 January 2007: I gave my Inaugural Lecture in the Westminster Theatre at Keele University on 16th January 2007. The text of the lecture can be found here: Political Animals.
17 December 2006: Stafford College students have produced this video about some of theissues regarding M6 widening (the M6 is our local motorway): No to M6 Widening. People who know me might recognise somebody in it.
13 October 2006: As part of a campaign against unnecessary travel I gave a paper at a conference in Dayton, Ohio, by videolink from the TV studio we have at Keele University. It worked fine: they could hear and see me, I could see and hear them, and even the question and answer session worked well enough. 0.7 tonnes of CO2 emissions were saved (out of a ’sustainable’ annual budget of about 2 tonnes per person). But as someone in the audience said – ‘Andy, the ‘plane took off anyway’. True: but if 350 other people decided not to travel, that would be one aircraft less. The Guardian picked up the story, which can be found at No Flying to Conferences.
25 September 2006: After 5 happy years at the Open University, I have now returned to Keele University (April 2006). The plan at Keele is to deepen and broaden the environmental curriculum, to engage with colleagues across the disciplines in genuinely interdisciplinary research, and to make the university campus a model for sustainable development.
